Friday the 13th: The Remake

As some may know, I'm not the biggest fan of a lot of the horror remakes we're currently seeing. That said, I struggle to resist the temptation of watching such remakes. After all, they could be really good, as the remake of Battlestar Galactica showed so well. With that in mind, I watched the remake of Friday the 13th last night.

It wasn't necessarily a bad film. But it certainly wasn't that good either. It felt more like a sequel that a remake. Although if it was a remake, it felt more like a remake of Friday the 13th Part 3 than the original picture. Which is the first problem with the film. It lacks anything even approaching ambition. Sure, it is probably wrong to look to a Friday the 13th film - a franchise itself that was a rip-off to begin within - and expect clever plotting, intricate story-telling and any sort of originality. Yet this film is so formulaic that I was left wondering whether there was some sort of requirement for a certain percentage of the film's run time to be given over to acts of jarring violence. And a further percentage of the film needed to be given to boob shots. And, just to make sure of winning over the target audience of teens, anything left of the movie's run time was given to drinking, drug taking and lust. Just to make sure that this film truly resembled Jason Voorhees Meets American Pie.

Yet it isn't the crass plot or flaccid direction of the film that makes it truly disappointing. After all, those are pretty much the trademarks of the preceding pictures in the series. What really struck me about this film was the level of the violence. Even for a film franchise that depicts a masked killing machine - a sort of zombie Terminator - cutting his way through hundreds of people, this film is unusually gruesome in depicting violence. It has no compunction about showing an arrow through someone's head or a woman being slowly roasted in her own sleeping bag. It makes the previous films in the franchise look almost innocent. The visceral, sadistic violence of this picture made even this seasoned horror movie fan in me wince more than once.

Of course, a horror movie without a horrific element is bit like an Adam Sandler comedy (that generally don't contain anything that's funny) - a bit pointless. Yet gruesome violence is not the only way to make a horror movie. In fact, if you look at some of the best horror movies, they actually contain very little violence. Halloween is a great example of this. It pretty much created the whole masked killer genre that this installment of the Friday the 13th saga is still milking. Yet Halloween contains very little actual violence, and shows nearly none in any detail whatsoever. Instead it creates a horrific atmosphere through careful use of music, atmosphere, clever camera work and subtle direction. It doesn't need to show a skull being cleaved in two by a machete in lingering - almost loving - detail. And whilst Halloween is still highly regarded decades after it was made, I can't help but think that this remake of Friday the 13th isn't going to curry any particular critical favour in 31 years time.

In his non-fiction book on horror, Stephen King wrote:

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”

The problem with the remake of Friday the 13th - and of those other remakes of horror classics - is that they aren't proud either. But unlike King, they don't try to terrorise or horrify. Instead, they simply go for the gross-out. As a result these films aren't terrifying. They also struggle to be in anyway interesting. Violence alone can't sustain a film. Sadly, all that the 2009 Friday the 13th has to offer an already moribund franchise is a higher level of violence than the previous installments. It won't be enough to sustain the franchise moving forward - it was barely enough to sustain this film for its run time.