In the 1980 slasher Friday the 13th, Annie, the cook, hitchhikes to Camp Crystal Lake, except she doesn’t actually get there. The locals call it Camp Blood for a reason. This summer, an unseen killer has it out for teens that can’t stop fucking each other while trying to revitalize the vacant summer camp. Turns out the killer is Pam Voorhees, mother of Jason Voorhees, who drowned decades prior due to negligence on the part of another sexually compulsive group of counselors. Three years after Friday, another killer visits Camp Arawak in Sleepaway Camp. Here, the killer targets campers and staff that aggrieve the painfully shy Angela: the sole survivor of a boating accident that killed both her father and twin brother, Peter. Under the custody of her Aunt Martha, Angela attends sleepaway camp, where puberty seems to have hit every girl but her. In the end, Angela reveals herself to be both killer and her twin brother, raised as a girl by Aunt Martha, who always wanted a daughter.
On her way to Crystal Lake, Annie manages to get a ride from a trucker. The camera barely registers his groping hand as Annie hoists herself into the cab. The rig is pinned on both sides by endless pasture and windbreaks that erupt the whole length of the highway. Riotous growth. Early summer. In the cab, their exchange is poorly dubbed and underexposed. The trucker instantiates the deathcurse—a drowning in ‘57, murders in ‘58, fires, and bacterial contamination of the lake in ‘62. Tragedy recirculates and recomposes itself at Crystal Lake, and all these teens want to remake the place in its original image: “Dumb kids. Know-it-alls.”
Annie shoots back at the trucker, “You’re an American original.”
It’s easy to forget that the movie is set in New Jersey.
The archetypal summer camp constructs itself in the fold of the fluvial valley. All precipitation flows down its fold, emptying into the basin and making a lake at its lowest point. In Friday and Sleepaway, the lake is the site of the tragic loop’s commencement and completion: the boat accident but also the reveal of Angela’s flaccid penis; where Voorhees drowns but also where Friday’s Final Girl, Alice, finds apparent salvation, in a canoe, with an arm flung over the side and a finger making final contact with the water.
Depending on the season, lakewater tends to circulate from the lightless anoxic layers below the thermocline, up to the surface and then back down. Psychic material, here, also seems to drag itself up from the endless unconscious and briefly into the light, before sequestering itself once more. In the summer, lakewater partitions into temperature-dependent bands of fluid.
Both Friday and Sleepaway produce horror in the concept of perpetual return. The summer endows the camp with a twofold significance, vested not only in the geomorphology of the lake but also in the camp’s seasonal occupancy: children are meant to return, cyclically, year after year. Friday concerns itself obsessively with this threat of cyclicality—the deathcurse of Camp Crystal Lake; the virgin Jason’s promise that he’s still out there, which virtually guarantees the release of a sequel, then another one. The movie happens to itself again and again.
In Sleepaway, it is the fact that children return to camp each year that enables campers to register the fact that the bodies of their peers are changing. Puberty, sexuality, and Angela’s ostracization happen because campers keep coming back to this place, seeing each other in each new iteration. Time keeps passing.
In Friday, almost every time a character exits a cabin or canteen or wherever, we hear the same clip of the loon call, which suggests that here, while the teenage victims sexually enact their youngness, the more-than-human world also produces itself through cycles of mate selection and reproduction. The loon makes an auditory sign. The pollen that slicks the surface of Crystal Lake makes an olfactory one. In the end, the campground emerges as a composite of all these animal and vegetal signals that say, We exchange codes. We split off and get down. We make ourselves in the bluish day-for-night lights.
Before the events of the movie, Camp Crystal Lake has been unoccupied for years. The teenage victims pull up, and the campground is exuberant in the radiation of all these sexual cycles. In the night, it starts to storm. The rain washes all these signs into the lake until the morning.
Sex, though playing different roles in either film, constitutes the engine of their respective violences. In Friday, the recurrence of sex performs the recurrence of the sort of negligent care that allows Jason Voorhees to drown in the first place. In Sleepaway, the possibility of sex, or the uncovered body, threatens the reveal of Angela’s repressed identity as boy, and consequently, her engagement in the homosexual act.
We can understand the trucker at the start of Friday as a figure portending the requisite initial warning. In order for this permutation of tragedy to occur, the young victim—here, Annie—has to make an informed decision to enter the campground. But in her labeling of the trucker, she makes a mistake: He’s not an American Original. In this essay, we want to read Friday and Sleepaway in pursuit of the Original. Who comes first? Or rather, who falls first? Who kicks off the cycles of violence pervading both horrorscapes—the very violences these films prod us to engage critically?
Where else to search for this Original than the apparent events commencing the tragic cycles at the heart of each movie? In Friday, we circle back to find Jason, drowning in the lake while his teen caretakers are having sex. In Sleepaway, it’s Peter watching his father and twin Angela mauled by a teenage couple on their speedboat; also, it’s Peter’s new ‘mother’, his Aunt Martha, who tells him he is now Angela—he is now a girl. In both films, the alleged inceptions of violence occur in situations of malignant caretaking. Critically, they occur when a child is severed from the supervision of his mother, which is to say, in both Friday and Sleepaway, it is in this maternal absence that cycles of horrific violence are enacted.
Take the end of Friday, where Final Girl Alice Hardy thinks very little before launching herself into the embrace of the murderous Mrs. Voorhees. “It’s alright, I’ll take care of you,” Mrs. Voorhees tells Alice, smiling. “I’m not afraid.” Seeing the lifeless teen counselor Brenda, appearing only partially on screen, Mrs. Voorhees gasps. “So young, so pretty,” she’s groaning now, “oh what monster could have done this.”
The monster, of course, is Mrs. Voorhees. If the implicit suggestion of horror is to direct attention to the images we’d rather not see, the thoughts we’ve perhaps, repressed, Friday the 13th exposes us to a mother with an incalculable propensity for harm. The horror of Mrs. Voorhees is really a horror of maternity’s perversion, of maternal feeling at once capable of boundless love and boundless hate.
There’s maternal perversion in Sleepaway, too. In the absence of her biological ‘mother’, Angela is raised by a father who instills in her a clear anxiety regarding the homoerotic act, and then an aunt who has “always wanted a little girl,” who raises Peter Baker as his twin sister Angela. Her fear of the homoerotic and the horrific import attached to the transgendering of Angela are both problematic and simultaneously, stem significantly from subliminal messaging we get in Sleepaway that the Baker twins are without a mother.
In the first image of this ‘family,’ Angela and Peter sit together fighting as their father lounges across the hull of the sailboat. It is just the children and him in the water when teenagers run them over with a motor boat. On the shore, watching, is not Mrs. Baker, but Mr. Baker’s boyfriend. In a scene of horror contextualized by homosexual coupling and absent mothering via divorce, 1980s anxieties regarding AIDS and a “Reno” epidemic (New York, where the film takes place, was the last state to codify “No-Fault divorce”) flood the senses. This is a film that, pun intended, cannot be divorced from its time. In the camp’s environment of unrestrained and fluid sexuality, a real fear seems to be the lack of a mother to ‘raise’ her children right.
If ‘mothering’ goes awry in Friday because Mrs. Voorhees sends her son to camp to thus be ‘mothered’ by teen counselors rather than herself, ‘mothering’ happens wrong in Sleepaway because Aunt Martha, already a surrogate mother, perverts the Oedipal structure. She replaces the boy’s fear of paternal castration with the mother’s (almost) legitimate castration of him—she turns Peter into Angela, boy into girl. Angela’s silence, her discomfort around her body, but most of all, her murderous disposition, become the physical manifestations of her deep repression on the screen. Perhaps none of this would have happened if Angela had simply had a mother (and one father) to begin with. Perhaps Jason would not have died if Mrs. Voorhees hadn’t sent him to camp in the first place, had never traded her own role as mother for the parenting of sexually transgressive teenagers. We’re spiraling in to reach the original sins precipitating both these movies. Kids are wrapped up in copious, repressive violence at the sleepaway camp, perhaps because of the initial violence of being detached from their mothers in the first place.
A more perverse light is thus cast upon the camp setting. The whole summer camp enterprise is predicated on the dislocation of campers from the home, and thus the domestic realm. The nuclear family is threatened by the camp’s extrication of children. The mother’s monopoly over caretaking too. It’s unsurprising, then, that a through-line across both movies is the emergent villainy of motherhood, the production of horror in the wake of tragedies produced by instances of mis-mothering.
The violence in Friday the Thirteenth and Sleepaway Camp carries a real libidinal undercurrent. Angela kills a skinny-dipper in the privacy of a canoe upturned on the surface of the lake. Later, she kills a girl from behind in the shower. These murders are intimate and spectacular. Angela gets playful. One time, she finds this guy jerking off in a latrine stall. She bolts the door with a broom handle and kills him by depositing a wasp nest into the stall.
Mrs. Voorhees often kills in the moments immediately peripheral to a teenage sexual encounter. In the originary punitive act, Pam comes across the two neglectful counselors fumbling around with each other, fondling, flatly dirty talking. In another scene, Pam lies under the bunk while two of her victims fuck each other. The girl is on top. In the damp moments afterwards, Pam plunges an arrow from the archery range through the mattress, through the guy’s trachea. The barbed tip glitters.
If violence in these movies doesn’t substitute for sex, it at least circulates in the same moral economy. The collision of two bodies. The opening of wounds. Fluid. The imbrication of self and body. Like these strings of murders, sex is retributive. It forms a link in the causal chain and gains the status of a moral act. The trouble with a causal chain is that you can just keep going until you reach the far-off site of absolute commencement.
The real lasting images of Friday come right at the end. This Final Girl—only preceded by Sally in Texas Chainsaw—clocks Pam Voorhees in the head. Blood oozes thick from Pam’s mom-cut. The Final Girl pushes off in a canoe and waits. In the morning—a long sequence of her deliverance from Crystal Lake overtop the dips and swells of Harry Manfredini’s orchestral score. The Final Girl reclines in the canoe. A police cruiser pulls up. An officer walks to the lakeshore. He waves out to the Girl. There is no sound.
The sleepaway camp, tucked between the water and the woods, bounded beyond the landscapes of normal life, home life, announces itself as an inversion of Eden—a variation of the Miltonian “narrow room” exposing “nature’s whole wealth.” Before the arrival of the cops, the Final Girl figures as this sort of anti-Eve: a singular, virginal woman who, after all this violence, persists in the glisteningly edenic reaches of the campground. Shes the girl left by virtue of her luck, her cunningness, and her vestal resistance to the adolescent exuberance that largely defines Friday. She has escaped the original sin of those teenagers, who, so many years ago, fucked each other and let Jason Voorhees drown in the lakewaters, which now lap against walls of the canoe. In these closing shots, the Final Girl blisses out. The sun caresses her in rays. The lakewater rests unperturbed, except for the Final Girl’s hand. Then, a chord change. Jason Voorhees bursts from the lake and drags her to the anaerobic lakebottom, from which Jason has waited watching all these years. You’ve been wondering where this Final Girl’s genesic counterpart has been hanging out.
It’s too easy to say that violence coexists with Paradise. In Milton, “My other half: with that thy gentle hand / seized mine, I yielded…” The garden is exuberant with violence to the point that, like the reproductive semiotics of the loon call, cycles of violence become a constitutive tissue in the Final Girl’s Eden. Sex and violence work out an OK exchange value. These moral economies make up paradise, and it’s beautiful.
Sleepaway contains its own Edenic inversion; Angela’s an anti-Eve in her own right. Virginal, young, innocent—she checks all of the boxes of a Final Girl. However, in Sleepaway’s final scene, the camera renders Angela—with this mane of hair and face that introduces, suddenly, a sense of derangement attached to Angela for the first time—the very monster of the movie. If Friday is about the exuberance of sex, beauty, and violence in a configuration that looks like Paradise, Sleepaway’s fixation is with repression. In the aftermath of violence, Angela can only survive in the narrow room of summercamp through this vast oppression of self, obliterating even her own ability to speak. At some point, she’s had enough. Violence under her surfaces starts oozing out in murderous impulses. And at the very moment that Angela’s identity emanates visibly, the screen freezes, greens. All we can hear is this terrifying panting pouring from her gaping mouth. This inverted Eden can’t digest violence into beauty like Friday’s can. In a matter of seconds, the movie ends.
On first viewing, the figures of the Mother and the anti-Eve come into being independently and situate themselves as alternative Originals. We define these archetypes according to a similar set of criteria. The Mother is close in proximity to the originary violence and repressive in her approach to adolescent sexualities. The anti-Eve has escaped the preponderance of the originary violence and, similarly, practices celibacy. In the deep history of the causal chain, the two figures almost assimilate into each other.
Our framing in Paradise Lost, however, complicates this conclusion: Eve fell and thus became “mother of mankind.” The original Eve, symbolic of a purity, transgressed, comes to the human world its mother. The mother, inversely, thus becomes symbol of the original Eve, fallen. But in the postlapsarian context, how to imagine the postlapsarian Eve, the American Original? When Friday and Sleepaway imagine this inverted Eve, this virginal figure of innocence for the fallen world, her ‘room’ can only be horrific. In this Paradise, there’s sex—lots of it. There’s violence and soulcrushing repression and somehow it colors the pines and loons and lake all the more beautiful. The fallen Eve mothers uncanny lookalikes. Twisted Eves for a twisted world.