The B-Masters Cabal

Thank you for asking.

I noticed the other day – rather to my consternation – that it has been a decade since I drew a line under my viewing of the original ten Friday The 13th movies. This detail coincided with a weird itch I’ve had lately to revisit the franchise, so that I was able to interpret it as A Sign.

Here’s the thing, though: I approached the F13 films the first time as a slasher movie neophyte, so that I was reacting to them cold, and my reviews, as a set, constitute a record of my journey through them, and the progressive thickening of my skin—or, as Zack Handlen put it at the time, “your horrified dismay slowly blossom{ing} into somewhat affectionate contempt”—and I don’t want to lose that aspect of them.

So here’s the plan: I do intend to revisit and revise the first one from a more knowledgeable perspective, as over time I’ve come to consider it a bit smarter than I was prepared to concede (or, perhaps, recognised) the first time; albeit still dumb as a box of hammers in the broader sense; but beyond that, I won’t be revising the other reviews too much, merely tweaking and tidying them up as they need it.

The other aspect of this trip down memory lane is that it gives me an excuse to embark on something I’ve had in mind for ages, namely, Rating The Final Girls (or Boys, or Couples). I know that for some (most?) people, slasher movies are all about their kill scenes, but for me, they stand or fall on their Final Girl sequences. I came out of my first F13 journey considering Amy Steel’s Ginny Fields the best Final Girl of all*, and I’ve seen nothing over the past decade that has made me change my mind about that. Thus, I’ll be ranking our Final Girls on The Ginny Scale, according to their endurance, ingenuity, willingness to get their hands dirty, and bad habits like putting their weapons down.

(*Please feel free to debate the point! – or to make recommendations…)

Of course not all slasher movies go along with the Final Whatever convention; and conversely, sometimes you find a proper Final Girl in a film that’s not really a slasher movie. Neither of these deviations will rule a film in or out of overall consideration.

And while in the first instance this project will simply address existing Final Girls, I hope that this will motivate me to tackle more of the slasher films I’ve accumulated but not watched. In that respect, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that one of the things that has held me up is trying to pick a starting point…nor that *my* starting point isn’t what the dogma dictates. However, for the sake of the last remnants of my sanity, I won’t be going any further back in time than the beginning of the 70s.