My Sunday column

A new version of “Friday the 13th” opens in a few weeks.
That isn’t really surprising considering that in the last few years “newly reimagined” versions of “Halloween,” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Dawn of the Dead,” “The Fog,” and “The Hills Have Eyes” have been released.
Some were good. Some bad.
Highbrow horror enthusiasts — yes, there is such a thing — will tell you the Golden Age of horror films was the 1930s with Universal’s Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman, or even all the way back to the silent era and the great Lon Chaney Sr.
Pishpoddle I say.
The films of the 1930s and early 1940s were great, at least some of them were, but the time that made me a lifelong horror fan was the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was the Rosetta Stone of the era. A low-budget film made in Texas in 1974, it was tough movie for a horror fan in a small town with a single, one-screen theater to get to see.
But several years after its initial release it appeared on the screen at the Tooga Theater in Summerville. I saw it with my younger brother. It was scary. Real scary.
Thirty years later it’s still one of my favorites, possessing a ragged intensity that few movie makers (with much bigger budgets) can come close to matching.
“Halloween” came to town in 1978. I couldn’t find anyone to go with me, so I settled into my seat, Milk Duds in hand, and prepared to submerge into the film.
Not so fast.
Turns out that not many parents in Summer-ville understood the kind of movie “Halloween” was. They probably thought it was a nice Disney feature with Dean Jones or a young Jan Michael Vincent.
As the house lights went down kids continued to chatter with their buddies, smack gum and yell wisecracks at the screen. I was not amused.
Twenty minutes later, the problem was solved.
Mask-wearing Michael Myers thinned that crowd out pronto. One kid after another bolted toward the lobby.
By the midpoint of the picture the remaining audience knew what it had gotten into.
And we loved it
“Halloween” changed things.
Horror movies were suddenly very cool with young people. The audiences began to get bigger and older.
So when “Friday the 13th” hit the screens in May of 1980 I didn’t have to go alone or with my little brother.
A pack of my buddies from high school made the trip.
What a night!
Now I am not going to tell you that “Friday the 13th” is great cinema. I am not even going to tell you that it’s a great horror film.
But it blew us right out of our seats. For 95 minutes director Sean Cunningham had us in the palm of his evil hand.
Most of you have probably seen some version of “Friday” over the years, if only a few minutes of a much bowdlerized version on TV. If not the original, you might have caught one of the numerous sequels that repeat the original’s format ad nauseam.
But being there in 1980 when the onscreen mayhem seemed all fresh and new was not something you can capture from a TV version, or even an unedited DVD print 30 years later. The impact has also been dissipated because the techniques and tricks Cunningham used back then have been duplicated a million times since. Even if you haven’t seen “Friday the 13th” ... you’ve seen it.
The movie ended on a bucolic note, with a lone survivor drifting along in a boat as police officers arrive on the scene.
She survived.
The audience relaxed.
Wham!
Something — something nasty — hurtled out of the water to grab our heroine.
She hadn’t escaped.
Nor had we.
The audience I saw “Friday the 13th” with back in 1980 rose as one and screamed its fool head off.
That was so cool.


Jimmy Espy is executive editor of The Daily Citizen. He blogs, often about movies, at www.espysoutpost.