Marcus Nispel, who is carving out a strange little niche for himself within the horror genre by remaking some of its most well known films (previously he directed the remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), directs the new Friday the 13th with a workmanlike sensibility. There are a couple nice shots but mostly the film is just the standard slasher flick boilerplate. Thus, to discuss the direction or the lighting or the shot selection would be to spend more time on those subjects than the director did himself.
Instead I’d like to ask why the characters in this film are so shallow and annoying. I guess it’s sort of a staple of the genre that the characters are disposable meat bags but it seems to me that the trend lately has been to make them more annoying than ever before. It’s almost as if the audience is supposed to be rooting for the killer to cut these idiots down.
If you’ve followed Jason through all eleven of the previous films in which he’s appeared (and I pity you if you have), it becomes impossible not to have a little empathy for the guy by the end of it. After all, he only really wanted to be left alone. It’s just that these damn kids keep intruding into his neck of the woods and then proceed to openly do drugs and have sex. And since Jason is basically a child in a massive man’s body, he can't really process what he's seeing, flips out and goes on a murderous rampage. After ten or twelve different iterations of this scenario, the viewer can’t help but at least understand where Jason is coming for. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want the kids in the films to be killed.
However, it seems like that’s the goal of this new remake of Friday the 13th. All of the kids in the film (except for the two that are clearly destined to live through this mess (to be killed in the inevitable sequel?) are such abhorrent jackasses that even if the viewer isn't actively rooting for them to die their deaths have no real impact.
To my way of thinking, this has a couple of corollary effects, neither of which helps the film in any way. Firstly, since all the characters are such idiots, it makes their deaths more or less meaningless. A scary or suspenseful scene is going to work whether or not the audience cares about the potential victim. But in order for that death to have any weight, in order for it to linger once the body is off the screen, the audience needs to have been wishing the character would live. Since everyone in this film (save the aforementioned brother and sister pair who are the only decent people in sight) is a self-centered dickhead who is either a sex-obsessed creep or just plain stupid, the idea that they might die at the end of any particular scene is of little concern to the audience. And since that’s the case, the only compelling reason to watch the film is just to see how the different characters bite it.
The second (unintended?) consequence of having all the ancillary characters behave as douchebags is that the audience may actually end up rooting for these idiots to get offed. Take, for instance, the jerkwad who cheated on his girlfriend, bitched out his friends multiple times for things he hadn’t told them not to do in the first place, managed to lose his handgun and then talked to it in the hopes that it would suddenly appear to him. For me personally, I was itching to see this guy get hacked to pieces with Jason’s machete. But how is having the viewer wanting to see a character get murdered an effective way to tell a horror story?
If the viewer is indifferent towards the characters, let alone actively rooting against them, it takes a lot of the tension out of the supposedly scary scenes. Why should the audience pay close attention, scanning the frame for the smallest sign of the killer’s presence if they aren’t nervous about whether the character on screen will make it out alive? Horror films, unlike thrillers or mainstream action films, do not have to have their lead characters make it through the film alive. When watching something like Die Hard, for instance, no one in their right mind thinks Bruce Willis is in any real danger (a notion tweaked brilliantly in Live Free or Die Hard which basically saw McClane become an unstoppable killing machine). But in a horror film, you never know. Thus the danger the characters are in from the killer is more real than in most other films. And because of that the suspense can be that much greater, the tension ratcheted up that much higher. But if the audience actually wants the characters to die, well, then the filmmakers have lost one of the most valuable things they had working for them. And so they have to resort to every more obnoxious loud screeches on the soundtrack to make people jump in their seats. There’s a reason the masters of the genre like Hitchcock and Carpenter never had to resort to such nonsense.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if this concept of making the characters so disposable, worthless and downright horrible is limited to the new Friday the 13th. Nor is it even limited to the films of Marcus Nispel. From Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake (where all the characters are constantly at each other’s throats despite being the last survivors of the human race) to the Saw films (where not only is everyone a despicable human being, that’s sort of the point of the whole enterprise) it seems that good people aren’t in horror movies much these days. And that baffles me because by doing that the filmmakers are making their jobs that much harder. It’s not easy to elicit a genuine emotional response from an audience and to cripple your film in this way strikes me as remarkably stupid, worthy of something one of the idiot characters that populate these films would do.
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