I smiled to myself as I slipped Part 1 into the VCR. “The catheter is in, the phone is off the hook, and I’ve got a bucket full of red licorice and peanut butter cups. Let’s get this horror show on the road!” I was 21. My life was about to begin, or something. I pressed “play.”

That was five weeks, six hamburgers, four yoga classes, one cappuccino, ten pizzas, a comic con, three imagined heart attacks, seven imagined nervous breakdowns, 15 CDs, two pitchers of beer, a college registration, a vacation in Monterey and a bout of eBay madness ago. I’m still 21 and in addition to a new scar (damn yoga!) I now have a healthy respect for the Friday the 13th franchise and its influence on me through the years. That mass-viewing brought back a flood of memories and feelings without head trauma or drugs of any kind. I’m not sure if I had a mental breakthrough or if that licorice was laced after all but my little F13 marathon turned into an indescribable self-odyssey of, uh, myself. I was so pleased that when I finished Jason Goes to Hell I ritualistically buried the nine un-rewound tapes in the backyard next to my parents, Blockbuster Video be damned. It was all incredible and possibly otherworldly! My only concern later was whether or not to catalog my experiences and memories and feelings or use my newly unblocked creative energy to write the best damn movie reviews ever! Ultimately, and you’ll know this if you already read my reviews, I chose the best solution for myself: do a quick half-assed analysis job and spend my summertime with the lovely girls working at Redlands Mall in Redlands, CA. Woo hoo!

Let me give you a little background. Up to Part 8’s theatrical release in 1989 I had never seen a F13 film, kind of. I say that because my grandma had them all (illegally) on tape and my uncles liked them, so sometimes while I was over there for family get-togethers I would drive my GI Joe vehicles “accidentally” into the den if they were watching one and sneak peeks at snippets of those forbidden films from behind the couch. I had no real idea what was going on, and I think that ultimately I managed to see about fifteen minutes of actual movie over seven years, and only about three minutes at a time. Most of it was boring dialogue, but I do remember two scenes quite vividly: the scene in Part 1 where the cook girl realizes she’s in a jeep with a psycho and is trying to get out of there, and the daytime shot near the end of Part 3 where the hot girl in the boat sees an unmasked and ugly Jason burst out of the barn and start running towards her. I swore then on my 10-year-old life that not only would I see all of these taboo scary movies, but that (when I got one) I would bring my girlfriend up to an isolated cabin somewhere and pretend that there was a crazed killer outside trying to get in, then reveal the whole thing was a joke and talk her into strip Battleship. I’m happy to report both my goals have been reached, and they were everything I had hoped for!

The first Friday I ever saw was the afore-mentioned Part 8. I bamboozled my parents into letting my friends and I watch it, thinking it would be one of the greatest things I would ever see. As it turned out the nude scene in Puppet Master was the highlight of the party, and thankfully the disappointment that was Jason Takes Manhattan was forgotten after indoor basement football and a Super Soaker War. Junior high school ruled and for several years, to me, Friday the 13th drooled.

There were only two redeemable things about the F13 concept: my own imagined F13 adventures and the F13 Nintendo game. I’ll start with the NES game: it was hours of fun! It was just what I thought of when I thought of how Friday the 13th should be: a group of counselors trying to save three cabins full of kids at Camp Crystal Lake from zombies and bats and Jason’s mother’s floating head before Jason kills everybody. You use rocks and knives and machetes and axes as weapons, you have a finite amount of time to paddle out to the kids on the lake when Jason is attacking or else they’re dead, and the ominous “whoosh!” sound you hear when Jason appears puts you on edge. It’s rather difficult to make headway in and if you don’t like Jason or the “secluded teens fighting for their lives against a slasher” premise, you won’t think much of the game. But I liked it, and that helped keep me thinking that maybe this series wasn’t as bad as Part 8 would have me believe.

What kept Friday the 13th on my mind the most were seven simple home video covers in the rental section of my local King Soopers back in Arvada. I never liked walking around the store while my mom shopped, so I would read magazines and then go into the rental section and head straight for the horror section. And there they were! The first seven F13 films! They were strange and mysterious and impressive. The first three had ominous body outlines, one carrying a knife, another carrying an axe, and the third glimpsed through a shower curtain a knife was being thrust into. The fourth video was a bloody hockey mask with a knife stuck in an eye socket, the fifth was another hockey mask lit from behind, the sixth was a hockey mask rising in splendor over a gravestone, and the seventh was half a hockey mask and half a girl’s face. There were other cooler movie covers, to be sure. But that hockey mask was menacing stuff, and I just knew that at least a few of those seven Jason films had to be good. They had to be! How could one of my favorite NES games be based on foolishness like Part 8? It couldn’t, so logically one of those forbidden films was superior enough to inspire some game designers to emulate it. That was the logic that kept me wanting to some day see those movies. I knew I would, one day.

That Nintendo game also kept me impressed with the character of Jason, to the point that I cherished the hockey-masked bad guy action figure from the Commando line and I made my own Lego figure of zombie Jason. I also made Lego versions of Pinhead and Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers (late night cable allowed me to see their films) but Jason was the one who made the most trouble, always equipped with the scary black Lego medieval axe and always the only bad guy that escaped final justice to terrorize again. Freddy had the neat knife glove I unsuccessfully attempted to buy a version of every Halloween, Michael Myers had a spray-painted William Shatner (Jim!) mask, and Pinhead had lots of pins and terrorized the beautiful brunette who recently did one of the best beer commercials I’ve ever seen. But Jason roamed in the woods and he was unfettered by supernaturalisms or familial obligations. He simply went where he wanted and killed and killed. I knew I was safe from most psycho killers because I didn’t live on Elm Street or in Haddonfield and I manipulated others into opening mysterious boxes. But in my young immature head, every twig snapping outside my bedroom window at night wasn’t my neighbor’s cat or a cat burglar: it was Jason looking for his next kill! And I didn’t keep a spear gun or a machete in my room for protection! What was I thinking!?!

Now I’m grown up and playing in a band. And there’s a Taco Grande where Los Panchos used to stand. I’ve never married and I moved to another state. It took years to see all the Fridays: they were mostly worth the wait. I actually think Halloween is better, if you haven’t that you should. But if you ask me to have a Friday the 13th marathon, I definitely would. COME SLASHING; c’mon have yourself a ball. Come slashing: it’s supernatural! (my apologies to The Kinks; “Come Dancing” was playing as I wrote this and I was in a satirical mood. If you’ve never heard the song “Come Dancing” go find it now!)

If you’ve never been to summer camp or gone camping, or if you have and it was uneventful, rent a Friday the 13th film and live and die vicariously through mostly attractive 30-year-old teenagers. It’s packaged plasticized death for your dismay/enjoyment, but rest assured many of Jason’s victims are unproductive members of society with no future prospects in sight. Remember: it’s all fake! Tom Savini’s impressive special effects might look snuff-quality, but it’s all smoke and mirrors and corn syrup! Just like a KISS concert! It’s a fantastic adrenaline rush if you can take it, and when you’re done watching you can go buy your own Jason Voorhees Movie Maniacs action figure. In a repressed society, we’d have no slasher films and no action figures of anti-hero slashers. Who’s better off? We are! And Jason X (part 10 for non-Latin-comprehenders) is on the way! So is Freddy vs. Jason! Long live Hollywood, long live zombie Jason, and God bless America! Thanks for everything, Friday the 13th!