Friday the 13th

Because American horror is creatively dead as a genre, it offers perhaps the best window into the wider breakdown of our culture and our art, as expressed through motion pictures. A movie like this year's Friday the 13th, produced by Michael Bay, is a perfect case study in this principle. Everything you need to know about why America is falling apart, you can find right in this movie, especially when you stack it up against the originals from the early 1980s.

Not that those 1980s movies were masterpieces. As my friend Thor likes to point out, the brutal slayings in those early Friday the 13th installments were copied straight out of 1970s Italian horror. He has a small library of classic video tapes to prove it.

But for U.S. audiences, they were (in conjunction with the Halloween movies) somewhat revolutionary in their depiction of stark, mindless killing, not of innocent bystanders, but of sinful souls (usually teenagers) who had transgressed the bounds of decency and morality, and had foolishly brought an evil retribution down upon themselves. It was a medieval formula. Most of the time it was sex and drinking that brought about their doom, not engaged in with wanton abandon and evil intent, but simple human curiosity. That is the tragic nature of sin, according to the old model: it traps the curious alongside the crazed evildoers.

But the new Friday the 13th, while still seemingly holding to parts of the old formula, is missing something that made the originals gritty and scary. It is like comparing the real New York City to the Las Vegas version. The new movies are a thrill ride version that actually somehow obscures and covers up the true horror-generating effects in the 1980s movies.

For one thing, we are inured to teenage sexuality, so it doesn't really fill the bill anymore. Everyone is looking at porn, so seeing a couple kids screwing on the big screen hardly evokes that sin-fear reflex. Instead it's now marijuana. Virtually all the killings in this year's version have to do with pot somehow. In thie opening, marijuana in a forest generates greed, and substitutes for the role that gold plays in Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale." Later on in the movie, anyone who touches a bong, or anyone who gets near a bong, gets killed.

But if were only as simple as that. In the original, the use of Jason and of the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake were integral to the actual story, which was about teenage counselors gone amuck. In this version, Jason and the Camp play no real explicit role in the story. Let me repeat that: Jason and the Camp play no real explicit role in the story.

Instead they are invoked as cultural archetypes, trotted out to provide mayhem when another character comes in contact with the deadly weed. The entire movie could have been made without mention of Jason, or the original camp, with the substitute of some kind of lake monster instead. So decrepit, so moribund, is the craft of American horror storytelling that no one even cares anymore. All we want to see is people getting hacked. The flimsiest non-sequitur narrative will suffice, so long as there is enough blood. Could there be a more perfect metaphor for the antireality False Narrative being propagated the Judas Goats in the national media?

A couple switcheroos from the original story are useful in chronicling the downfall of America since the 1980s. In the original, all the counselors, and the thus all the victims, were of the same socio-economic class. In the contemporary version, the college kids at the lake are psychologically abused by the rich asshole prick whose house they are staying in. It's a perfect portrait of America right now, so much that we wind up rooting for the rich asshole to be killed, in horrible brutal fashion. Jason has gone from being an agent of terror to an agent of collective vengeance.

But like the real America in its death throes, everyone has to die, along with the rich dude. No one gets spared. Jason is a psychopath who sees everyone as vital threat who must be extinguished. We are all in the path of his machete.

The movie ostensibly bills itself as a remake of the 1980 movie, but is really more of a remake of the 1981 sequel. This makes sense, because the 1980 movie was naturalistic (only "real" causes), whereas the sequels invoke the quasi-supernatural, with the repeated resurrection of the deceased but unkillable Jason. Naturalistic horror (which used to be the rule until the early 1980s) no longer appeals to faith-based American audiences. We understand only fantasy anymore. We don't like the "real."

Perhaps the most glaring difference between this movie and the 1980s installments is the dropping of the most controversial directorial feature of those originals: killer POV. In the Sean Cunningham-directed original, when a victim was about to be offed, we often got to switch to see their reaction screams from the vantage point of Jason himself (or his mother, depending on the movie). This technique was considered the hallmark of the originals, in fact (although Thor will tell you that it was stolen as well from the Italians, who have the most gruesome minds for bloody horror).

Somehow those techniques don't matter anymore. The contemporary movie isn't about generating horror in a way that would really shock, and therefore enlighten. It's about serving death porn eye candy, pure and simple, while pillaging our cultural memory to make a fast buck. Better that no one really notices what's going on. In return, we get to see a rich prick get skewered.

Like I said, our defunct horror actually says a lot about who we are right now.

I saw this in Leominster on its afternoon of release. There was an enormous crowd for the evening show trying to get in as I left. It's what people want, I guess. The best things I can say about my movie are the performances of two of my favorite young actors, Jared Padalecki (formerly on "Gilmore Girls") and Amanda Righetti. I didn't even notice the latter as the same actress in "The Mentalist" on CBS. That's how good a job she did.