Eek. Maybe you've seen these slasher movies before, but I haven't. I don't know why I've resisted them, considering I see tons of movies without discrimination. At any rate, you can now consider me schooled. Just don't consider me summer camped.
You probably know the premise. The year was 1958 and Jason drowned at Camp Crystal Lake. The counselors were humping, so they didn't save him. Naturally that irked Jason's mom (a cook at the camp), so she killed enough counselors to get the camp shut down for good.
Sure enough, though, someone opened the place again in 1983 (I think). They do this despite the town crazy's warnings. So back comes Jason's mom to kill everybody some more. And she practically dices all of them, too. Even Kevin Bacon.
One girl, though, manages to survive and even beheads Jason's mom. That right there is probably the worst thing anyone could have done, because somehow Jason witnessed the act and now he's out for blood. Apparently he didn't drown after all.
We learn in the second movie that Jason has been living off of berries and whatever he can forage. He survived the drowning, I guess, but emerged horribly disfigured, and horribly evil. So the first thing he does is kill the girl who killed his mom. He does this with an icepick, which he sticks into her skull.
Then he goes back to Crystal Lake, where someone is hosting a counselor training course. He kills everyone there including the skinny-dipping chick with the fine body. The dude in the wheelchair takes a machete to the face then rolls out the door and down the stairs.
That's the idea. Develop the characters to be people like you and me, then kill them.
Aside from a cultural study of what these movies influenced (hitchhiking paranoia, for example) pretty much everything that we can learn from them is espoused in that scene in Scream, where Neve Campbell contrasts what people actually do in horror movies with what they ought to do. Nevertheless, I think there is enough interesting stuff going on with
-Jason's psychological problems,
-and the fact that he is pure evil,
-and the backstory,
-and the wardrobe
to make being obsessed with this stuff interesting for some people. If we haven't seen a Friday the 13th Board game yet, though, we probably never will. That's a shame, too, because I'm bet it would involve gettin' naked and lots of yelling.
At any rate, I'm going to keep watching. I hear that numbers 3 through 9 are all the same. In the 10th movie he goes to space and kills people there, and most recently he and Freddy Krueger get into it.
When I figure out how he survived the drowning and got so ugly, and why he's killing everyone, I'll let you know. That is, if you don't get killed by a masked knife-psycho in the meantime.