Friday the 13th Part III (1982)

Friday the 13th Part III arrives in 1982 with a hockey mask, a leased 3-Depix camera rig, and a mandate to terrify teenagers in three dimensions. Steve Miner directs a cast of young people who were, by the screenwriter's own admission, chosen for looks. They wander a homestead near Crystal Lake, meet a man named Abel who warns them to turn back, and are then dispatched by pitchfork, speargun, machete, and fire poker. The film's enduring contribution to civilization is the Detroit Red Wings goaltender mask that Jason Voorhees puts on during a lighting check. That is the legacy. A piece of sporting equipment became an icon.

On the ledger of modern social consciousness, this installment is a blank page, and it seems content to remain so. Chris Higgins carries a trauma from an earlier attack, and the final girl survives through endurance, but the film offers no argument about gender, power, or anything else. Race goes unremarked. The cast is uniformly white and the screenplay has no interest in the matter. There is no economic critique, no environmental sermon, no meditation on bodies or minds. The bikers get killed for trespassing. The stoners get killed for being stoned. The moral universe here is a fuse box and a hammock.

We are left, then, with a document that predates the entire apparatus of contemporary messaging by decades and makes no attempt to anticipate it. Nobody in this film is trying to teach us anything. Jason simply arrives, does his work, and lies down in the barn. There is a kind of purity in that. The picture wants only to sell tickets, and it succeeded, briefly dethroning a far gentler story about a boy and his alien. It is a slasher sequel, nothing more, and it never pretends otherwise.