Walking the long hallway with Friday the 13th

When I was a kid, the distance between my Uncle Jimmy’s living room and the bathroom down the hall seemed to stretch a full mile. I spent many a Saturday night gorging on horror movies and trying to muster the courage to creep down that endless corridor to unload a bladder full of A&W Root Beer.

The Friday the 13th’s were the movies that made that hallway feel the longest and the darkest.

When I went back to visit that apartment after years away, much of it was as I remembered. The buzzer at the top of the stoop. The shelves full of dusty books. The gray cat scurrying under the bed. But the distance between my Uncle Jimmy’s living room and the bathroom down the hall was only a couple of feet.Outside of a handful of entires, the Friday the 13th movies haven’t held up particularly well. Then again, they were never really intended to. They were disposable annual rites of adolescent passage best ingested alongside a bladder’s worth of A&W Root Beer. Yet they evoke great fondness whenever I revisit them – invariably on a day like today, a Friday the 13th. Then I’m ten years old again. And that hallway stretches a full mile.
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(Above) A trio of pictures featuring legendary special effects artist Tom Savini plying his trade.

(Above) A step-by-step guide to Savini’s creation of the deformed young Jason Vorhees in the original Friday the 13th. The graphic comes from Fangoria issue #6 and was scanned for posterity by Dr. Terror’s Blog of Horror.

(Above) Friday the 13th Part III actor Larry Zerner has an appliance affixed to his neck for his role as zany practical joker Shelly, the most slashable of all the series’ victims.

(Above) A still from the 2009 remake.

(Above) Storyboards from Jason Takes Manhattan (Part VIII) and Jason Lives (Part VI). Both of these come courtesy of the site Fridaythe13thfranchise.com, which features interviews, filming locations, info on screenings and more.

(Above) An alternative Friday the 13th poster from artist Mark Welser.

(Above) Poster by Christopher Cox.

(Above) Poster by Jay Shaw.

(Above) Poster by Doaly.