Editorials
[Remember This?] When Being Dead The Whole Time Was A Twist?
I didn’t have enough room in the headline for this article’s subtitle, which is And Remember When “They Were All The Same Person” Was A Twist? This whole thing has been buzzing around in my head since a recent argument regarding the ending to Haute Tension, which I found sort of ridiculous. It’s the standard “The Protagonist Is Insane And Actually The Killer” (aka “The Split Personality” twist). But I have to say it got me thinking that this trope actually doesn’t bug me as much as the other two, since it usually says more about the characters at hand.
Still, I’m not sure what happened to our brains over the past 14 years, but you can’t call something a twist if everyone knows it’s coming. I feel like horror needs to widen its bag of tricks beyond the “they were dead”, the “split personality” and “the protag is crazy” tropes which seem to be the only three ploys in regular use for filmmakers seeking to pull the rug out from under their audience.
The “dead” thing worked for The Sixth Sense, and it sort of worked two years later with The Others. It also worked in 1962’s Carnival Of Souls. But we’ve seen it employed at least twice more recently in Passengers and The Devil’s Ground. I’m not denigrating those films necessarily, but it should probably end there. Similarly the “split ” angle didn’t even quite work in Identity and it certainly didn’t work in The Ward. It was sort of used in Shutter Island as well, but it worked there because it was actually source of catharsis for its character.
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Around the time The Ward came out I made a point to ask five people, people who hadn’t seen the movie, the following question, “If a movie takes place in an insane asylum and there are five leads, what’s the twist?” Every single person answered, “they’re the same person.”
Now, I don’t want to go on a pissy rant that denigrates anybody, few things displease me more than articles that call into question the ability and/or intelligence of a filmmaker without having all of the facts. For all I know, a lot of these scripts had been around for a while and were the passion projects of their directors. If you’ve been working on something forever, you’re not gonna just stop when something similar comes along. I get it. It’s just that we’ve reached a saturation point with this stuff. Twists aren’t necessary to a good story, but if you’re going to have one make sure it actually twists.
One recent horror film where the twist actually worked for me was A Horrible Way To Die. I feel like its ending is very much a twist, it’s just that it doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s a revelation of its characters’ true nature (both AJ Bowen’s and Joe Swanberg’s, though I find Bowen’s revelation more compelling), not an upending of the film’s reality. I’d like to see more films embrace that route and realize that “shocking” doesn’t necessarily mean “showy.”
What about you? Any pet peeve twists out there that I missed?
Genre fans rejoiced this week as Peacock finally released a teaser trailer for the upcoming Crystal Lake TV series starring Linda Cardellini as horror’s favorite killer mommy. This sneak peek is actually the first footage of an official Friday the 13th project since the Platinum Dunes remake came out over 17 years ago, so it makes sense that we’re all incredibly hyped for this long-awaited prequel.
While we’ve since received more information about the show -including how all eight episodes will be released at the same time on October 15– fans wasted no time in speculating about the direction they think showrunner Brad Caleb Kane intends to take the franchise next. After all, Kane’s team is free to adapt elements from the entire Friday the 13th franchise, so it seems that anything goes at this point. That being said, I doubt we’ll be seeing young Jason depicted as a fun-sized killer with an affinity for hockey masks, as I’m of the opinion that the show is likely reaching back to the original actress behind Pamela Voorhees herself in order to fill out the prequel’s story.
You see, after sifting through behind-the-scenes interviews and plenty of special features from my own Friday the 13th collection on physical media, I learned that the late, great Betsy Palmer had come up with an elaborate backstory for Ms. Voorhees that was never properly explored in the films. She may have only accepted the iconic role because she needed money for a new car, with Palmer notoriously referring to Victor Miller’s original script as a “piece of shit”, but that didn’t stop her from taking her work seriously – and eventually even warming up to the now-iconic film.
Trained in the Stanislavski Method, an infamous system where actors use the “art of experiencing” to more realistically portray their characters, Palmer decided to build off of Miller’s script and make her own notes in order to characterize Pamela as a more complex and arguably sympathetic figure, even if only a fraction of her contributions would actually make it onscreen.
The only real information she found in the script concerned her character’s prominent class ring, and from there Palmer extrapolated an entire backstory where Pamela had a high school boyfriend during the 1940s that got her pregnant and then skipped town. This led to Pamela being forced to raise her child all on her own during a deeply conservative period in American history – another reason why the character is so bothered by the camp counselors’ promiscuity.
It was Tom Savini who first revealed to Palmer that Jason was going to be depicted as being disabled (an idea that wasn’t in the original screenplay), with this crucial addition making the actress realize that Ms. Voorhees was already overburdened even before the death of her son. The tragedy only pushed her over the edge as she became a puritanical vigilante attempting to shut down Camp Crystal Lake at any cost.
For Palmer, this means that “Camp Blood” never had any curse, as the multiple fires and poisoned water incidents that kept the camp from reopening before the summer of 1979 were merely part of Ms. Voorhees’ years-long vendetta against the property’s owners. Palmer also insisted that the killer in the sequels isn’t the original Jason, as he definitively drowned at the bottom of Crystal Lake. According to her, having Pamela’s child return even as a killer revenant would undo her entire character arc, meaning that the masked murderer who takes over her legacy must be someone or something else entirely!
CRYSTAL LAKE — (Photo by: Matt Infante/PEACOCK)
These ideas match up with most of what we’ve heard about Peacock and A24’s plans for the upcoming series, which is set to follow Linda Cardellini as Pamela after she gives up a career as a singer in order to take care of her disabled son, played by Callum Vinson. That’s why I wouldn’t be surprised if the writing team decided to borrow from the woman behind the machete in order to make the series more authentic to the source material.
Of course, there are rumors floating around that the show could also feature a teenage Jason in some capacity, so we’re still not sure about how exactly Kane and company plan to adapt their project to the franchise’s ever-changing mythology. That’s why I’d like to invite fellow readers to comment below with your own theories about where you think the prequel show is headed!
For now, I think it’s safe to say that Friday the 13th fans are more than ready to binge-watch Pamela’s bloody origin story when it finally drops this October. And who knows? Maybe the show’s success could finally lead to a new mainline film…
CRYSTAL LAKE — Pictured: Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees — (Photo by: Peacock)
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