Tis the season to be Spooky! Or, I don’t know. Some shit. Look, I enjoy scary movies, and don’t much care when I watch them. But, as the weekly movie night held by my friends has moved into October, the idea of digging into previously unviewed schlock has become an undeniable #mood. (Does it even matter if I point out my own sarcasm?)

As a child I was afraid of pretty much anything and everything. My sister and I still talk about the time we were staying at our aunt’s house and shook in complete fear while trying to eat dinner, with our cousins watching pet Semetary in the next room. Just the notion of being that close to a “Scary Movie” was terrifying. No need to watch it. Just being within ten feet was all we needed.

But, I, like most children, grew up eventually. (Some may debate this) And with the increase in height, body hair, and consistent cursing, came a new found appreciation for the rush of adrenaline given by literal hair raising cinema. What’s my poison? Mostly supernatural stuff. The Others, The Conjuring, The Uninvited (1944), and the Insidous series just to give a Sous Sant of my tastes. I did eventually start to go back and watch films from the era that had given me nightmares. Things like Halloween, Child’s Play, Children of the Corn, and so on. (Pet Semetary is still scary as shit.)

However, two series that never really drew me in were those of the two eventual head to headers Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. I mean, they’re enough a part of the pop cultural landscape that I couldn’t possibly have made it this far, in life or art, without gaining at least a little background knowledge.

Freddy, burned alive by a mob of parents after escaping child murder charges on a technicality, kills teenagers in their dreams. Jason kills teenagers in the woods for no other real reason than their penchant for fucking too close to where he drowned as a child. So on. So forth. Rinse. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

I’m not going to lie. The shear number of entries in each franchise was among the list of deterrents to my exploring of each. That coupled with my previously held (with a kung fu grip) feelings regarding “Bad Movies.” But, as a very dear friend of mine taught me during the collapse of society, “There are no bad movies. Only experiences.”

So, fuck it. Enough prologue. Let’s talk about the movies.

I’ll summarize them both in terms of which entries I would recommend to a new comer. The way my mind works, I have to watch an entire series from the beginning. But for those who want to skip to just the good bits, here we go. (SPOILERS AHEAD)

When it comes to the man in the brown hat and the Vegematic glove, there’s really only three movies worth your time.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Obviously, the beginning. The classic. In case you were unaware, Wes Craven knows what he’s doing when it comes to stories that aren’t just jump scares, or gore fests. This man knows how to unsettle you. Whether it be the creepy children singing a creepy nursey rhyme that is by now seared into my brain. (1…2… Freddy’s coming for you!) Or just the base concept of never being able to sleep out of fear of dying in some painful, horrific way. When final girl Nancy’s alcoholic mother recounts the story of just why Freddy is after the kids, you can see and feel the complexity on everyone’s faces. The slowly cracking certainty that, not only is Freddy dead, but that the actions of the parents who murdered him were completely justified.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

Picking up 6 years after the original, and completely ignoring the second entry, we find Nancy as a young woman living with the weight of what happened to her. She takes an experimental medication to deprive her of dreams, and tries to help the kids Freddy is still terrorizing, as an intern at the Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital. Craven had never wanted the original to become a franchise, so this was his attempt to put a nail in the coffin. We get a deeper, more disturbing origin of Freddy, some truly fantastic kills, young Laurence Fishburne, a hard rocking theme song by Dokken, and the answer I never knew I needed. “What happens to the kids after Freddy kills them?” Everything about this movie tells you this was meant to be the end of the franchise, and in another more perfect universe, it would have been the haunting crescendo to send us out on.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)

Since the last one didn’t end it, instead spawning three more sequels, Wes Craven came back one more time to flip the entire story on it’s head. This time we’re in the real world. The lead isn’t Nancy, but rather Heather Langenkamp, the actress who played her. Heather is reticent to come back for another entry in the long running franchise, feeling that her two performances were enough. But, at the prodding of her husband, her on screen father, and the man behind Freddy himself, Robert Englund, she agrees to at least hear Wes Craven out on what he’s working on. But a series of strange phone calls, mysterious dreams, and truly bizarre behavior on the part of her son, begins to make her question her own reality, and whether or not her previous work were truly just movies.

Jason Voorhees is a little tougher of a nut to crack. For one, the most interesting thing to me about the character is an Easter egg in his second to last solo entry, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. That’s where we learn that Jason is a Deadite. The evil possessed killing machines from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead Franchise. His mother, grief stricken over the accidental death of her special needs child, somehow found a copy of the Necronomicon Ex Mortis and raised him from the dead as an unstoppable, indestructible killer. And, honestly, the whole franchise makes a ton more sense knowing that. Which is why it’s such a shame that that is never stated out loud. Owing to New Line Cinema not owning the rights to The Evil Dead movies, it is only heavily implied when a character enters the dilapidated Voorhees home, finds the iconic book, flips through it, and continues on with the rest of the movie.

So, I’m glad I read ahead. Because otherwise, these movies make no god damn sense. But, in the interest of playing fair, here’s my list.

Friday the 13th (1980)

Jason isn’t even in this one, aside from a dream sequence jump scare. But, again it’s best to begin any business at the beginning. (Thank you, Bilbo.) There are some truly great performances interspersed among the tits, and blood. But, then again, that could be said about most of the movies I’m listing from here on. But, it should be noted that this one has a surprise Kevin Bacon to brighten everyone’s day.

Friday the 13th Part II (1981)

Okay, now we get the man in the mask. But not a hockey mask. Nope. This time its a burlap sack. And along with it we find the fate of the last film’s final girl, and some truly confusing questions about where the, now full sized, adult Jason has been the whole time his mother was doing her thing in the first movie. Again, the Deadite plot makes a lot of this make more sense. With characters a little more likeable than the previous film, this movie treads a lot of the same ground. Two months after the previous film’s massacre, some teens are working on setting up a summer camp, a little further down the lakeside. (Who the hell is going to send their kids?) That, as you can probably imagine, doesn’t go so hot.

Friday the 13th Part III (1982)

This one gets a little interesting. The kills are better and more inventive, Jason gets his iconic mask, and we have a final girl with an actual arc. She’s working out her childhood trauma of having once had a run in with Jason in the woods outside her family’s home. Now as an adult, she returns for the first time and brings her weird, nerdy, and stoner friends for a nice weekend on the lake. Unfortunately, they piss off some multi ethnic street toughs (You know how the country side is just lousy with those.) But, all of that goes out the window entirely because the machete wielding Jason just has to crash the party.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

Aside from the laugh one has to stifle when uttering this title, my favorite part about this movie is the introduction of the character of Tommy Jarvis. Played here by a 12 year-old Corey Feldman, Tommy goes on to carry the franchise for the next two installments. Though the less said about Part V the better. We also get the joy of watching Crispin Glover be his deeply weird self. Just wait for his dance scene. It’s worth the watch alone.

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

Yes, as I said, we’re not going to talk about Part V. And, honestly, we don’t have to. This one picks up with a now adult Tommy Jarvis attempting to finally exercise his childhood trauma (A lot of that going around) by digging up Jason’s corpse and burning it, only to instead impale it with a very convenient lightning rod. No, seriously. The metal pole Tommy stabbed him with gets struck by lightning and the, now decomposed, killer is once again on a spree. We actually get some really fun characters in this one. It seems like they finally figured out that the best approach was to place ones tongue firmly in ones cheek before trying to make one of these movies. Tommy goes head to head with Jason and we get what is probably the closest thing to a satisfying ending this franchise could have. It just happens to come four or five films too soon.

And so we come to our denouement.

Freddy Vs. Jason (2003)

Honestly, this was a lot of fun. Seriously. Like it might be the most 2003 movie ever, but it definitely gave the people what they wanted. Building off of a blink and you’ll miss it surprise at the end of Jason Goes to Hell, we find ourselves in a world inhabited by both of these undying psychos. Freddy wants to come back, but unless people fear him, he has no power, and the people of Springwood (Where all the Elm Street movies take place) have gone way out of their way to make sure no one remembers him. So, he hatches a plan to revive Jason and guide him to Springwood to start slaughtering people, knowing that they’ll all assume that Freddy is back, fear him, and give him strength. But, you know what they say about best laid plans…

I think my favorite thing about this is that they chose to only focus on the first three Elm Street movies when it came to Freddy’s story, and just the first few Friday the 13ths for Jason. Like the filmmakers saw the mess, decided to sweep most of it under the rug, and play with the best parts. And they did! To great effect!

So, yeah. that’s it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to re-watch Dream Warriors, and New Nightmare.

Happy Halloween