A Few Campy Horror Fantasies
Look. I’m sorry, but I hate the name Jason.
It’s not because I hate the 1963 adventure-classic Jason and the Argonauts. I like that Jason. The film is charm and cringe. Though Hollywood generally tries to make its fantastical worlds seem like they could exist (with developed characters, plausible art direction, scripts that offer clear context), the Argo delights in…the lack of these things.
The Argonauts quested after mythological greatness. Scantily clad, the characters fight skeletons; they soliloquize, saunter and seduce. The thing that elevates the film is not the action. It’s the camp. The spectacle is everything.
Jason sprang to my pre-pubescent rescue. The assumed cis-hetero-utopia of my military upbringing was intense. Jason encouraged silliness. The film’s brazen indifference to the “rules” of real life made it a “queer-camp” classic.
Susan Sontag in her famous 1967 essay “On Camp” boils the concept of “camp” down to this: the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp is gestalt: what makes it great is its wacky totality. And, often, it is unapologetically queer.
“Queer,” like “camp,” is generally two things at once: beautiful and repulsive. Highly performative, it is grounded in the spectacle. Queerness is, as scholar Dana Cloud argues, “the development of subaltern identity out of shared experience of oppression.” It centers alternative/oppressed forms of sexuality.
In film, this can be done through characters, through the storyline, or by drawing attention to the people making a film.
Queer-camp films structure a viewer’s identity by providing blueprints for how to behave and how to survive. Different from the real world, queer-camp proclaims itself not only as what is but what is possible.
The world of these films — their “mise-en-scéne” — normalizes what cultures deem to be abhorrent while simultaneously celebrating that deviance. You could even say that Jason blazed a trail for my pre-teen queer-questing. He suggested a form of self-expression.
But though I love one Jason, the other is the (hockey-masked) face of the darker side of camp.
And. Well? I hate him.
*
I was twelve when my neighbor found a copy of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. We watched it one day when the adults were away. And although I didn’t know the words for it at the time, the film is pure queer-camp. Funny and ridiculous, its visual puns suggest an attempt by director Rob Heddon to queer the horror franchise. The eighth Friday is nothing like its predecessors; but to a 12-year-old boy who didn’t have the words to explain it, the film traumatized me.
Only familiar with the fun and carefree codes of camp, I didn’t understand Heddon’s vision. I was so scared — so deeply affected — I had nightmares for months. (It didn’t help that my neighbor picked up on my distress — hanging outside my window at night to make the chee-chee-chee sound Jason exhorts whenever pursuing a kill.)
Because I was only familiar with the carefree codes of camp, the thematic darkness actually traumatized me. Granted, I was in on the joke while a band of Argonauts frolicked about, the inverting horror of Friday’s Jason killed more than those fifteen-ish unsuspecting teenagers.
Instead of understanding the film as a bleak-but-romping farce of tropes, I read its strange moral calculus literally.
Instead of winking along, I shut my eyes. And since then…Jason has been chasing me.
*
Last May, another queer-camp masterpiece hit theatres.
Everything, Everywhere All at Once uses comedic camp to make hot-dog fingered people and an apocalyptic donut seem revelatory. At the climax, Michelle Yeoh’s character defeats evil by transforming pain and violence into humor. She transforms darkness by forging power from kindness and humor. Yeoh takes the power away from the wicked, by transforming it into laughs. She…well…camps up the place.
Such a reframe could work for me too, right?
After 30 years, I decided to watch Part VIII again.
*
The 80s was fraught with slashers. Violent harbingers of hell (Chuckie, Jason, Freddie) dominated the box office. In many ways, Jason epitomized the decade. Paramount released the first Crystal-Lake carnage the year before I was born (1980). The eighth — and “final” — installment hit theaters in July 1989. And despite the reliability of the franchise, the seventh sequel only had a $5-million budget. Needless to say: it had nothing to lose.
By all objective standards, VIII was the series loser: it netted the least amount at the box office. After killing and resurrecting its undead villain seven times, the gimmick was starting to wane. The Washington Post review picked up on the campy mood — writing that the “most amazing conceit…is that Crystal Lake High School even has a graduating class to warrant a senior trip to New York.” After 286 deaths, the town was bled dry. It called Jason “a tricky devil, moving into the frame just as a victim slips out the other side, looming from all directions and generally saving the scriptwriters from being concerned with anything approaching logic.” Ouch!
By 1989, slasher-victim tropes were well established. Part VIII used them all: a blonde-sexaholic, an old fuddy-duddy, the token POC cast member. To put it frankly: the series had become desperate. And desperation is either boring or funny.
So how does a low-budget slasher draw in a bored public?
It does camp at its most absolute bonkers.
The title itself is an obvious reference to the Muppets — who had “taken” Manhattan only a few years prior. Though it may feel bizarre, the allusion sets the tone. But despite conjuring a mind full of flailing Muppets, the title is a misnomer. We know what Jason’s “taking” (and it ain’t a theatrical revue). He’s only on the island for twenty minutes!
The plot is simple: Jason springs forth from his watery grave — again (something about electricity-magic this time). He boards a ship full of graduating seniors and proceeds to kill everyone on board. A few survivors (and a dog?) escape, rowing to shore; and, in the blessedly short final sequences, Jason takes in the sites — taking out a few traumatized New Yorkers along the way.
Camp, at its most basic, is hyperbolic. To Sontag, though, it’s more than exaggerative allusion. Hyper-stylized at the expense of content, camp relies on artifice: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’ To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”
Just as the other Jason swashbuckles around in abject defiance of the rules of verisimilitude, Jason the masked-killer-of-my-nightmares gallivants around the Love-turned-Death “Boat” (it’s called the Lazarus for cripes sake!), ending up in a mostly unrecognizable “Manhattan.” (My friend who re-watched it with me — because I couldn’t bring myself to watch it alone — asked: “Green toxic sludge just hanging out!? I don’t know…maybe if you’re in Queens.”)
Nothing squares. (1) The boat passes a series of huge mountains. Anyone with a skosh of geographical knowledge will recognize this as problematic. (Principle photography, incidentally, occurred in British Colombia. Wow! That is a long trip to New York!). (2) Among the graduating seniors is a young woman who still needs credit (?). She seduces/ blackmails the lone male teacher on board for a grade-change. Except, she’s already graduated? (3) There’s a dance party that doesn’t end — disco lights and music blares without anyone thinking to turn it off. (4) There’s even a sauna on board this dilapidated boat! (My friend again: “Why you gotta shove a burning-hot rock into his chest? You know what they call this on Criminal Minds? Overkill.”)
These are not faults; they capture the moment when the bombastic counterculture of the 80s gave way to the kitschifying impulses of the 90s. The hair is high, the shoulders are padded, the cocaine is…everywhere. The ill-formed objet d’arte America had accumulated over the eight long years of “Reagan” are on full display. Friday doubles down on the waning influence of the 80s in the exact instant culture shifted away.
Even if you disregard the plot and title, it revels in queerness. The locations (bedroom, disco, sauna) are iconic settings for gay porn. (Being dark camp, though, nobody’s getting stuck by anything pleasant.) These are lusty teenagers: victims in a world that wants to “kill” their desire. Few things are more subaltern than teenage sexuality.
This was the first in the series to leave Camp Crystal Lake. With none of the aesthetic restraints from the original seven, VIII got to be something new.
It left camp in order to build it.
*
Before Part VIII, my exposure to camp was limited to films like Labyrinth and the Dorian-Gray-inspired monstrosity The Leech Woman. The grotesquerie of each is “harmless” because their exaggerative impulses undermine the vicissitudes of life. Even as a kid I knew these films were exciting: pop culture had tapped into a mode of sly and irreverent art. They titillated as much as they entertained by promoting melodrama, taboo-breaking and bold sexualities.
Queer-camp celebrates melodrama. It teaches simple social lessons by collapsing cultural morality into trope. But each Jason goes about it differently. Part VIII relies on ugliness — subverting the codes of queer-camp. It’s the violence that maintains the melodrama. Teenagers who have premarital sex/do cocaine/blackmail teachers/enjoy a sauna die horribly.
The darkness overwhelmed me. Camp suddenly felt threatening. Unable to recognize irony, I interpreted the film’s queerness as something needing to be killed. About to become a teenager, I saw the film’s characters — sexual, vivacious, alive — as problematic. In a world of beautiful camp, confronting its darker side, I was afraid. If camp made room for fixtures like Jason, was it (I?) ever safe?
Part VIII introduced me to a darker fantasy of queer-camp — a moral failing instead of a celebration of the undesirable. I bypassed the shirtless, skeleton-fighting nature of one Jason to embrace the oppressive monstrosity of the other. My brain turned the camp into tragedy. I suddenly felt threatened and exposed. Instead of a blueprint for how to live, it entered my young brain as a list of warnings.
Jason “taking” Manhattan is as much a critique of consumerist-80s culture as it is of itself. But…I was a kid. I didn’t get. And I internalized the lesson that camp, however dark or light, needs to be policed: queerness is inevitably needing suppression.
And that’s why I grew to hate the name Jason.
*
Older now — and watching it again for the first time in 30 years — I have to say: viewed through a lens inspired by the badassery of Michelle Yeoh and the overt queerness of Everything, Everywhere All at Once, I actually like Part VIII. The sexuality, clear and critical, celebrates an aesthetic form and genre that would benefit from a more queered sensibility.
Today I celebrate camp in all its splendored forms. Thanks to Pedro Almodóvar and John Waters, I marked a path away from the internalized homophobia Friday’s Jason partly inspired. And, miraculously, I see Part VIII as a masterpiece of dark camp.
One of its central (and surviving) characters says this: “Facing your fears doesn’t always mean you conquer them.” Queering Friday the 13th and celebrating it as camp is a step toward conquering mine.
We need to reassess queer-camp like this. We should ask: which are exemplars and which serve as cautionary tales? What messages help or hinder blueprints as they get drawn?
Though I may never name any of my cats “Jason,” I’d enjoy dressing one up like him. And that, my friends, is progress!
*
P.S. [Re]Making sense of what goes bump in the night is important. Understanding and challenging what we fear can open worlds to us. Though I am a rational adult (sort of…most of the time), I continue to wince at dark corners, cringe at sounds that go chee-chee-chee. But I’m learning to release it at last.
If only I could let my arms dangle over the sides of my bed. But that’s a Gremlins problem. And I’ll have to write another essay at some point to deal with that shit.
