Original Cult Horror Classic Friday the 13th Hits Movie Theaters (1980)

Prompted by the success of John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic Halloween, director Sean Cunningham put an advertisement in a 1979 edition of Variety to sell a new horror movie titled Friday the 13th. This while screenwriter Victor Miller was still drafting a screenplay for the film. After casting the movie in New York City, shooting took place in Warren County, New Jersey, including Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, an active Boy Scout camp, during the summer of 1979, with a budget of $550,000.

A bidding war ensued over the completed movie, climaxing with Paramount Pictures nabbing domestic distribution and Warner Bros. securing international rights to the film.

Released on May 9, 1980, Friday the 13th was a major box office hit, grossing nearly $60 million worldwide.

Filmmaker Sean Cunningham avoids revealing anything about the psychotic killer in Friday the 13th beyond the fact that they are dressed in men’s work gloves and boots, leaving the audience to assume the murderer is male. As with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho before it, a major reveal occurs during the movie’s climactic scene. In the case of Friday the 13th, the audience learns that the killer is a female – actress Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees.

Contemporary scholars in film criticism have credited Friday the 13th for starting the sub-genre of the “stalker” or slasher film, even though John Carpenter’s Halloween was released in movie theaters 2 years prior.