Welcome to "Camp Miasma"
“Dealer’s choice.” In the crates of DVDs and Blu-rays beside my desk, there’s a box set of the first eight Friday the 13th movies, from the original 1980 independent smash hit to the 1989, Vancouver-shot Jason Takes “Manhattan” (or downtown Vancouver’s then-new SkyTrain line). The original film was produced as an immediate response to John Carpenter’s Halloween . It was written in the summer of 1979, shot that September with a budget of $600 000, and released in theatres the following May. It was released in the heyday of the “slasher” as a subgenre, right when Reagan’s America took up arms against the sex and violence found in many Hollywood features, when the R rating was still supreme for mass-market action entertainment. From the time the first sequel came out in 1981, the series was already facing diminishing returns. When Part VIII rolled around in ‘89 (yes, they did eight movies in ten years, only missing ‘83 and ‘87), it only scraped $15 million on a $5 million budget, despi...
