Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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Appendix 1
Plot Summaries for the Friday the 13 th Films
Friday the 13 th (1980; dir. Cunningham)
Friday the 13 th centres on the sinister events at a summer camp, called Camp
Crystal Lake, in the forest. The story begins on a Friday the 13 th of an unspecified
month in 1950. Two young camp counsellors are interrupted while “making love”
and subsequently killed by an unseen stalker. Thirty years later on a Friday the 13 th
in 1980, camp counsellors just arriving in preparation for the summer events are
killed one at a time, again, by an unseen assailant. The sole survivor, Alice, is
eventually confronted by the killer who introduces herself as Mrs. Voorhees, a
former cook at the camp. Mrs. Voorhees, who initially appears as a comforting
matronly figure, reveals that she killed the two counsellors in 1950 because her son,
Jason, had drowned while they should have been watching him. She has since been
hearing Jason’s voice, which has instructed her to kill all of the counsellors of Camp
Crystal Lake. Alice confronts Mrs. Voorhees and decapitates her. She then gets into
a canoe and pushes out into the lake, then falls asleep. She awakes as the police
arrive, and as she sits up to communicate with them, a deformed boy leaps out of the
lake and pulls her under. Alice comes in the hospital, and in talking with a
policeman asks what happens to the boy, who she refers to as Jason. The policeman
reveals that they saw no sign of the boy, and the film ends with Alice stating, “Then
he’s still out there.”