Although the Friday the 13th franchise is taken less seriously by many critics, the classic slasher movies did have a major, formative impact on the smarter meta-slashers of the Scream series. Compared to their slasher franchise competitors, it is fair to argue that the Friday the 13th movies don’t get much respect. While its sequels and remakes are seen as a mixed bag, director John Carpenter’s original Halloween is viewed by critics and viewers alike as an important epoch in cinematic horror history.
Similarly, even the bizarre silliness of Nightmare On Elm Street’s lesser sequels has not stopped the franchise's original creator, Wes Craven, from being accurately eulogized as an auteur. The director’s work on both the original Nightmare On Elm Street and the Scream franchise is broadly considered to be artful, original, and inventive. In contrast, even the original Friday the 13th has been called a shameless Halloween rip-off by its own co-creators and the Friday the 13th franchise at large is generally seen by critics as a tawdry, lowbrow guilty pleasure at best and an embarrassing curio at worst.
However, despite its complicated reputation, the Friday the 13th series has a major unheralded influence on a much more critically acclaimed slasher series. The Scream movies, while indebted to the slasher sub-genre as a whole, owe a surprising amount to Jason Voorhees and Camp Crystal Lake specifically. From Friday the 13th’s funnier, more self-aware sequels to the original Friday the 13th’s Giallo-influenced whodunit plotting, to the franchise helping establish Scream’s infamous horror movie rules, Friday the 13th arguably has more of an influence on Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s slasher series than any other single franchise.
Scream’s Formula Is Borrowed From Friday the 13th
The first movies of both the Scream and Friday the 13th franchises are Giallo-esque whodunits wherein characters are left at a remote location and picked off one by one as the viewer tries to work out the killer's identity via the process of elimination. As traditional mysteries, both movies cheat, since Scream famously has two killers and waits until the end to stick everyone in one location, while Friday the 13th pulls the classic “the killer is someone who has never been shown before” trick. However, the original Scream’s violent mystery setup is nonetheless borrowed from the original Friday the 13th.
Slashers Aren’t Usually Mysteries (But Friday the 13th Was)
Friday the 13th’s creative influence on Scream’s premise becomes more obvious when it is noted that, despite what many genre buffs think, most other classic slasher movies don’t usually keep their killer a mystery until the finale. Most major influential, successful slasher movies (including Halloween, Child’s Play, Candyman, Nightmare On Elm Street, and early proto-slashers such as Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) establish their killers early on and owe nothing to the mystery genre. As such, the Scream franchise’s killer reveals along with their decision not to reveal the killer’s identity until the finale owes more to the original Friday the 13th specifically than the slasher sub-genre as a whole.
Friday the 13th Influenced Scream’s Horror Movie Survival Rules
The Friday the 13th movies not only featured a killer who targets teens for having pre-marital sex and taking drugs, but they are also one of the only horror franchises to justify this recurring trope. As famously noted by Randy during Scream’s climactic party scene, most slasher movie villains killed based on this skewed moral framework. However, Friday the 13th’s Jason was one of the few franchise villains who had an in-universe excuse for this. His death was caused by negligent camp counselors failing to keep an eye on the kids because they were busy canoodling, allowing the Friday the 13th franchise to justify a trope that would soon be set in stone as a formative element of the slasher sub-genre.
Friday the 13th’s Sequels Were Funnier (& More Self-Referential)
Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives was a more meta, playful take on the slasher series which added a faster pace, sillier characters, and a broader sense of humor to proceedings. The Friday the 13th sequel played up its comic elements and offered some winking acknowledgments of the franchise’s silliness. If that sounds familiar, that may be because the Scream movies too much the same approach. While it was generally viewed as the worst Scream movie, Scream 3 was set in Hollywood largely so that the already self-aware series could be even more self-referential and comedic in tone. Similarly, Scream 4, from its opening onwards, dispensed with the franchise’s darkest elements and played up the character comedy with more one-liners, more in-jokes, and more fan-favorite characters surviving the entire movie’s action.
The Slasher Essential Friday the 13th Missed (But Scream Nailed)
While Friday the 13th may have had more of an influence on the Scream series than it gets credit for, there are some parts of Craven’s movies that the earlier slasher franchise could have done with. Most notably, the Friday the 13th franchise has no single memorable Final Girl, something that the Scream series avoided fastidiously with the unforgettable heroine Sidney. Although Scream 2022 made Sidney less central to proceedings, before that late addition, the franchise had entered entirely on her and had been stronger than the Friday the 13th movies as a result. Having one character whose journey viewers cared about appearing in every movie in the series made Scream a rare horror franchise that audiences were able to get emotionally invested in.
In contrast, the Friday the 13th movies made a point of dropping or killing off each movie’s Final Girl before moving on to a new one in the next sequel, meaning each character’s temporary defeat of Jason fell flat. Since there was no doubt that Jason would inevitably be back to kill off more teens in the next franchise outing, the Friday the 13th series was never able to make viewers care about its characters to the extent that Scream viewers became invested in Sidney. This did mean that Friday the 13th could facilitate ever more gory and inventive death sequences as the series progressed, but failing to center characters over pure horror spectacle meant many genre fans preferred the Scream series, despite how heavily it was influenced by the earlier slasher movies.