The Friday The 13th Films: Imagery And Our Memories

Not necessarily a news item for this story as more of a reflection on what The Friday the 13th film franchise means to the fans in terms of images we keep stored in our minds. In all films we adore, specific scenes or imagery define that movie for the individual and make it a personal experience. Last year a special project concluded that includes this mode of thinking

At the end of 2010, David Ferrando Giraut completed an endeavor to showcase how love and death coincide and what feelings come from that symbiotic relationship. In venturing to show the correlation between the two subjects, David used the Friday the 13th films to lend imagery to those who fall in love and their inevitable deaths.

This is indeed a very large part of the Friday the 13th films as many people say that part of the formula is sex equals death. Perhaps this was not the original intention of what the films were meant to convey, but it has over time been a staple of the franchise. To show his message in pictures, David created Polaroid images from screen captures which were specific to certain scenes in the Friday the 13th films. These scenes showed intimate moments of partners that would eventually die at the hands of Jason Voorhees. These Polaroids were then framed and displayed as a visual reference to give a snapshot of lovers that once lived, but are now dead.

Below is what David had to say about the Polaroid 600 portion of his work.

Untitled (Polaroid series)

2009-2010

Polaroid 600 photographs The Polaroid 600 film, usually related with domestic photography, is here used as the carrier of photographed movie stills, which could be taken as someone’s personal memories; as an undead who emerges from a past time, familiar and alien at the same time. The Polaroid 600 film itself, which stopped being produced last year, holds this same character.

This familiar appearance –most of them are images with which we can relate easily, provoke questions as to what extent they are a part of our individual memory, which role they play in our comprehension of reality, and how should we feel about this fact. If family photographs act as an index of the moment when we or our relatives were portrayed, these take us to the moment in which, as spectators, we witnessed the apparition of an image which, having become a part of our memories, do not essentially belong to us.

It has always been interesting to explore the affect of the Friday the 13th films on a deeper level than just Jason killing teenagers. The franchise is historical in the motion picture industry for how it helped change the landscape of horror film releases in the 1980's as well as the box office grosses that has been accumulated over the years. However, the most interesting subject to explore is the affect this franchise has placed on the psyche of the fans and how they perceive love and death.