Hockey mask, crazy killer, and a chainsaw, right?  Not quite, but this is the image I had in my head whenever I thought about the Friday the 13th movies as a kid, an image that really wasn’t all that enticing and one that gave me no desire whatsoever to see the Friday the 13th movies.  Thankfully that image changed in 1998 on Halloween night when I accidentally stumbled upon the ending of Friday the 13th on TNT’s Monster Vision.   Now, for those of you who were fans of Joe Bob Briggs Monster Vision I probably don’t have to set up the scene too much, but given that this was over ten years ago, and that many of the viewers of this webpage are so young that they have  

on the screen (I hadn’t seen him up until this point given my late entry into the movie) and started talking about the next movie he was going to show which was Friday the 13th part 2, which was when I realized I had stumbled upon a Friday the 13th marathon.  Somewhat hooked, I decided to watch this second movie and have to say that I thought it was one of the scariest movies I ever saw.  The fact that it was Halloween night only added to the terror and at one point I actually went upstairs into the kitchen and felt a moment of relief when I looked at the clock and saw that it was actually after midnight and that Halloween was over.  Like I said, I was young and my mind hadn’t been warped yet.  

The following year I once again stumbled upon Friday the 13th, this time closer to the beginning and realized that this one was even scarier than the first, my mind completely forgetting who the killer was until she once again revealed herself at the end.  Having missed the beginning again, however, and wanting to know how everything started, I went to the store the next day and bought the video and sat down to watch it that night.  Halfway through my brother came into the room and caught the scene where the shadow of an ax rises behind one of the girls on the wall, and then he too was hooked.  After that we made a point to go out and buy all the Friday the 13th videos (Jason Goes to Hell being the final video at that time) and spent the entire summer watching them and in later years would actually watch one movie every Friday night once school was out, our minds now having a new reason to hate the later sequels because we always new that once we saw those it meant school would be starting in a few weeks.  

no idea what Monster Vision was (or that there once was a time when great horror movies weren’t being remade on an endless assembly line . . . sorry that is something for another page), I will explain.  Monster Vision was a show on TNT that aired every Saturday night and featured Joe Bob Briggs hosting great horror and monster movies, usually of the low budget variety but others as well.  He did this from a trailer-like set, one which had three or four different areas for him to host the movies from, his location usually changing between the first and second movie.  In the beginning of each movie Joe Bob Briggs would set everything up with his drive in totals which gave a list of all the great death scenes and any other interesting moment from the film.  He would also let viewers know about all the nudity and sex scenes that would be cut from the movie, which I always thought was funny , and then would go on to explain some of the history of the movie (this was all before DVDs started showing this stuff standard, so I thought it was pretty cool).  Anyway, since Halloween was on a Saturday that year Joe Bob Briggs decided to do something special with Monster Vision and hosted a Friday the 13th marathon, one which was showing parts 1 - 6 I believe (I would have to look it up exactly since I only made it through the beginning of the third movie before falling asleep).  Naturally while hosting these movies he started to get stalked by someone and people from the set began to disappear, something which only added to the fear that my uncorrupted unscarred mind was still susceptible to at that point in my life.  

Like I said earlier, I actually joined this marathon toward the end of the first movie after sitting down in front of the basement TV and deciding that I wanted to watch something scary in honor of Halloween, my hopes being that the movie Halloween would be on since I had only seen it once before and remembered that it was pretty frightening.  Halloween wasn’t on, however, but something else was, something that featured a girl and a middle age woman talking inside what looked like a boat (I have no idea why I thought this, but it was actually the inside of the main cabin, the scene being the one where Mrs. Voorhees finally reveals herself to be the killer).  The movie hooked me even though it was near the end, and I watched the chase seen with wide eyes, my mind having no clue what was going on but knowing that this girl (Alice) was in trouble and really, really needed help.  Once the movie was over Joe Bob Briggs