How does the first weekend in May 1981 already have a Friday the 13th?
It's a jam-packed opening to the month with a pivotal horror sequel
The premise is simple, but the task is not. Every single movie released in the United States during the 1980s, reviewed in chronological order, published month by month.
Buckle up, because this is The Last ‘80s Newsletter You’ll Ever Need…
MAY
Billie Jean King became the first prominent sportsman to come out when she announced her relationship with Marilyn Barnett.
26-year-old Bobby Sands died as a result of his 66-day hunger strike.
SCTV Network 90 debuted on NBC, to the delight of a generation of comedy fans, and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Cats debuted in London, to the delight of a generation of tourists.
By far, though, the most important story of the month was the premiere of The Harlem Globetrotters On Gilligan’s Island, perhaps the finest crossover-between-a-basketball-team-and-a-sitcom movie of all time.
Rolling into May of 1981, I was starting to really cycle up into an insufferable movie nerd.
My parents, god bless them, indulged me as much as they could. I don’t think either one of them knew what they were unleashing when they took me to see movies or when they brought an early VCR into the home, allowing me to start working my way through various rental libraries. This was the year they started relaxing their standards on the R rating in a big way. I’d seen some R-rated films before this, but largely by accident. After April’s back to back of Nighthawks and Excalibur, it felt like something had shifted, and I started pushing much more aggressively for things that interested me.
My parents always seemed to be open to me ingesting art that was above my pay grade as long as I could explain my reactions to them. There were things that made them uncomfortable, but considering they were both raised in fairly conservative Southern families, they were much more lenient than many of my friends’ parents. That created a system where I had to know who was likely to take us to see things and who wasn’t, and which kind of things were most likely with which parents or older brothers.
Friday the 13th was a big deal already by the time the first sequel was released, and we knew months ahead of time that our parents weren’t going to let us go anywhere near the theater. The first film existed for me as photos in Fangoria and a breathless blow-by-blow by my friend’s older brother, and we decided we were getting into the second film no matter what. I think the reason I have so much fondness for the franchise is because my first experience with it was this one, seen as part of an excursion with a whole group of guys from my scout troop. Some people were able to buy tickets. Other people were admitted through a side door. We went on the first weekend, on a Saturday evening, and it was a galvanizing experience for a young film fan. The audience was vocally involved in everything about the movie, and Jason was a terrifying presence that had everyone screaming and jumping, popcorn in the air repeatedly. I loved it, and I was absolutely terrified by it. Trying to play it off around my parents was tough because I was so affected by the movie and by the entire experience, and they were so irritated by the entire idea of the Friday the 13th movies and contemporary hyper-violent horror.
The thing is, everything in our pop culture was rougher in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Maybe it was because of the hangover from Vietnam. Maybe it was the entire turbulent era that America had survived that left these scars that made even family entertainment feel much rougher. I know that going into this summer, I was out of my mind. There was a new James Bond film coming. There was a new movie from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. There was a new Superman movie. And there were so many other things that looked fascinating. I had a notebook I kept with my list of things I wanted to see and things I’d seen, and I made notes on movies I saw on TV or in the theater or, increasingly, on video. This was also the beginning of the era when May was the official start of the movie summer. The year before, we got a totally stacked line-up in May, building up to my birthday weekend at the end of the month, and that was a trend that only became more pronounced as the decade wore on.
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