Friday the 13th Part II. 1981. USA. Directed by Steve Miner. Screenplay by Ron Kurz, based on characters by Victor Miller. With Adrienne King, Amy Steel and John Furey. 35mm. 87 min.
Released almost exactly one year after Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th, Steve Miner’s sequel is the first film in the series to foreground Jason Voorhees as the terrorizer of Crystal Lake (and the last film without his now iconic hockey mask). Many of the hallmarks of the slasher genre are present here: nubile teenagers in grave danger, unheeded warnings from creepy locals, and deaths by a remarkable number of sharp implements. Paramount initially wanted to shift the story’s focus away from Jason, but Miner wisely fought to keep him in the film, setting the stage for his evolution into a horror icon.
Alice. 2012. Great Britain. Directed by Ben Rivers. With Adrienne King. 8 min.
In Alice, filmmaker Ben Rivers reconstructs Friday the 13th to exclusively feature the film's main character and final girl, Alice Hardy. The original film’s violence and danger are absent, but palpable.