45 Years Later: How I Came to Appreciate Friday the 13th & Mama Voorhees

She was an old friend of the Christys.

As someone who grew up a horror geek in the 1980s, I will admit that I spent a lot of my time focused on the genre icons of those days: Freddy Krueger, Chucky, Michael Myers, Leatherface, and, of course, Jason Voorhees. And because I grew up so fascinated by the icons of horror, it meant that sometimes I made dumb decisions, like pretty much overlooking the original Friday the 13th for decades simply due to its lack of Jason.

Thankfully, with age comes wisdom, and you learn how to expand your viewpoints as you learn more, and this has happened with me a lot of over the years, especially with slasher movies.

This week, the original Friday the 13th celebrated its 45th anniversary and with Mother's Day this weekend as well, this felt like the perfect opportunity to give Mama Voorhees her due and celebrate her dedication to making things right for little Jason in this film that forever changed the landscape of modern horror.

When it comes to the elements slasher formula, Friday the 13th helped establish the patterns of other films of that era: get a group of kids isolated somewhere, preferrably the woods, and unleash an unknown assailant on them who dispatches of their victims through a series of memorable kills, eventually revealing a major truth about their motivations that seemingly changes everything we thought we knew about the story.

At the time that Friday the 13th was coming together, most cinematic killers at that point were male characters. And sure, a few antagonists' dastardly deeds in the horror were inspired by their mothers (hello, Norman!), but a maternal killer just wasn't something you'd be expecting when you watched a low-budget slasher movie in the spring of 1980.

That's one of the biggest reasons why Friday the 13th stand out beyond its clever title, memorable cast of characters and a bevy of audacious kills concocted by one of the greatest special effects artists of their — or any — time. When it came to cinematic killers at this point in the genre’s history, seeing a Mom out there seeking vengeance through her blood-soaked rage was kind of a “Holy Shit” moment when you think about it. And that’s a big reason why the character of Pamela Voorhees, perfectly portrayed by Betsy Palmer, should be considered more than just a footnote in the annals of slasher movies.

Admittedly, my biggest problem with making Mrs. Voorhees the killer in Friday the 13th is the fact that it always felt like the biggest “non-reveal” ever because, at that point, who else WOULD it be? Nearly every single other cast member is either confirmed to be dead or we have seen them "confronted" by the killer at this point, and it just didn't seem like Crazy Ralph would be the killer either because he was a loon, but he wasn’t a murderer.

So when Pamela rolls up to Camp Crystal Lake in her Jeep during act three, it always felt like a, “Well, of course it has to be her” moment because the only other person left is poor, traumatized Alice (Adrienne King) who just keeps repeating, “They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

And as the ladies spend more time together, Mrs. Voorhees eventually reveals just why she’s been killing everyone that Friday the 13th — it’s her son Jason’s birthday and he died in a drowning accident back in 1957, and there’s just no way she could let the camp open up again after the loss of her son. Palmer’s monologue in Friday the 13th is absolutely iconic (“He wasn’t a very good swimmer!”) and from there a battle for the ages emerges between the aspiring camp counselor and the aggrieved mom.

But even though the “surprise” of the killer being Pamela Voorhees isn’t necessarily all that big of a surprise, what’s great about her being the killer in Friday the 13th is that she’s a woman of a certain age just toying with these counselors, eliminating them in gruesome fashion and even going so far as playing games, like leaving a bloody axe in the bed to be discovered, messing with the cars so they won’t start, cutting phone lines and even taking out the generator. Hell, she even keeps driving around with Annie’s corpse in her Jeep because no one likes a litter bug!

Like, everything that Pamela does in Friday the 13th takes A LOT of work to not only plan but to actually facilitate, and as someone who is younger than the character of Mrs. Voorhees is in this film, I’m just exhausted thinking about everything Mama Voorhees achieves during her exploits here.

Something else that is really cool about Mrs. Voorhees is that Betsy Palmer really makes the most of her limited screen time in Friday the 13th. We don't actually see her character until the 1:15:09 mark, and there is only about 20 minutes of the movie left at this point. Before she's killed by Alice, Pamela only spends about 14 minutes total on screen in Friday the 13th. That’s pretty amazing when you really think about it because Palmer’s performance ends up being so freaking iconic and she’s only involved with something like 15-16 percent of the entire film.

Also, Mama Voorhees’ sweater game was so legit that Rick in Friday 3 even borrowed her look.

But there are so many great touches that Palmer adds to her performance that makes her such a formidable onscreen presence in Friday the 13th, too — the way she no-sells Alice’s attempts at fighting back and how she keeps this intense scowl on her face the entire time she persistently chases down King’s character? Yeah, Mrs. Voorhees is scary as all hell. There’s also when she talks to herself as Jason in the film too — utterly chilling stuff from Palmer who may not have been exactly thrilled about being in a horror movie at the time, but she truly owns every single scene she’s in here.

And that’s the thing — as a kid, I was dumb enough to be disinterested in this franchise installment due to the fact that Friday the 13th didn’t feature an iconic killer, not realizing at the time that Mrs. Voorhees was absolutely iconic in her own right and she very much set the stage for the rest of the slasher movies that came out throughout the rest of the 1980s and beyond.

So, thanks for being such a devoted mom, Pamela, and thank you Betsy Palmer for giving us horror fans so much to enjoy for these 45 years. Sorry I was such a stupid kid and didn’t realize just how iconic you truly are and were.