don't go to Crystal Lake

I've been working for the past week straight in a room in the house that has been affectionately dubbed "the old man cave." Replete with maroon and gold upholstered sofas and armchairs, it also happens to be the one room in the house that contains a TV. Thus: old man cave (a brilliant University of Mississippi MFA student came up with that phrase: I take no credit). Because HBO has decided to play Boardwalk Empire for at least ten hours of every day, I've been relegated to channel surfing while I work. And since the last couple of days of television programming have been a wasteland, I've spent the last 48 hours intermittently watching Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th II, III, and tonight, IV, on AMC.

That's a whole lot of stupid. In the first film, before the first hapless victim of Voorhees justice arrives at the renovated camp, she's told by the local townspeople that people died at the lake years ago, yet she still continues her journey to the camp. She trots her shiny-haired, grinning self out to the road, hitch-hikes with a woman who we later learn is Jason's mother, and well, dies. Surely the townspeople told the other kids that people had died at the camp, but since we don't see it on film and it's not canon, I'll give them their mistakes. They were victims. They died awful deaths. But why in the hell did the next camp directors and counselors show up at Crystal Lake just five years later? Let me get this straight: someone died at the camp many years ago, and then five years ago, when a group of folks came out to the camp to open it again, more people died, lots of people, and the killer was never caught.

There are nine Friday the 13th movies. Nine. How many unsolved murders on one lake have to occur before potential camp directors, counselors, and vacationers realize it's not the place to spend their summers? I ask myself this and then the corners of the old man cave start creaking, and there are noises in the kitchen, and I am freaked the hell out. I'm probably talking shit about the Friday the 13th movies because I saw the first when I was young enough to be snuck into a drive-in theater by rolling myself into a ball between my mother's shins and having the carpet rug thrown over me as I crouched beneath the dashboard. Don't move, my parents said. Be quiet. After we parked, I perched on the armrest between my parents and watched the campers die. Later, after the movie, I had nightmares about the girl Jason murdered in the bathroom.

I should watch something else, shouldn't I?