times have changed

Rating: 9/10 (15 October 2000)

Watching this with an audience indicates changes which seem to have occurred since the original debut of this film 27 years ago.
First, and most annoyingly, audiences have no idea how to behave in a theatre (but we won't go on about that here).
Second, Friday the 13th and other films in the intervening years have changed expectations about what a horror film can and should do. Drew Barrymore was not stalked and gruesomely murdered in the first 10 minutes of this film. Instead, the film opens with 10 minutes of an archeological dig in Iraq; the most graphic "horror" element is a strange statue silhouetted against the sunset. The audience made no effort to disguise its boredom with the film by the time this segment completed. Indeed, it is probably an hour into this film before there is any image that could be construed as graphically shocking. As a result of the intervening years of horror film boundary stretching, I have trouble imagining exactly what scenes elicited the vomiting and other extreme reactions the film generated the first time around.
Third, elements of this specific film have become so ingrained in our culture (or, at least in me) that I'm still not sure whether I had ever actually seen the film before. Some scenes and images seemed vary familiar, but other portions were entirely new to me (and I don't mean the scenes that were added for the re-issue).
Oh, and the film itself? Excellent.