Friday the 13th (1980) Created the Blueprint for Effortless Calendar-Based Marketing

Almost a decade ago, my director friend Benjamin Stark and I made a short religious thriller called Dead Saturday.¹ (You can watch it for free on Ben’s YouTube channel.) It’s only nine minutes long, but we’re proud of it. And we really enjoy bringing it up exactly once a year.

You see, “Dead Saturday” is what the young characters in the film have named the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. In their minds, because there’s a whole day between Jesus’ death and resurrection, their sins don’t count and they can do all the bad things they want.² Which means that the action of the film all takes place on one specific day of the year.

We were simply trying to tell a good story. We didn’t intentionally factor long-term topical relevance into our film’s release strategy.³

But I bet Sean Cunningham did with Friday the 13th.

Given the nature of the film itself—it’s not exactly high-concept stuff, especially since it was essentially conceived as a cash grab in the wake of Halloween—it would be easy to write off the film’s eventual stranglehold on a particular combination of day and date as a happy accident. But if you look at Cunningham’s track record before this film, I think he deserves some credit.

Cunningham wasn’t just some young hotshot looking to capitalize on the dawn of the slasher craze. He’d directed five other films before Friday the 13th, from sexploitation comedies like Case of the Full Moon Murders to family-friendly fare like Manny’s Orphans. But the most significant film on his track record to that point was one that he produced: Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left.

Craven actually sought Cunningham out after the latter’s first film (The Art of Marriage) because he liked it so much. They hit it off, and then Craven became an associate producer—his first film credit of any kind—on Cunningham’s second feature (Together). So Cunningham returned the favor a year later for Craven’s directorial debut.

And wouldn’t you know it, Cunningham’s most lasting contribution to the film was the title.

Okay, so it was actually one of Cunningham’s friends, a “marketing specialist,” who proposed the title for The Last House on the Left, which Craven thought was “terrible” at first. But this same friend went a step further to really amp up the film’s promotional potential. When watching a cut of the film with his wife, he tried to comfort her by saying that it was “only a movie.” Thus the film’s tagline was born: “To avoid fainting, keep repeating ‘It’s only a movie.’”

Cunningham must’ve learned a lesson or two from this friend. He knew that marketing had to be his secret weapon in order for Friday the 13th to rise above the other slashers of its era.

Okay, so it may have taken some time for those lessons to sink in. After all, screenwriter Victor Miller’s original title was “A Long Night at Camp Blood.” Quite bad, if you ask me. But as he was revising the script, Cunningham proposed the film’s eventual title. In fact, he loved the new title so much that he hired a New York agency to mock up a logo and took out an ad in Variety to unveil it—almost a full year before the film arrived, all while Miller was still finishing the screenplay. The ad called Friday the 13th “the most terrifying film ever made,” even though it…hadn’t been made yet.⁴ (Now that’s marketing, folks.)

I can’t blame him, though. Halloween kickstarted a veritable Space Race for the slasher subgenre, so Cunningham was in a rush to trademark the title before anyone else did. And it’s a great title, one that’s rooted in Norse mythology as well as Christian history.⁵ While it surely put pressure on his crew to deliver the final product as soon as possible, it was a smart business decision for Cunningham to go ahead and lock down a memorable, evocative moniker.

Okay, so he actually wasn’t the first one to use the title for a film. I’m not sure we can accuse him of theft, though. There was a film released in 1979 called Friday the 13th: The Orphan, which is more commonly called The Orphan nowadays, though the poster certainly emphasizes the “Friday the 13th” part. But this film was released in November, a full four months after Cunningham’s Variety ad ran on July 4th. Did Cunningham know about this upcoming film? Did the producers of The Orphan see his ad and shift their marketing? Or was it just a total coincidence?

It didn’t really matter, as it turns out. Because Cunningham did what any good producer would do: He made it work. He and his production team negotiated a financial settlement with the owners of The Orphan before Friday the 13th was released. It’s unclear how much they ponied up, but given that they spent just over half a million dollars on Friday the 13th and it made nearly $40 million in the U.S. alone, it seems like a good investment.

Were the reviews glowing? Perhaps not. The very same Variety that premiered the Friday the 13th logo called the film “low-budget in the worst sense” in their official review, adding that “Friday the 13th has nothing to exploit but its title.”⁶

Joke’s on them, though. Sometimes a good title can be a film’s best asset.

Friday the 13th is now streaming on Max and Paramount+, and it is available for rent elsewhere.

1. If you’re new here, Ben and I just premiered a new feature film! It’s called Don’t Die. It hasn’t been widely released yet, but you can follow us on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter and read about how the film Seconds played a critical role in shaping the film’s narrative themes.

2. It’s worth noting, I think, that I’d been sitting on this concept since the early 00s and then Ben and I started working on the script in 2012…about a year before we heard about The Purge. (I still think Jason Blum should’ve called us and let us turn this idea into a Purge prequel.)

3. This feels like a great time to point out that The Third Saturday in October Part V and The Third Saturday in October, both directed by my buddy Jay Burleson, are screening on their titular date next weekend for Hauntsville, Alabama at the Orion Amphitheater in Huntsville! (Jay also wrote about a pair of influences on these two films for this very newsletter last year.)

4. If a director or producer ever did this to me while I was still writing a script, I think I’d lose my mind. Kudos to Miller for delivering the goods under the wire and making good on all that hype.

5. There are also references to Fridays the 13th in a 1834 French play called Les Finesses des Gribouilles and a 1907 American novel called Friday, the Thirteenth. I’m willing to bet Cunningham never read either one, but maybe he had a library card.

6. Speaking of exploiting this film’s title (in a good way): If you live in Birmingham, the Sidewalk Cinema will be showing Friday the 13th twice today in honor of this horror holiday! Catch a 2:30 matinee or stop by tonight at 6:30.