Friday the 13th Part III (1982) Gave the Franchise an Iconic Character in Shelly

Folks, it’s a Friday the 13th once again! And because we’re a Friday morning newsletter, you can be sure that I’ll write about this franchise at least once a year until we run out of titles.¹ Or I run out of newsletter.²

I can’t say that Friday the 13th Part III is one of the most successful entries in this chaotic franchise, but I do have a soft spot for it. If you’ve seen all or most of these films, you know that this is where the franchise lore really coalesces into the iconography that everyone recognizes. As Scream reminded us, Jason Voorhees isn’t even the killer in the first film. And though he does return to avenge his mother’s death in Friday the 13th Part 2, he’s not a fully realized villain yet. Jason is pretty good at murdering camp counselors right out of the gate, but he’s still trying things out, hiding his face with a burlap sack and wielding weapons like a claw hammer, a pickaxe, a kitchen knife, and a spear along with his trademark machete.

Friday the 13th Part III is all about Jason coming into his own. But it also gives us Shelly, one of the franchise’s most memorable yet oft discarded characters.³

As slasher heads know, the Friday the 13th franchise sets itself apart from competitors like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween by mostly eschewing character continuity. There’s no Laurie Strode or Nancy Thompson to speak of. The closest thing to a recurring role—aside from Jason himself, of course—is Tommy Jarvis, who doesn’t appear until the fourth film and doesn’t stick around after the sixth film.

That means each installment introduces a fresh batch of young meat puppets for Jason to dispose of in increasingly creative and humorous ways. Most of them are pretty forgettable. Because most of them aren’t Shelly.

Shelly stands out the moment he’s introduced, playing the token “different” character that often appears in 80s and 90s slasher flicks. He’s a little bit overweight. He’s got goofy curly hair. And though there’s no formal reference to his religion or ethnicity, most would agree that he’s presented as Jewish.⁴

But his surface-level traits are merely supporting what truly makes Shelly different: his personality.

You see, Shelly lacks confidence. From the beginning of the film, he lets us know that he feels like an outsider: “They said they were going skinny dipping, and I’m not skinny enough.” Naturally, he makes matters worse for himself, overcompensating for his appearance by constantly pulling pranks on his new friends—mostly the shock value kind where he pretends to murder or be murdered. And he really commits to the bit: As he tells his buddy Andy after pretending to stab him in the back, he’s “not an asshole, [he’s] an actor.”⁵

Of course, Shelly takes things too far, scaring his friends and backpedaling by saying it’s “just a joke,” even though no one else ever laughs. From what I’ve gathered, many Friday the 13th fans feel the same way about Shelly as his peers do, reducing him to nothing more than an annoying gimmick of a character.

I think the opposite is true, actually. Sure, final girl Chris Higgins is given the dominant narrative journey, returning to her old home on Crystal Lake despite some traumatic events that happened to her there. But Shelly is the one that’s really going through it. When he spooks Chris for the third time, she confronts him, leading him to admit that he feels like he has to prank everyone in order to be liked. “I do like you,” she says, “but not when you act like a jerk.” His response is a bit heartbreaking: “Being a jerk is better than being a nothing.”⁶ That’s more pathos than you’ll find in any other character here.

But that scene with Chris by the lake is crucial for another reason. Apparently Jason was taking notes in the shadows as he watched these performances, because Shelly just so happens to be wearing a hockey mask that he found laying around when he scares Chris. And what do you know, a moment later, it’s Jason wearing the hockey mask, as he does for most of the rest of the film. He takes it off at the end for plot reasons, but the iconic mask returns for every installment (and even every poster) after this.

Larry Zerner, the actor who played Shelly, has even become iconic in his own way. Though he gave up acting in 1987, he stuck around Hollywood, pivoting to entertainment law and making a nice career for himself. And as a specialist in copyright law, he’s become a go-to source for comments about the franchise’s ongoing legal battles. He was even a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire!⁷

He may have had to make his millions from an office rather than a movie set. But before Larry hung it up, he gave us one of the most memorable characters of a beloved horror series—and helped steer the franchise in the right direction.

Friday the 13th Part III is now streaming on Paramount+, and it is available to rent elsewhere.

1. Except for Friday the 13th (2009), which was not released on VHS, and also is bad.

2. In case you’re new around here, I wrote about Friday the 13th (1980) a couple years ago, then I skipped ahead to Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan last year.

3. Shelly gets so little respect that the writers didn’t even give him a last name. However, a 1988 novelization named him Shelly Greenblatt, and then the 2017 Friday the 13th video game renamed him as Shelly Finkelstein. Minor reparations, but still welcome.

4. You could argue that adding the “Finkelstein” name years later is a bit of franchise retconning, but it’s easy to assume that this was the intention of the casting directors back in 1981.

5. Paul’s response is a brutal one: “Same thing.”

6. Shouts out to the Gorey Bits YouTube channel for making this supercut of all of Shelly’s best scenes.

7. He was also a contestant on a game show I’ve never heard of called 1 vs. 100. Whatever he did on that show, it won him $250,000. Pretty good!