Jason’s mask in Friday the 13th, Leatherface’s name in Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Freddy’s Nightmare on Elm Street quips all came late in famous horror franchises — here’s why.
There are few traditions as hallowed in cinema as the horror movie sequel. The first film is haunting, refreshing, and groundbreaking, and now that it’s made a ton of money, it’s time to try and repeat its success until the wheels fall off. In particularly long series, some of the elements that made them famous tend to run together a bit. Have they been pre-installed since the beginning, or did they show up somewhere along the way and audiences just accepted them as gospel?
What aspects are in the original recipe, and which came in later to spice things up? It’s time to dive into that question regarding iconic bits of six lengthy horror series — bits that might seem to have been foundational text but actually didn’t get inserted until a little later.
The Frankenstein films were the bread and butter of the golden age of Universal horror, with two fantastic films by James Whale (Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein,) an extremely solid turn starring Basil Rathbone (Son of Frankenstein) and then a quick descent into cheaper, clunkier efforts. Boris Karloff, who played the titular monster in the first three films, delivers a thoughtful, tragic performance, so it’s a little weird that the iconography that’s remained is that of a man with his arms raised, clumsily shuffling through castle sets.
This character-defining image wasn’t actually set until the final moments of the fourth film, The Ghost of Frankenstein. (Quick synopsis: The monster, played here by Lon Chaney Jr., has his brain replaced with his conniving sidekick Ygor’s, played with raucous malice by Bela Lugosi. This allows him to speak and plot, but thanks to a medical mishap, he’s pretty immediately rendered blind.) The monster spends the last few minutes of the flick groping around and then, in the sequel, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, he shows up with arms outstretched.
In the subsequent movies, no one ever mentions he’s now blind, whether it’s in his Wolf Man battle or House of Frankenstein or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. So the Frankenstein walk that would come to define the time period not only didn’t occur until the end of the fourth movie, but is part of a plot point that no subsequent movie could be bothered to remember.
If there’s any item on this list that has gone down in the annals of horror trivia, it’s this one. In the first Friday the 13th, it’s Jason’s sweater-wearing mother Pamela doing the killing. In the second film, Jason finally shows up, but he’s donning overalls and a burlap sack over his head. It’s only in the third movie that he robs a comic-relief character of his hockey mask and decides that’s the look to keep. Since then, Jason has been irreversibly tied to that particular mask, one that has come to represent the slasher genre as a whole.
