Wax - Curious goods: behind the scenes of Friday the 13th: the series

I first saw Friday the 13th: The Series when I was about nine years old. It was Saturday morning, the eleven oclock hour the awkward television time when morning cartoons were over but old sitcoms like The Munsters and I Love Lucy were still a couple hours away. I was flipping channels, and landed on KCOP 13, a local Los Angeles station. There was something incredibly gory on the TV, a man with throbbing, oozing pustules all over his head. I was fascinated. Entranced.

That show was Friday the 13th: The Series. The episode? Stick It in Your Ear, with the cursed hearing aid. The obsession had begun.

Around that same time, I was just getting into horror movies. My first one was Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child, shown to me by a school friend, who promised it wasnt actually scary. After watching that movie, I realized I was scared of the idea of horror movies; the movies themselves were not scary. In fact, I found a lot of humor in it. It was a few more years before my parents gave in to my horror obsession by renting me videos and getting me a subscription to Fangoria, but somehow, if it was on television Saturday mornings, no less it was safe to watch.

I recorded each episode on VHS, then would watch them after school, when I was done with my homework. This was 1989. The Internet was scarcely more advanced than CompuServe and BBS. I knew nothing about this wonderful mystery show; I just enjoyed it.

My obsession was deeply rooted in two aspects of the show: the gore and the lead. Micki Foster. Micki was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen (still is) and as a ginger kid, she was my first exposure to a beautiful redhead on television. I dont remember ever being teased for having red hair, but it was somehow validating to see a redhead on TV.

Micki was my idol. She was smart, she was capable, and she always took care of herself. More often than not, she got herself out of dangerous situations (And Now the News and Bedazzled come to mind immediately) without needing to be rescued by the boys. The final girls of horror movies of that era were generally all either bubble-headed idiots or fleshpots there to add a little T&A before getting ripped to shreds. Micki was neither of those things. I loved that she wasnt afraid to use her sexuality, but there was always intention behind it. Plus she had a fantastic wardrobe.

It was frustrating, because all I ever wanted to talk about was F13, but I couldnt find anyone who had seen an episode. For a while, I started to wonder if I had made up the show all together. One morning, I woke up fifteen minutes into the episode; from that day on, I set my alarm to make sure that never happened again. Sometimes I would wake up 3:33 a.m. and I would lie still, waiting to see if anything weird happened (nothing ever did). I can trace my intense phobia of snakes back to And Now the News.

The local station took F13 off the air at some point. I dont remember how long it was before it disappeared, but I was devastated. Another show, She-Wolf of London, appeared in the same time slot, and that held me over for a few months, but with a mere twenty episodes, it didnt last long.

I remember going to Florida with my mom in 1992, a short trip to see an old friend of hers. There wasnt a lot to do, so I studied the TV Guide and found an episode of F13 playing at 1:00 a.m. The Butcher, I believe. I was ecstatic; it was the highlight of the trip for me. I remember sneaking out to the living room late at night, waiting for the show to come onand I couldnt quite make it. I fell asleep about a half-hour before it aired and didnt realize until my mom found me passed out on the couch in the morning. I was heartbroken.

Friday the 13th: The Series returned to television when I was thirteen. Flipping channels on a Saturday evening, I passed something with Chris Wiggins in it. Doubling back, I discovered my beloved series was back! The newly launched Sci-Fi channel (before it became Syfy) was running the series, allowing me to record the remaining episodes I didnt already have on VHS. Sci-Fi Channel ran the series regularly for a number of years. Every Friday the thirteenth, they would run a marathon of the series, hosted by Ron Perlman, which even included a few exclusive interview clips with Louise Robey.

Sometime around 1994, the Internet was really becoming consumer-friendly, thanks to America Online and blazing fast 14.4k modems. I soon discovered that, on the Internet, you could always find someone who was into the same weird stuff as you. I quickly found other fans and started what was the first Friday the 13th: The Series Internet fan club. I wrote my first-ever episode guide, an embarrassingly bad piece of fan fiction. I had over a hundred people with which to discuss my favorite topic (a few of which even thought I was Micki I didnt dissuade them). I even had a terrible, bare-bones web page devoted to the show. To this day, my techy husband is still a little bitter that, even though he built his first computer at age eight, I had a website long before he did.

In 1996, my obsession showed no signs of abating, and I devoted months to creating my first (and only) Friday the 13th: The Series fanzine. Filled with my afore-mentioned atrocious episode guide and worse fan fiction, some short stories and poems from other fans, generic clip art, and some pretty good original drawings, I sold over sixty copies and didnt make a penny profit. (I sold them at cost, which was still nearly $20.)