Is The Burning better than Friday the 13th?

With The Burning recently added to Shudder (in the US at least) and many discovering the movie for the first time, is it time to re-evaluate the film as one of the greatest ever slasher flicks? Is there even an argument to say it’s better than the much more ubiquitous Friday the 13^th?

On its release in 1981, The Burning was buried in a slew of similarly plotted slasher flicks – with many complaining it was derivative of Friday the 13^th, released the previous year. It also suffered extensive cuts to its gore effects, and was only officially available uncut in 2003 in the UK and 2007 in the US.

On the surface The Burning has much to recommend it. Special effects come courtesy of Tom Savini, who turned down Friday the 13^th Part 2 to work on it. The budget of $1.5 million is also almost three times that of Friday the 13^th. This shows by having the action take place in a fully operational summer camp, rather than just having a handful of camp counsellors turn up early and meet their doom.

The campers wave goodbye to the teens on the raft... for the last time

So how do the two films compare? The Burning has a vastly more compelling opening scene. Instead of Friday the 13^th’s superfluous ’21 years earlier’ flashback, we have a vivid depiction of how caretaker Cropsy was badly burned in a prank gone wrong and set out for revenge. Early signs look positive.

The first present day kill in Friday the 13^th comes 22 minutes in – a nicely orchestrated throat slit for poor Annie (Robbi Morgan) who doesn’t even make it to camp. The Burning viewers need to be a whole lot more patient. Aside from the unnecessary murder of a prostitute early on, our first unhappy camper meets her end 49 minutes in, more than halfway through the film’s runtime. We all know murder is kind of the point of slashers, so what on earth has The Burning been up to until this point?

While it’s great one of the OG slasher films is being rediscovered, there’s a reason no one's clamouring for The Burning: Cropsy Lives.

Well, we get a fair few teasing fake outs, where it looks like a camper is going to meet their end only for it to turn out not to be Cropsy or for them to escape without even knowing they were in peril.  There’s a lot of nostalgia for modern viewers, and some OK performances from the film’s young cast. Then there are some 80s sexual politics.

The Burning was one of the first films that Harvey Weinstein worked on and he helped craft the original story, which casts the multiple scenes of teenage girls being pressured into having sex in an uncomfortable light. Final boy Alfred (Brian Backer) is caught lurking near the girls' showers. Eddy (Ned Eisenberg) struggles to take no for an answer when Karen (Carolyn Houlihan) doesn’t want to have sex with him.

Pervy Alfred (Brian Backer)

Sex throughout the Friday the 13^th franchise generally follows the lines of both girls and boys opting to hook up with equal enthusiasm. The issues of consent in The Burning aren’t handled all that sensitively, and make what should be a cheesy murder-fest pretty difficult viewing at times.

While Mrs Voorhees likes to mix it up with her murder weapons (arrows, axes, machetes), Cropsy is pretty wedded to his garden shears and the kills are not as inventive – despite the iconic raft scene, of course, which dispatches five campers in less than a minute. The more sadistic among us (that includes me) will be disappointed by the number of teens that make it out of The Burning alive.

Then there’s the film's climax – where handsome camp supervisor Todd (Brian Matthews) has to rescue pervy Alfred from Cropsy’s clutches. It’s revealed that Todd was part of the group of boys that burned Cropsy and started this whole damn murder spree – but he doesn’t appear to feel all that bad about it, and ends up putting an end to Cropsy’s reign of terror.

Heeerrreeee's Cropsy!

While the puritanical morality of Friday the 13^th is kind of questionable – Alice (Adrienne King) being the only survivor because she wasn’t in the mood for the beast with two backs – The Burning’s ethics, if it has any, are bizarrely upside down. We’re meant to feel sympathy for Alfred, who is not shown to have any redeeming features. When Eddy comes within a hair’s breadth of raping Karen, it’s Karen who ends up butchered (Eddy dies shortly afterwards thankfully). Todd, who helped get us into this mess in the first place, is the film’s all-American hero.

So while Savini’s effects are on-point and there is some attempt to elevate the characters beyond your typical machete-fodder, as The Burning’s credits roll you’re like to feel either meh or slightly icky. While it’s great one of the OG slasher films is being rediscovered, there’s a reason we’ve had ten Friday the 13^th sequels and a reboot while no one seems to be clamouring for The Burning: Cropsy Lives.

Ironically, the missteps of this movie – the delayed gratification of postponing the killing, the unsympathetic final boy, the non-consensual advances – seemed to end up solidifying the now instantly recognisable slasher formula to avoid these mistakes in future films.

Looking for more slasher goodness? Here's the Gore Connoisseur's top ten slasher kills.

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