Friday the Thirteenth
Is Friday the thirteenth a tradition, or a superstition? It's mostly a superstition, I'd say. But surely a superstition is, to some extent, a tradition in itself.
Friday the thirteenth is interesting because it's somewhat below the radar of popular consciousness. It's not a holiday, it's not a memorial, it's not an occasion in any meaningful sense. Mostly it creeps up on us without us noticing (rather appropriately) and exists in a kind of netherworld (also appropriately). If it's remarked upon at all, it's usually jokingly.
Interestingly, the idea that Friday is unlucky is much older than the idea that the number thirteen is unlucky.
Snopes.com says of the Friday superstition: "The reasons why Friday came to be regarded as a day of bad luck have been obscured by the mists of time — some of the more common theories link it to a significant event in Christian tradition said to have taken place on Friday, such as the Crucifixion, Eve's offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden, the beginning of the Great Flood, or the confusion at the Tower of Babel."
Surely the Crucifixion is the stand-out there, and all the more because it definitely happened on a Friday.
Similarly (as most people know) the most common explanation of the superstition regarding thirteen is that Christ and his disciples numbered thirteen at the Last Supper. It's the most satisfying explanation, too, especially since it links both elements of the Friday the thirteenth superstition.
Not long ago there was a specific superstition against thirteen people sitting down together, and especially against being the first person to get up from such a gathering (presumably because Judas was the first person to rise at the Last Supper). This is alluded to in one of my favourite novels, Diary of a Nobody by George and Weldon Grossmith (1892): “I hate a family gathering at Christmas. What does it mean? Why someone says: ‘Ah! we miss poor Uncle James, who was here last year,’ and we all begin to snivel. Someone else says: ‘It’s two years since poor Aunt Liz used to sit in that corner.’ Then we all begin to snivel again. Then another gloomy relation says ‘Ah! I wonder whose turn it will be next?’ Then we all snivel again, and proceed to eat and drink too much; and they don’t discover until I get up that we have been seated thirteen at dinner.”
(Perhaps this superstition has become more obscure today because, given social atomization, it's uncommon to have thirteen people sitting together at a table.)
On the specific superstition of Friday the thirteenth, The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland has this to say: "The belief that Friday 13th is an especially unlucky day is one of the widest known superstitions in Britain today, and is erroneously assumed to be of great antiquity. The only one of the superstitions regarding the number thirteen which can be traced back further than Victorian times is that it is very unlikely to have thirteen at table, which first appears in the 1690s. The notion that thirteen is a generally unlucky number has not been found earlier than 1852. Fridays, however, have been regarded as unlucky since medieval times."
Acorrding to this NPR article (and other sources), the first printed mention of Friday the thirteenth comes from a French play in 1834, when a character says: "I was born on a Friday, December 13th, 1813 from which come all of my misfortunes."
Returning to the Penguin Guide, the article continues: "The idea that Friday 13th is an ancient superstition is so engrained that the assertion that it is no older than Victorian times is frequently met with disbelief, even anger, but the evidence is overwhelming." I found myself wondering if the writer is appealing to personal experience here. Did he enrage somebody by mentioning the recent origins of Friday the thirteenth?
There are plenty of articles online about real-life tragedies and disasters that occurred on Friday the thirteenth. None of these are terrible interesting (in my opinion); you could surely find as many horror stories for any date of the year. The only one that intrigued me is the 1972 plane crash in the Andes which formed the basis of the movie Alive. Not only did this occur on Friday the thirteenth, but the deadliest civil aviation crash up to that time occurred on the same day in Russia, killing all 164 passengers. That's a bit freaky.
(We were shown Alive in religion class in school. This puzzled me at the time and has puzzled me ever since. What life lesson was it supposed to be teaching us? That it's OK to eat your dead fellow passengers if you get captured in the Andes after a plane crash?)
Interestingly, Samuel Beckett, that most pessimistic of authors, was born on Friday the thirteenth in 1906. In some biographies, doubt is cast on this fact, because his birth certificate has it as May the thirteenth. Some writers even assumed Beckett was engaging in some creative misremembering. But his biographer James Knowlson says: "The truth is less dramatic. A mistake was clearly made. Everyone who knew Beckett as a child thought of his birthday as being on 13 April. This never changed. But fortunately, and surely conclusively, even for those who believe in Beckett's propensity for myth-making, the birth was announced in the Births and Deaths column of the Irish Times of 16 April 1906, that is, a month before he was oficially recorded as having been born."
Is this truth less dramatic, or more dramatic? The fact that this darkest of playwrights was born on the most ill-omened of days seems too good to be true, but it is.
The year after Beckett was born, a novel titled Friday the Thirteenth was published by an American financial speculator called Thomas Lawson. It centres on a stock market panic that occurs on the titular date. (Interestingly, a stock market crash did occur on the infamous date in 1989.)
Of course, the most famous work of fiction with the title Friday the Thirteenth is the slasher film that came out in 1980, and that spawned eleven sequels (so far). The original movie features a group of young employees of a summer camp in New Jersey, who are bumped off one by one by a mystery killer. Although I'm a huge fan of the horror genre, I've never actually seen Friday the Thirteenth, though I've seen one of its sequels: Freddy vs. Jason (2003), a cross-over with the Nightmare on Elm Series franchise. (It was dreadful.)
The central villain of the franchise is Jason Vorhees, he of the iconic hockey mask (though apparently this is first donned in the third film).
But to return to the first instalment...
The title Friday the Thirteenth was considered so important by its writer/producer Sean Cunningham that he published an advertisement in Variety magazine before the script was even finished-- partly to make sure nobody else had used it. The ad was simply the title behind smashed glass and the slogan: "The most terrifying film ever made." It created enormous industry anticipation.
What's really interesting is that Friday the Thirteenth was a cash-in on another hugely successfull slasher film, Halloween, which was released in 1978. The producer of that movie, Irvin Yablanz, was astonished that nobody had used the word Halloween in a title before. And it is quite astonishing.
How much did the titles contribute to the success of these films? In the book Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle (2011), the sales manager of New World Pictures is quoted as saying: "Sixty to seventy per cent of an exploiter's initial [ticket sales] lies in the promotion and the title."
Bizzarely, another horror film had used the title the very previous year: The Orphan, otherwise known as Friday 13th: The Orphan. But this is completely forgotten today, proving that a killer title isn't everything.
Setting a horror story on an ominous date seems to give it a definite edge. The addictive website TV Tropes has a list of these (with the amusing title "Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesdays"), although funnily enough Friday the thirteenth isn't one of them.
As for traditions, Friday the thirteenth doesn't seem to have gathered any well-known traditions (so far), although it has given rise to some lesser-known ones, as we'll see.
I found the following delightful story on the Facebook page of the Lawrence History Center (from the city of Lawrence in Massachussets), posted by a Deborah D'Elia Beaudoin: "I thought you might be interested in a social club that was founded in 1935 by Stanley Mazzota. A group of high school friends who didn’t want to lose touch after graduation decided to form a club that flaunted superstition and walked under ladders, spilt salt, and broke mirrors. Of course they celebrated every Friday the Thirteenth in style! They also belonged to a bowling league and raised money for charity.
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"My dad, Joseph D’Elia, was one of the original members and served as treasurer and later as president. The club disbanded when the members began enlisting to serve in World War 2." (Presumably this was in Laurence, Massachusetts.)
Jumping back into the present, New York City (where else?) has a sort of informal Friday the Thirteenth Tattoo Festival; "An all-day marathon of affordable work for anyone with a few extra dollars, time to wait in line, and the boldness to permanently memorialise our unluckiest date", according to this recent article. The tradition began in 1995. On Friday the thirteenth, participating tattoo parlours don't do appointments (only walk-ins), they stay open late, and they offer bargain tattoos...but you have to choose from a menu of designs, rather than a custom tattoo. (I've never understood why anybody would want a tattoo. But aside from that, I'm greatly tickled by this story.)
Last Friday the thirteenth (which was this June), the Frida cinema in Santa Ana, California, played ten Friday the Thirteenth films over two nights. There were fifteen minutes between showings and a total running time of 540 minutes. Sounds fun. (I've never been to a cinema movie marathon. I'd love to go to one.)
In the "unincorporated community" of Port Dover in Norfolk county, Ontario, Canada, there is a motorcycle rally every Friday the thirteenth. The tradition began with twenty-five friends in 1981 and has now become a candidate for the biggest motorcycle rally in the world, attracting about a hundred thousand bikers when Friday the thirteenth falls in the summer.
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The last thing I'll mention is a television drama where the motif of Friday the thirteenth is a recurring one. It's "Rude Awakening", the third episode of Hammer House of Horror, which originally aired in 1980 (on September 27th!). This is my all-time favourite made-for-TV horror production, featuring Denholm Elliott (the butler in Trading Places) as a somewhat sleazy estate agent who finds himself trapped in a series of nightmares, each one giving way to the next. (I love anything about dreams within dreams, nested realities, and so on.) It's available to watch on YouTube at the time of writing, and has been for several years now. Check it out.
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