The Only Thing to Fear Today is No Movie Marathon

Today is Friday the 13th and an unlucky and dreaded day for friggatriskaidekaphobics and paraskevidekatriaphobics. Those are the scientific terms for people who fear Friday the 13th.

I do find myself to be superstitious —I often knock on wood thrice to prevent a jinx, I get a little weird around black cats, and I don’t walk under ladders. I think I do the last one mainly because it’s a lot safer!

I’ve never really been superstitious about Friday the 13th. If anything, I just know it is considered a jinx day. In the past, I have scoured calendars to see how many Friday the 13ths we get every year. This year, today is the only one. (But there are three next year!)

I don’t know why I don’t freak out on a day like today. There’s been no wood knocking around my apartment.

If I wanted to, I could probably celebrate the day by smashing mirrors, hanging out with black cats and walking under ladders. If you’re interested, .

I think that perhaps my leisure with Friday the 13th doesn’t come from a subconscious ease, but from an enjoyment I had in my childhood.

You see, there was something that happened then that doesn’t happen now. And I don’t know why.

Here it is: Where the hell are the Friday the 13th movie marathons?

I’ve never considered myself a horror fan—or a fan of Jason Voorhees—but I would dedicate myself to watching these campy, sometimes awful, sequels every Friday the 13th growing up.

I remember being about 14 or 15 and looking over the TV listings one Friday the 13th, and coming across a marathon of the schlock horror films.

Maybe it was my appreciation for the horror subculture, or maybe it was an inner sense of sitting down and understanding these films. All I know is at 1 a.m. on a Friday, I was planted on the family couch watching the marathon of these movies.

I don’t remember all the plots—I know in the first one, the killer wasn’t Jason, but his mother!—but I remember some cheesy parts and actors.

There was the one where Kevin Bacon got killed with an arrow and the one where Corey Feldmen resurrected Jason from the dead.

I think there was one with a black kid who was obsessed with Michael Jackson, and one where three dudes got killed in the woods in broad daylight after Jason jumped down from a tree.

And let’s not forget to mention the bad 3-D one, where knives and yo-yos were supposed to come out at you from the screen. It wasn’t the same on a standard definition TV.

The marathon was always something I looked forward to as a youth. Sometimes Rhonda Shear or Joe Bob Briggs would host them, and I think they usually aired on late-night USA Network. Other times, they would be on some premium channel.

The point is there was always a marathon on Friday the 13th. It played on the superstition. It was a perfect time to play these movies.

To this day, whenever I see a big lake in the middle of the woods or at some resort, I think about the legacy of Jason Voorhees.

Camping in unknown woods? Better not have sex!

And whenever I do laundry downstairs late at night, where the dimly-lit storage room is as well, I wait for an axe to the chest as I come around the doorway.

The legacy of Friday the 13th can be attributed to Victor Miller, the writer of the first film in 1980. Weird enough, Miller went on to write for soap operas, like Another World and All My Children.

Apparently, Jason was supposed to never come back after the first film, but producers and horror maven Tom Savini thought otherwise.

If not for them, Friday the 13th may have had a phobic effect on me.

On Thursday, I scoured IMDB and TVGuide.com in hopes that a marathon would play this year.

No such luck. What a bummer. The only thing I found was the terrible Friday the 13th remake. On OutMax Channel 330. At 10:45 p.m.

I tell you, it can make a man go crazy.

If you want some Friday the 13th facts and trivia, check this website out.