Hoff’s Horrorfest Presents: FRIDAY THE 13th PART 3–in 3D!

Hoff’s Horrorfest is a monthly show at Brit Pack (3rd floor, 153 Lafayette, Manhattan) featuring stand-up comedy from Hoff Matthews and a guest performer, followed by a horror movie screening. It’s free and BYOB. This month’s installment will be at 9:30pm, Friday, June 26th.

This month’s guest performer: Tim Duffy (Midevenings with Jay Miller, Amazingtown Comedy)

This month’s movie: Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982)–in 3D!

nostalgia

noun nos·tal·gia

\nä-ˈstal-jə, nə- also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl-\

: pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again

From the Greek for “the pain from an old wound inflicted by a forest-dwelling mongoloid in a hockey mask”

In this New Yorker essay on Mad Men, writer Adam Gopnik introduced what he calls “the Golden Forty-Year Rule,” which states that “[t]he prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past.” The reason for this, Gopnik says, is that the forty-something gatekeepers who control pop culture have reserved their strongest sense of nostalgia for the era of their early childhood, “the potently fascinating time just as [they] arrived, when [their] parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in [their] actual memories.”

I was born in 1988, which means that my Edenic period happened to be the tail end of the decade in which a new Friday the 13th movie hit theaters almost every single year. I didn’t actually watch any of them until I was in high school, but Jason Voorhees and his hockey mask (which he put on for the first time in 1982’s Part 3) have been unavoidable in pop culture for as long as I can remember. As this endearing attempt to collect all of the Friday the 13th references in existence demonstrates, that motherfucker’s everywhere.

So for me, to finally watch an actual Friday the 13th film and see that iconic hockey mask in action doesn’t just mean watching an ’80s B-horror flick (though that’d be fine in and of itself); it means experiencing a primary source document for a symbol that’s been universally recognized by everyone around me for my entire life. As I’m not a forty-something cultural gatekeeper, I can’t translate the melancholy reverence that elicits from me into a nationwide revivalist trend in an attempt to recapture a more innocent time that never really existed, but I can screen Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D at Brit Pack on June 26th, prefaced by some stand-up from me and the hilarious Tim Duffy. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I hope you’ll join me.

Also, RIP Betsy Palmer.

See you on the 26th!

–Hoff