Whenever a cultural flashpoint is coming up, you can count on the good people at the Onion AV Club to cover the hell out of it: remember their onslaught of Simpsons considerations the week the movie came out? Of course, there's no way they'd miss out on Halloween, and amid the plethora of lists and geekery already way under way, pay special attention to Noel Murray's Year-By-Year With Friday The 13th. Murray heroically slogs through all twenty-three years of the Jason franchise, dissecting each entry's stylistic, thematic and sign o' the times connections to the year of its production. 1984's Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, for example, dates itself with "a hospital orderly [who] watches a jazzercise video," while cocaine becomes a suspiciously popular drug in the mid-'80s entries. By 1986, "the boys look like Bruce Springsteen and the girls look like either Madonna or Lisa Bonet." There's way more juicy overthinking in the full article, and plenty of gory YouTube clips embedded to keep you busy at work while waiting for nightfall. Happy Halloween, all. — Vadim Rizov
