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Miniature of Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th at Cockington Green. Steven Cromack Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980)—both more than thirty years old—are now America’s classic horror movies. Why do they enjoy such prominence in American culture? The answer rests in the content of their plots and the context in which they were produced.   John Carpenter’s Halloween catapulted the slasher film into American culture with its release in 1978. In 1974, before he made A Christmas Story , director Bob Clark made Black Christmas , a story of young adults alone in a secluded area, ready to be terrorized, an all but standard plot line in horror movies today. But Halloween ’s central character Michael Myers was something new. He was not just a serial killer, but one who stalked his victims with creepy music in the background. And he was seemingly indestructible. Never before had such a character existed in cinema. Not too long after Halloween came Friday the 13th , another m...

Randall Stephens [Cross-posted from Religion in American History ] Life magazine, June 30, 1972 Larry Eskridge is Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals and editor of the Evangelical Studies Bulletin at Wheaton College.  With Mark Noll, he was co-editor of More Money, More Ministry: Evangelicals and Money in Recent North American History (Eerdmans, 2000).  Eskridge has also written the definitive account of one of the most significant mass religious movements of the last century.  His God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (Oxford University Press, 2013) examines the fusion of the hippie counterculture and evangelical Christianity that burst onto the scene in the late 1960s. I recently caught up with Larry to ask him about the project, his research, and more. Randall Stephens: What first got you interested in the topic of the Jesus People? Larry Eskridge: I found the Jesus People an interesting topic at several le...