Chapter 1
Ah, Spooky Season. The leaves are changing. Horror movies populate the theater. Halloween decor livens up my home. My whole life is wrapped up in pumpkins and spiced cider and flannel and Sunday Packer games. I love it so much.
Some years, I go with a theme when watching my horror movies. One year I did them alphabetically. Another, I concentrated on monsters – the vampires, werewolves, and zombies. For several years now I just went with the flow and chose at random. Its time for a new theme this year. You can thank The Substance and Demi Moore’s big yellow coat because the theme is the color yellow. When the color appears in horror, it can stand for a lot of things. Caution. Loss of innocence. Rot and decay. Illness. Even safety. I’ll be exploring it all month long via my blog in an eleven part series.
The first chapter is about the most iconic of yellow items in horror: the yellow raincoat.
Children and the Loss of Innocence
The bright yellow raincoat has become a symbol of both safety and caution in horror so often that I’ve become accustomed to knowing that the person wearing it will likely suffer an untimely death or have some awful adventure likely to cause a plethora of mental health issues. I believe Stephen King is responsible for this in my life because I grew up reading his books and watching the adaptations. My childhood and teen years were filled with Pennywise and his red balloons.
In It, his 1500-page odyssey of a group of kids fighting against the terrible evil that envelops their town, little Georgie Denbrough went out into the rain wearing a yellow raincoat so he could sail his wax paper boat. His brother feigns illness so he doesn’t have to go out in the rain, and will have to live the rest of his life with the guilt of knowing that if he had gone, he might have been able to save his little brother from Pennywise the Clown. That yellow raincoat didn’t save Georgie, but instead warned both the reader of the book and the viewer of either the miniseries from the 90s or the modern movies that danger was already living in Derry. You’ve been warned. You’ll float too.
King was not the first to use this trope even if, for many, it is the most iconic. In the 1976 film Alice, Sweet Alice, the raincoat is featured on two tween sisters. One is suspected of killing the other at her first communion while wearing a creepy mask with the raincoat. Here, the raincoat has dual meanings. Loss of innocence, yes, but also something more sinister. Yellow is the color of rot. In this case, the older sister’s jealousy created moral decay causing many to believe she took her own sister’s life. When the twist happens later in the movie, and it turns out an adult was responsible, we see that adults are just as susceptible to feelings of jealousy and rage as children.
Netflix brought us the surprisingly great German language series Dark. The main character, Jonah, wears a yellow raincoat throughout the series, a signifier of his loss of innocence in a show about the paradoxes of time travel. There are also yellow protective suits at the local nuclear power plant, a symbol of warning or caution, much like the nuclear symbol itself. A yellow dress is warn during the show by a character who betrays another in the midst of a time-travel scheme. Her dress, paired with her black accessories, shows her moral decay.
The 2021 Nordic film The Innocents utilizes the yellow raincoat as well, but combines the cautionary loss of innocence trope with the moral decay trope. Some children discover they have dark, unnatural powers and use them against each other when the adults aren’t looking. It’s pretty brutal what these kids do to each other. There has to be something disturbing going on mentally if they are willing to hurt their friends or family.
From the animated film Coraline to Sadie Sink’s character in Stranger Things, modern horror is just as likely to play homage to this safety trope as it is to use it against the viewer. Never get too comfortable. Always move forward with caution. The innocence lost by the Georgie Denbroughs of the world always stick with us.
Friday the 13th and the Color Yellow
In June of 1980, Friday the 13th entered the slasher and final girl conversation. The opening to the film featured camp counselors in yellow polo shirts that featured the Camp Crystal Lake logo. They sing around a fire with an acoustic guitar as two of them sneak off to get lucky with each other. Those yellow shirts now become a cautionary tale. If you abandon your responsibilities to do the nasty, you’re going to pay the bloody price. With your lives.
The sign for Camp Crystal Lake is also yellow. A sunshiney sign to welcome youngsters. Happiness. Security. Immunity from the dangers of the world. But for Jason Voorhees back in the 1950s and Kevin Bacon and company in 1980, their lives would forever be linked to gruesome deaths at Camp Crystal Lake. That yellow sign was really more of a warning.
What I really want to talk about though are the yellow raincoats worn by not only Alice, Marcie, and Steve Christy in the original film, but Ginny in Part 2 and Tommy in Part 5. Yes, there were that many yellow raincoats in the first five films, as well as Brenda wearing a green one and Bill wearing a red poncho in the first film. I believe that Brenda’s green raincoat signified her motherly personality. It’s what led her out into the rain that fateful night trying to save a child she thought she heard crying for help. Bill was the leader when Steve was away so his red poncho might have meant that everyone’s blood was on his hands since he couldn’t see what was going on. Marcie wore a raincoat to the bathroom and promptly took it off once inside. That yellow coat may have protected her from the rain, but it wouldn’t have saved her from the ax wielding Mrs. Voorhees lurking in the shadows. Steve Christy’s yellow raincoat was a metaphor trusting the wrong person. Like many adults, we lose part of ourselves when we don’t see the worst in someone. Steve paid the highest price wearing a garment meant to keep him dry, but it wouldn’t protect him from being soaked in his own blood.
Alice was one of the original Final Girls. She wasn’t my favorite character in the film, not by a long shot. She runs around screaming hysterically in a yellow raincoat for the second half of the movie like a sad damsel in distress, but she does end up the sole survivor so there must have been some strength in there somewhere. I don’t know what it was about Alice, but Mrs. Voorhees goes from killing grown men and lifting their corpses into bunk beds and throwing Brenda through a kitchen window to girl slapping Alice like they are fighting over a boy at prom. Was it that Alice wore that yellow raincoat in the finale of the film? Did it protect her just enough, empower her just enough, to give her the strength to behead Mrs. Voorhees with that machete?
Who knows. Maybe had she kept the rain coat and worn it at home, she wouldn’t have been the victim of Jason’s revenge killing during the opening of the sequel. By killing Alice, Part 2 paved the way for a new camp on Crystal Lake. One on different land with a different premise. This camp trained counselors to be counselors. No kids were coming here. Not that Jason cared. He began killing them anyway.
Ginny became the next Final Girl of the series. She too wore a yellow raincoat as she ran through the woods. This Final Girl is different though. She’s less hysterical. More empathetic to what Jason must have gone through. Ginny truly understood and it saved her life. When she finds Jason’s dilapidated cabin and the shrine to his mother’s severed, rotted head, she decides that she can trick Jason into believing she is his mother. For a long moment, it works as she speaks to him in the yellow flickering yellow light of burning candles.
For me, this is where the descent into madness really started for Jason Voorhees. He was upset that he witnessed his mother’s death, sure, but he would have been driven mad to find someone using her against him in the way Ginny did. Genius on her part because it allowed her time to get away. For Jason, that dimly lit room with Ginny speaking to him and then seeing the festering face of Pamela Voorhees staring back at him from behind her would have enraged him further. No one knew where that film series would go, but I like to think there was some unconscious foreshadowing as to what Jason Voorhees would become. An unstoppable force of quiet, festering rage.
The fifth film also featured a yellow raincoat as Corey Feldman reprised his role as Tommy, the little boy who hacked Jason repeatedly with a machete at the end of part four. He stands there watching two men dig up Jason Voorhees in the rain, releasing evil back upon the world. It’s only a dream, mind you, but that yellow raincoat screamed caution. That adult Tommy couldn’t escape Jason even if the killer in part five was just a copycat killer. In part six, Tommy goes after Jason knowing he will never be rid of him. Granted, this film forgets that Tommy was in a halfway home for people who probably belonged in mental institutions in the fifth film. But, whatever. Gotta keep on keeping on with the machetes.
Yellow can mean many things in horror, but those first few Friday the 13th films used the color both as a cautionary color and as a metaphor for the loss of whatever innocence Alice, Ginny, and Tommy had before they encountered Jason and his mother. Much like Georgie encountering Pennywise. The yellow raincoat is probably the most iconic symbol of lost innocence in horror films.
I’m going to explore these themes more as this blog series progresses. I hope you’ll follow along. There will be a lot of ⚠️🚖🐝🌻🚌 to discuss in detail. 🫣
IYKYK
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Becky Tyler Art and Photography 
Chapter 1
Ah, Spooky Season. The leaves are changing. Horror movies populate the theater. Halloween decor livens up my home. My whole life is wrapped up in pumpkins and spiced cider and flannel and Sunday Packer games. I love it so much.
Some years, I go with a theme when watching my horror movies. One year I did them alphabetically. Another, I concentrated on monsters – the vampires, werewolves, and zombies. For several years now I just went with the flow and chose at random. Its time for a new theme this year. You can thank The Substance and Demi Moore’s big yellow coat because the theme is the color yellow. When the color appears in horror, it can stand for a lot of things. Caution. Loss of innocence. Rot and decay. Illness. Even safety. I’ll be exploring it all month long via my blog in an eleven part series.
The first chapter is about the most iconic of yellow items in horror: the yellow raincoat.
Children and the Loss of Innocence
The bright yellow raincoat has become a symbol of both safety and caution in horror so often that I’ve become accustomed to knowing that the person wearing it will likely suffer an untimely death or have some awful adventure likely to cause a plethora of mental health issues. I believe Stephen King is responsible for this in my life because I grew up reading his books and watching the adaptations. My childhood and teen years were filled with Pennywise and his red balloons.
In It, his 1500-page odyssey of a group of kids fighting against the terrible evil that envelops their town, little Georgie Denbrough went out into the rain wearing a yellow raincoat so he could sail his wax paper boat. His brother feigns illness so he doesn’t have to go out in the rain, and will have to live the rest of his life with the guilt of knowing that if he had gone, he might have been able to save his little brother from Pennywise the Clown. That yellow raincoat didn’t save Georgie, but instead warned both the reader of the book and the viewer of either the miniseries from the 90s or the modern movies that danger was already living in Derry. You’ve been warned. You’ll float too.
King was not the first to use this trope even if, for many, it is the most iconic. In the 1976 film Alice, Sweet Alice, the raincoat is featured on two tween sisters. One is suspected of killing the other at her first communion while wearing a creepy mask with the raincoat. Here, the raincoat has dual meanings. Loss of innocence, yes, but also something more sinister. Yellow is the color of rot. In this case, the older sister’s jealousy created moral decay causing many to believe she took her own sister’s life. When the twist happens later in the movie, and it turns out an adult was responsible, we see that adults are just as susceptible to feelings of jealousy and rage as children.
Netflix brought us the surprisingly great German language series Dark. The main character, Jonah, wears a yellow raincoat throughout the series, a signifier of his loss of innocence in a show about the paradoxes of time travel. There are also yellow protective suits at the local nuclear power plant, a symbol of warning or caution, much like the nuclear symbol itself. A yellow dress is warn during the show by a character who betrays another in the midst of a time-travel scheme. Her dress, paired with her black accessories, shows her moral decay.
The 2021 Nordic film The Innocents utilizes the yellow raincoat as well, but combines the cautionary loss of innocence trope with the moral decay trope. Some children discover they have dark, unnatural powers and use them against each other when the adults aren’t looking. It’s pretty brutal what these kids do to each other. There has to be something disturbing going on mentally if they are willing to hurt their friends or family.
From the animated film Coraline to Sadie Sink’s character in Stranger Things, modern horror is just as likely to play homage to this safety trope as it is to use it against the viewer. Never get too comfortable. Always move forward with caution. The innocence lost by the Georgie Denbroughs of the world always stick with us.
Friday the 13th and the Color Yellow
In June of 1980, Friday the 13th entered the slasher and final girl conversation. The opening to the film featured camp counselors in yellow polo shirts that featured the Camp Crystal Lake logo. They sing around a fire with an acoustic guitar as two of them sneak off to get lucky with each other. Those yellow shirts now become a cautionary tale. If you abandon your responsibilities to do the nasty, you’re going to pay the bloody price. With your lives.
The sign for Camp Crystal Lake is also yellow. A sunshiney sign to welcome youngsters. Happiness. Security. Immunity from the dangers of the world. But for Jason Voorhees back in the 1950s and Kevin Bacon and company in 1980, their lives would forever be linked to gruesome deaths at Camp Crystal Lake. That yellow sign was really more of a warning.
What I really want to talk about though are the yellow raincoats worn by not only Alice, Marcie, and Steve Christy in the original film, but Ginny in Part 2 and Tommy in Part 5. Yes, there were that many yellow raincoats in the first five films, as well as Brenda wearing a green one and Bill wearing a red poncho in the first film. I believe that Brenda’s green raincoat signified her motherly personality. It’s what led her out into the rain that fateful night trying to save a child she thought she heard crying for help. Bill was the leader when Steve was away so his red poncho might have meant that everyone’s blood was on his hands since he couldn’t see what was going on. Marcie wore a raincoat to the bathroom and promptly took it off once inside. That yellow coat may have protected her from the rain, but it wouldn’t have saved her from the ax wielding Mrs. Voorhees lurking in the shadows. Steve Christy’s yellow raincoat was a metaphor trusting the wrong person. Like many adults, we lose part of ourselves when we don’t see the worst in someone. Steve paid the highest price wearing a garment meant to keep him dry, but it wouldn’t protect him from being soaked in his own blood.
Alice was one of the original Final Girls. She wasn’t my favorite character in the film, not by a long shot. She runs around screaming hysterically in a yellow raincoat for the second half of the movie like a sad damsel in distress, but she does end up the sole survivor so there must have been some strength in there somewhere. I don’t know what it was about Alice, but Mrs. Voorhees goes from killing grown men and lifting their corpses into bunk beds and throwing Brenda through a kitchen window to girl slapping Alice like they are fighting over a boy at prom. Was it that Alice wore that yellow raincoat in the finale of the film? Did it protect her just enough, empower her just enough, to give her the strength to behead Mrs. Voorhees with that machete?
Who knows. Maybe had she kept the rain coat and worn it at home, she wouldn’t have been the victim of Jason’s revenge killing during the opening of the sequel. By killing Alice, Part 2 paved the way for a new camp on Crystal Lake. One on different land with a different premise. This camp trained counselors to be counselors. No kids were coming here. Not that Jason cared. He began killing them anyway.
Ginny became the next Final Girl of the series. She too wore a yellow raincoat as she ran through the woods. This Final Girl is different though. She’s less hysterical. More empathetic to what Jason must have gone through. Ginny truly understood and it saved her life. When she finds Jason’s dilapidated cabin and the shrine to his mother’s severed, rotted head, she decides that she can trick Jason into believing she is his mother. For a long moment, it works as she speaks to him in the yellow flickering yellow light of burning candles.
For me, this is where the descent into madness really started for Jason Voorhees. He was upset that he witnessed his mother’s death, sure, but he would have been driven mad to find someone using her against him in the way Ginny did. Genius on her part because it allowed her time to get away. For Jason, that dimly lit room with Ginny speaking to him and then seeing the festering face of Pamela Voorhees staring back at him from behind her would have enraged him further. No one knew where that film series would go, but I like to think there was some unconscious foreshadowing as to what Jason Voorhees would become. An unstoppable force of quiet, festering rage.
The fifth film also featured a yellow raincoat as Corey Feldman reprised his role as Tommy, the little boy who hacked Jason repeatedly with a machete at the end of part four. He stands there watching two men dig up Jason Voorhees in the rain, releasing evil back upon the world. It’s only a dream, mind you, but that yellow raincoat screamed caution. That adult Tommy couldn’t escape Jason even if the killer in part five was just a copycat killer. In part six, Tommy goes after Jason knowing he will never be rid of him. Granted, this film forgets that Tommy was in a halfway home for people who probably belonged in mental institutions in the fifth film. But, whatever. Gotta keep on keeping on with the machetes.
Yellow can mean many things in horror, but those first few Friday the 13th films used the color both as a cautionary color and as a metaphor for the loss of whatever innocence Alice, Ginny, and Tommy had before they encountered Jason and his mother. Much like Georgie encountering Pennywise. The yellow raincoat is probably the most iconic symbol of lost innocence in horror films.
I’m going to explore these themes more as this blog series progresses. I hope you’ll follow along. There will be a lot of ⚠️🚖🐝🌻🚌 to discuss in detail. 🫣
IYKYK
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Share this: