Sean Cunningham, the director of Friday the 13th, is very vocal that Friday the 13th’s theme is not that “sinners must be punished”. He saw it as “bad things happening to good people for no apparent reason.” He also rejected Gene Siskel’s complaint that the film was “misogynistic”. Cunningham said the film is not meant to be sexist, and both males and females get punished equally in this movie.

John Carpenter was similarly dismissive when critics complained that Halloween was pushing an old testament puritanical sex-must-be-punished-by-death moral code on the audience. Debra Hill, his co-producer and screenwriter on the project said in response: “I think people are reading moral and sociological messages into a simple horror story that has no agenda to lecture the audience in any way.”

So, all those pundits and critics that say early horror movies were puritanical are just projecting their own interpretations on something that was never intended to be the case.