Friday the 13th is superstition without historical roots

As we have already said before, the slogan "Friday the 13th" has no real historical basis.

One version is that it originated in Britain in the 19th century, when it was the world's workshop, where the working day lasted more than 10 hours. Naturally, at the end of the working week, when everyone is tired and safety precautions are practically non-existent, more accidents occur. But this version is refuted by the simple fact that Friday is the end of the working week in the modern era, and in the 19th century, Saturday was also a working day.

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According to another version, on Friday, October 13, 1307, arrests of members of the Templar order began, who were accused of heresy and subjected to cruel torture. However, no one remembered this, or rather the combination of the number 13 and Friday, until 1869, when an English journalist, writing about the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini, wrote that he died on the day when these two factors coincided.

So if someone is unlucky on this day, it can be explained by the so-called self-fulfilling negative forecast or, more simply, self-hypnosis.

In popular culture, this combination first became the title of a work of art in 1907, when the writer and financier Thomas Lawson wrote the novel Friday the Thirteenth, which described the customs and superstitions of stock exchange participants.

And in 1980, the first horror film of the future Friday the 13th franchise was released. The film grossed $39.7 million at the box office with a budget of $550 thousand and showed the potential of the horror film genre with teenage protagonists. After all, novice actors do not have to be paid large fees, and films are actively consumed by a clear target audience, the same age as the actors.

Now the Friday the 13th franchise, which includes more than ten films, includes TV series (the only thing they have in common with the films is the name), novels, comics, computer games, etc. All this has already brought in so much money that it is simply impossible to count it. One example is that the "film part" of this franchise, which temporarily ended back in 2009, brought in almost half a billion dollars without taking inflation into account...

Photo: execution of the leader of the Templars Jacques de Molay Вікіпедія