My friends, it is the spooky season once more. Time for bats and pumpkins and tacky lawn decorations galore.

Somehow I’ve been in a bowie frame of mind lately for no particular reason whatsoever that I can identify, so let’s use this one for a gratuitous Halloween themed special.

Here is the iconic, legendary, deeply prolific, and all the other words we can think of to praise the thing, Buck Model 119 Special. This is quite possibly the single most ubiquitous fixed blade knife in America and it’s basically a given at this point that everyone who is into knives in any meaningful capacity either owns has owned one of these at some point in their lives. And if not this, than certainly the very closely related but slightly larger Buck 120, or the mildly downscaled 117.

My brother had one. I’ve owned two of the damn things, one of which vanished some years ago, probably having been stolen by somebody. A good friend of mine infamously carries a 117 every single day in lieu of a folder to the extent that it’s basically become part of his identity.

The Buck 119 is another crocodile, remaining largely unchanged since its introduction since there’s not much about it that needed changing. The details are a little hazy but the thing is veritably Precambrian, as near as anyone can figure being introduced some time around 1942. There have been various minor permutations of handle construction and blade steel, with the originals starting out as carbon tool steel and eventually becoming 440C, then today’s 420HC by about 1994.

Buck stamps a glyph on each one of these nowadays which translates to the year of production. My current one appears to have been manufactured in 2023, and I bought this when the obvious hole in my collection really started to bother me again. As for the one I lost, I have no idea. I bought it from K-Mart in my late teens, I didn’t bother to check its production date and at the time I certainly didn’t care, and now we’ll never know.

So now we’re seven paragraphs in and I still haven’t explained how the hell there’s supposed to be a Halloween connection here.

Well, even if you’re not a knife nerd, if you think you’ve seen this knife before that’s because you probably have.

That’s right, Ghostface’s very own knife from the Scream movies has been consistently depicted as the larger Buck Model 120, which has an identical profile to the 119 aside from being an inch and three eighths longer.

It seems all of the early classic slasher pics are famously duct taped together with an array of low budget prop solutions. Michael Myers’ face being a stretched out and spraypainted store bought William Shatner Halloween mask is well known one, and I imagine back in 1996 Wes Craven or Kevin Williamson or somebody probably bought that Buck 120 right off the peg from a K-Mart someplace in a manner not too dissimilar from how I bought mine.

So the 120 and by extension to a lesser extent the 119 join the short list of actual factual named production knife models that have made it into a popular piece of fiction cast as themselves. Not with any bits glued on, not hacked apart and turned into something else, and in this case certainly not shown only in a passing glimpse.

Thus it joins the ranks with the likes of, say, Raul Duke’s attorney and his Gerber Mini-Magnum, Mickey Rourke’s Cold Steel Espada, and Hit-Girl’s Benchmade Model 42. (And while we’re at it, it will probably not surprise you at all to learn that Jeff Imada’s brief cameo in Cheech and Chong’s Sweet Dreams where he appears as a waiter and smoothly lops the top off of a wine bottle with his balisong knife was hugely formative towards my own career of learning to use and amassing the things.)

Actually, come to think of it Hollywood’s output is just chock-a-block full of knives of all descriptions, very often being wielded exclusively by the bad guys, but nearly all of which are utter fictions made of plastic and foam rubber. It’s rare enough that a real knife makes it onto the screen in any meaningful capacity that I’m struggling to think of any more concrete examples. I’m sure that’s something we can all kibitz about in the comments.

All the classic slasher villains have their signature weapon, be it Jason’s machete, Leatherface’s chainsaw, or the cleaver Michael Myers frequently gets depicted with. Or, and I’m casting around for examples here, perhaps Karl Childers and his eponymous sling blade. But those are all generic objects that are defined by their wielders rather than the other way around. Just by themselves they’re nothing; totally nondescript.

Ghostface’s Buck, on the other hand, has only seemed to creep closer to center stage as the incessant sequels pile up.

While we’re on the topic, the fact that the villains all seem to have knives probably goes a long way towards explaining why society as a whole seems to be so down on knife ownership these days, and why our laws in particular seem to single out specific types of knives for prohibition apparently informed solely by their depictions in movies. I suppose given our legislators’ famously well-documented shortcomings on the topic of separating fantasy from reality, this probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. That still doesn’t make it any less stupid, though.

Anyway, back to the 119. Although it can be had with wooden handles as well, the classic versions of the 119/120/117 trio all have their stark black and very glossy phenolic resin handles. That is to say, Bakelite or something very close to it. Like the stuff they used to make rotary dial telephones out of. This must have seemed very modern in the 1940s but it feels almost quaint now.

You’d think this would make the 119 act like a bar of soap in your hand, but surprisingly it doesn’t. In my younger years I professed not to be a huge fan of the 119 for this and other reasons, and broadly considered my ownership of one to be more of an obligation than anything else. Nobody, I declared at the time, could possibly use this thing seriously. But I’ve warmed up to it more recently. We’ve got fingerprints precisely so we can grip things, after all. Provided your hands aren’t covered in grease or possibly butter your purchase on the 119’s handle is actually perfectly satisfactory.

The pommel and guard are steel and near mirror polished. I have no doubt that these contribute to the knife’s screen presence and might have been no small part of the casting decision that got the Buck 120 immortalized on film.

The 119 and its ilk come in a distinctive leather sheath that is aggressively right handed with its wrap around retention strap. This actually has changed slightly over the years, with minutely different cuts to the shape of the strap and certainly updates to Buck’s logo.

As it happens I still have the sheath for my OG 119 although I still have no clue where the knife itself got off to. This one has an older logo variant on it, and maybe some old timer can use this to identify its vintage. Me, I can’t be bothered.

The current 119’s steel is 420HC, which is a choice that has rather infamously garnered Buck kind of a bad rap among the Intertubes’ relentless peanut gallery. The current zeitgeist seems to consider 420HC a thoroughly unexciting steel and totally unworthy of any consideration. “Them Buck knifes just ain’t what they used to be” is a cry apparently heard so often that Tim Leatherman himself went and penned In Defense of 420HC Steel in response — an entire article about it.

Truth be told this is part of what had me down on the 119 in those days of yesteryear myself. But then much later it was Larrin Thomas’ very own chart on knife steel toughnesses that tickled my interest not too long ago, which is obviously the type of thing that’s of considerable interest to me now that I’m an aspiring knifesmith.

What immediately caught my eye was 420HC’s top-of-the-heap ranking, with its dot all the way the hell up there in the stratosphere in the upper left. Yes, lowly old basic, outdated, and extremely unhip 420HC is capable of outperforming not just a wide array of much more expensive stainless steels on sheer toughness, but literally all of them.

The conclusion I’m coming to here is that maybe we’ve been misunderstanding the Buck 119 all along.

It turns out that the 119 is the perfect redneck’s knife, just as it should be. While its edge retention may be unimpressive compared to any number of fancier modern steels, this is readily mitigated by keeping a field stone about your person someplace and if nothing else will provide a vehicle to keep you gainfully employed while you’re sitting around at camp. Meanwhile in exchange, in the hands of any mere man the 119 should be functionally unbreakable. This is ideal for all the types of stabbing, chopping, hacking, and prying uses a particular subset of careless users are likely to subject it to.

And that’s fantastic.

But that’s not all. Oh, it certainly isn’t.

What could possibly be more ominous than the sound of a banjo echoing through the woods on the dark?

Well, if we’re on the topic of rednecks (A group in which I often gleefully include myself), how about the Harbor Freight knockoff of the Buck 119? Yes, there’s a real life honest to goodness pod-person clone of this thing, which you can apparently still walk into any number of retail locations and just buy, and somehow this hasn’t gotten anyone sued. You are doubtlessly aware of this knife, as it has been ragged upon ad nauseam by all of the cutlery related online cults of personality already. Somehow, though, I still couldn’t resist.

As usual for the old Hazard Freight, they’ve invented from the whole cloth a non-brand moniker for this, in this case calling it… “Gordon.”

They’re waiting for you.

In the test chamberrrr.

I find the feature list on the back and its distinctive reek of desperation to be particularly amusing. I’m most fond of “heat treated blade.” Yes, we would certainly hope so. The note about being “perfect for detail work” is also a little rich considering it’s applied to a fixed blade Bowie that’s just a touch over 10-1/2" in overall length.

Once you get over the initial shock brought on by the sheer chutzpah of the thing, you’ll notice that there are several differences between the Gordon and the genuine Buck that are more than just superficial.

The easy to spot ones include the simplified pommel and guard, which in addition to being shaped slightly differently from the real 119 also conspicuously lack the layered black stripe embellishments. This is without a doubt to make manufacturing the thing cheaper. Strangely the Gordon is also minutely longer than the genuine Buck. The 119 is exactly 10-1/2" long (266.7mm) but the Gordon is just about a sixteenth of an inch longer or 268.29mm. It’s unnoticeable until you have both of them lying on the table next to each other, and then it’s impossible to miss.

In exchange the Gordon’s blade is also a tiny bit thinner than the Buck, 0.170" vs. 0.172" (4.318mm/4.3688mm). This may be a further cheapening, or it may just be down to manufacturing tolerances. The difference isn’t much. Likewise the genuine article weighs 7.76 ounces or 219.8 grams sans its sheath. The clone is 7.34 ounces or 208 grams precisely, and its handle is noticeably less dense. The 119’s point of balance is basically right behind the crossguard but the Gordon places it forward of this by about half an inch.

The much less superficial difference is that the Gordon flat out admits to being made of 7Cr17MoV steel, a Chinese alloy broadly equivalent to 440A which somehow manages to be even less exciting than the Buck’s 420HC. 7Cr’s edge retention may theoretically be slightly better than 420HC due to it having a higher potential hardness, but the difference is probably really splitting hairs. It will more importantly have noticeably reduced toughness versus the former. Which if you’re going to dump all of your points into one stat, so to speak, really rather defeats the purpose.

The Gordon’s sheath is also clearly riffing off of the Buck’s but it’s worse. The button snap is a generic black painted one and it’s relocated to the middle rather than the side mounted location on the genuine sheath. The retention strap is a different, simpler, and less attractive shape. Its real problem is that it’s not quite long enough, though, which makes snapping it back over the handle a real chore.

Luckily I have two genuine 119 sheaths so I guess if I’ll ever do anything with this knife I can drop it in my spare one. What anyone else is going to do about it I have no clue. As for myself, I’m thinking of building some kind of generator that runs off of the heat from the scorn and ridicule I’d earn by doing so, and get myself free power forever.

The Buck’s edge is true out of the box, completely aside from mine arriving with the tip already being slightly hooked as if somebody at the factory used it to stab a rock. Maybe they did, and that’s how they test their heat treatment. Who knows.

The Gordon’s edge, meanwhile, is so out of whack that it’s clearly visible to the naked eye.

The rest of the Gordon’s grind is at minimum acceptable, although the surface finish obviously isn’t anywhere near as nice.

This isn’t a repeat of the same glamor shot I put in earlier up the page. This is actually the Gordon, shot from roughly the same angle. From a couple of feet away it does look like the business.

One other piece of trivia I don’t have anywhere better to slip in is the apparent fact that this is made in Vietnam of all places, but “finished” in China. I cannot fathom how that would possibly contribute to making it any less expensive to manufacture, but it clearly must do somehow or else this wouldn’t be stocked at Harbor Freight.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I suppose I should not find it at all surprising what with the Internet being what it is that people are apparently straight-facedly hawking “replica” Scream knives when as we’ve just explored the real thing is literally just a mass produced model from a major manufacturer that you can still buy. Even more baffling is the observation quite a number of these charlatans are trying to sell these for several dollars more than just clicking over to Buck’s website and buying a 120. Or if it comes down to it, just going to any Tractor Supply or Walmart or whatever and walking out with a genuine 119 for a hundred bucks.

If you absolutely must have one that’s a prop for your Halloween costume and you legitimately need it to be made out of plastic or whatever, I can at least sort of respect that.

Or just, like, buy one of these Gordons and butter knife the edge off of it on your grinding wheel for $35.

I can think of no finer use case for it.