By the end of 1987,
the idea of pitting "Friday the 13th's” Jason
against “A Nightmare on Elm Street's" Freddy Krueger
was already quietly circulating around Hollywood.
Due to complex legal issues
involving the two characters, however,
it would be another fifteen years
before fans would see Freddy and Jason battle to the death.
But that didn't stop executive producer Frank Mancuso, Jr.
From finding Jason a formidable foe.
I got kind of energized by 6 a little bit,
and I really wanted that to tell people,
"Okay, we got your back.
We got Jason back so it's going to be okay."
And 7, I sort of backed off again.
I mean, inevitably it had to do with what else
I was doing at the time.
I was about halfway into the first season
of "Friday the 13th,” the television series,
when I got a call from Frank Mancuso
asking me if I'd like to come down to Los Angeles
and discuss with him
the possibility of producing "Friday the 13th Part 7.”
And Frank was in discussion with John Buechler
to come and direct the film.
Basically I said, "Why?
Didn't they just make 6 of them?
I mean, why would you ever want to do a “Part 7?”
And I said this in front of Frank Mancuso,
and my agent was in the room and both their jaws dropped.
And I think it's because I didn't want to do it ultimately
that I got the job
because I did want to push it in a slightly new direction.
John had been a makeup effects artist.
He directed “Troll” and a couple of other movies.
He'd come out of the Charlie Band Empire world
of low-budget horror films.
So he was kind of a perfect candidate.
Because of my particular effects background,
I think I was considered as being
the helmer of the project
because I could bring that to the table.
Even when it got to “Part 7,”, I mean,
they weren't costing any money.
So there wasn't any real risk.
Originally titled “Jason's Destroyer”
the screenplay written by Daryl Haney
would see Jason face off against a powerful
though unlikely, new adversary.
Well, obviously the main difference
in this "Friday the 13th" was that there was a female foe.
A girl that could just come in and stand up to Jason.
The synopsis of this movie would be Carrie Meets Jason,
and, you know, this is a girl
who's got these incredible telekinetic powers.
The first thing I remember about getting the script
for "Friday the 13th" was the fake name on it,
“Birthday Bash,”
and my husband was a huge "Friday the 13th" fan.
And, he goes, "This is Friday the 13th.
This is not “Birthday Bash.” You've got to do this.
Please do it."
And he just begged and begged and begged for me to do it.
Lar was wonderful,
and I don't think anyone had really seen Lar
in anything before that.
But she was terrific.
One of the visual inspirations for me
was an old Hammer film called “Hands of the Ripper”
where you basically had a beautiful, little blonde girl
who was Jack the Ripper's daughter.
That kind of iconistic image
stuck with me and that became the template for Tina.
I idenfified with several things of Tina
right off the bat.
She was very vulnerable,
and she... a lot of people are.
They might have an exterior,
but they have a vulnerable underside.
So Tina evolved from what was basically a Carrie clone
with different baggage, of course.
"Part 7" once again opens at Crystal Lake,
where a young Tina Shepherd
first unleashes her powerful telekinetic abilities.
My daughter, played by Jennifer Banko,
had these special powers,
and my husband, John Otrin, would beat me up constantly,
a horrible alcoholic.
Please, don't drink anymore!
Don't tell me what to do! (slap)
That's all I knew.
It was an abusive father.
And my little daughter was able to cause his demise.
One day she just, she's had enough,
and she accidentally with her telekinetic powers
kills her dad.
She goes, "I hate you, Daddy."
I hate you! I wish you were dead!
You know, I remember I did that little
And the next thing I know,
the pier falls right into the water, and I die.
But it was amazing
because we had to do multiple shots,
and the bridge would shake and it would collapse,
and then it would put itself back together,
and we'd start from one.
After spending years in a mental hospital,
17-year-old Tina returns to Crystal Lake
to face her past... and to exorcise her demons.
You didn't know what Tina was capable of,
and she didn't know what she was capable of.
I always had a sense that what if she got too upset
and hurt someone that she loved around her again.
Because you weren't really sure what she was thinking,
and she couldn't control it.
Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't happen!
And you're lying to me!
Her adversary, up until the end, is not Jason.
It is her doctor who is trying to exploit her.
Terry Kiser played the doctor.
Terry did “Weekend at Bernie's” where he played the corpse.
He became huge, never said a word.
He wants to do a research document on her.
He takes her to the one place, Crystal Lake,
where her father was accidently killed by her
to make her very agitated.
Instead of taking her anger out on kids at the prom,
basically she takes it out on the lake,
and she focuses her anger at the lake,
and the lake starts to bubble,
and it jump-starts Jason.
Ch-ch-ch-!
Never before had Jason been played
by the same actor/stuntman more than once.
All that was about to change.
Enter Kane Hodder.
I had worked with Kane Hodder on a couple of other films,
one was called "Ghost Town,"
and the other one was called "Prison,"
and I thought that this might be the kind of guy
that I would want to play Jason
because he is a coordinator, he is a stuntman,
and he could perform under tons of prosthetics
and makeup.
I had been a fan of the movies for a long time,
a horror fan in general.
Loving the character of Jason,
never having any clue that I might have a chance
to do it myself.
I kind of went into it without any real plan.
I wanted to just do what felt natural.
You don't get the performance.
You don't get the visceral one-on-one confrontation
if you don't have an actor,
if you don't have somebody who can perform
through a ton of foam latex without a single word
and make you know what he's thinking.
And obviously Kane Hodder came through with flying colors.
Although the film's exact timeline remains unclear,
at least 10 years have passed since the events of "Part 6"
when a supposedly-dead Jason
was left to decompose at the bottom of Crystal Lake.
Buechler's thoughts were that he's kind of a rotted corpse,
and the makeup was real extensive.
Every scar, every rip, every tear
that Jason ever had was in the Jason
that we created for “Part 7.”
I looked at things in the past,
and it just kind of seemed like he was too much of a zombie
for what I would enjoy myself.
And so I tried to just put subtle things in there
to make it a little more human,
like the breathing thing, and the head turn
where I turn my head first and then the body follows.
It just was something that felt right
and felt kind of imposing.
And we all thought
he should have been Jason from the beginning.
He should have been every single Jason, you know.
He's the guy that ended up playing Jason most
in the "Friday the 13th" movies
because he did bring something to the role.
While Tina is subjected to Dr. Crews'
unethical experiments,
the house next door is overrun
by another lively group of teens,
including the handsome yet sensitive Nick,
ugly duckling Maddy, and the bitchy Melissa.
Played by the late Susan Jennifer Sullivan.
I remember Susan Jennifer Sullivan.
A fun little girl, not at all like her character.
She was sweet as can be.
In many ways, she was playing against type
because even though she looked, she had the package
of that kind of privileged snobby princess
There goes the neighborhood.
She was really humble and very nice.
It's a matter of some curiosity that at this point in time,
the fan base knows it as "Fri-Gay the 13th Part 7."
We were kind of aware
that a large number of the male members of the cast
and nee, indeed some females, were indeed gay,
but it never had an effect on making the show.
I know possibly one of the reasons it got the name
Fri-Gay the 13th, Kevin, the love-interest
of Lar Park-Lincoln, was, I believe he was gay,
and maybe some people thought there was no chemistry,
and you know, she might not have been terribly attracted to him.
There was a little bit of a rumor on the set
about that they didn't really get along that well
which I thought was pretty tough to have to be able to,
you know on film, appear like they're hitting it off,
and they're having a connection.
It's a big pink elephant.
I was a little bit oblivious to the fact
that their chemistry wasn't all that good.
I kind of remember now
that Lar would say a couple of things to me
that they weren't jiving,
but they never said a bad word about each other.
The film worked just fine,
all the romances, all the drama.
I'm not sure sexual orientation gets involved
with who Jason wants to kill.
He's an equal-opportunity slasher.
While the Friday the 13th films
were never greeted with enthusiasm
by the Motion Picture Association of America,
no one felt their wrath more harshly
than director John Buechler.
I've said it often, and I'll say it again,
the ratings board raped my movie.
The MPAA was the true horror of the film.
They sent us back many, many times
to re-cut the film,
to take out, you know, pieces of gore.
The favorite Jason kill that I've ever done
is the sleeping bag just for the creativity of it.
OK you big hunk of a man, come and get me!
Jason picks up the sleeping bag with the young woman in it.
She's screaming, and he bashes her against a tree.
They shot various versions of the sleeping bag.
It had a heavy dummy in it
and about twenty gallons of blood,
which is not light.
So, of course that was a big no-no with the ratings board,
so I would cut it down, cut it down.
And finally, in the final version,
he picks up the sleeping bag,
hits the tree once and throws it down.
One of the rare cases where I thought
maybe the edited version ended up better than the unedited.
Every kill in the film,
they shot footage that was very, very graphic.
The kid who got killed at the lake
when his girlfriend was skinny dipping,
and there was far more detail to what happened to him.
Jason, like a golf pro, swings the axe upward
and slashes up through a guy's jaw,
splitting his face forward
and a spout of blood goes straight up.
In the movie, unfortunately,
you out away before any connection is made.
For me it's like telling a joke without the punch line.
I think Billy Butler's kill was also kind of great
because you didn't really see it happening,
but you saw Tina's vision.
William Butler and I
actually did “Texas Chainsaw” together as well.
A lot of our fans, you know, they bring up
that him and I did two horror films together,
very close, a couple of years apart.
They seem to think that's really neat, I do as well.
We were filming “Friday the 13th: Part 7”
in February in Alabama.
We had a guy with a gun with us all the time
to shoot alligators.
He was a rather older man and he was very slow,
so I don't think he could have shot that alligator
if it came out of the swamp at me,
so that was strange.
Oh, get real, Maddy. You're not his type.
You need a little touch-up work first.
Thanks!
I remember Diana Barrows.
She played kind of the ugly duckling
who gets the makeover.
Need a little touch-up work, my ass.
We actually did reshoots in Topanga
to make the deaths kind of longer
and that was the scenes with Maddy smoking grass
for the first time with David,
and more versions of my death scene.
[scream]
And my ex-boyfriend confessed to me years later,
after I broke up with him,
that he would rewind my death scene a million times and go,
"Get her, Jason! Get her, get her."
[scream]
Yeah, right, happy fucking birthday.
I certainly remember how Jason killed Ben,
my boyfriend in the movie.
L'll bet it's Michael
I'm thinking Michael is shaking the van.
It's actually Jason. I hop out of the van.
For some reason I don't want to have sex anymore.
I want to find Michael.
I don't think I've ever seen a killing like that
where he just takes, you know, his head,
one hand on top and one under his chin,
and just smushes it to a pulp.
Actually in the script my death is described
as "Ben's head gets squished like a ripe pimple."
They had made a dummy head.
They had filled it with cottage cheese
and a bunch of gook.
After my head is squished,
Jason picks up the party horn, and she gets plugged again.
After the horn went in,
which I didn't realize until I'd actually seen the movie,
there was a little toot noise.
When we were in Alabama,
we filmed a scene where they made a kind of prosthetic body
under my nightgown,
and he took a big sword and chopped me in half,
but the fake body underneath
had shifted, and it looked really phony so...
but they didn't see that until we got back to LA.
So that's why we re-shot it.
A new death scene for Robin
was filmed in the same Topanga Canyon house
which previously served as the Jarvis residence
in "Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.”
So he picked me up by the neck,
and he threw me out the window,
but the funny thing is, is they hired a stuntman
to be my body double.
So when you see the body going out the window,
it's this guy with these big giant legs
and this kind of pretty bad red wig.
You know, so I remember people going,
"Your legs are so muscular."
Push comes to shove,
we discover that not only does Tina
have this psychokinetic ability,
but she can also clairvoyantly see things before they happen,
but not exactly as they happen.
She gets an image that is kind of a surreal version of it.
Once in a while if one of the characters
was particularly bad,
then I might want to come up
with a little bit more violent way of killing 'em,
like Dr. Crews.
Terry's character, he was not a good doctor.
You have deliberately turned my daughter
into an emotional wreck.
That's not true.
In fact, in my death scene, when we're out in the woods,
and I'm running and the whole thing, he sees Jason coming.
And he literally puts my body in front of his
so that he's safe for a second.
That's the kind of guy he was.
That guy's gotta die in a creative, violent way,
more so than some of the other people.
The psychiatrist's death was another one
that was just gutted by the MPAA.
I was surprised when I went to see the movie,
so much of the gore had been cut out.
That was a real tool.
I've never seen it since then.
I hadn't seen it before,
but it was like a weed whacker with a circular saw blade on it.
Great weapon.
Didn't see much of it in the movie unfortunately.
They shot all sorts of angles,
cutting into a prosthetic body and blood and guts and... gone.
[screams and buzzing]
Everybody loved watching Melissa get the axe in the head.
She was just such a horrible character.
She was such the quintessential bitch.
Melissa was a bitch.
You were already waiting for her to get it.
Tina and myself and Melissa
are in the cabin kind of waiting things out.
Don't go out there.
She says, "Fuck you. No..."
Fuck you both!
Turns to leave and guess who's at the door?
Jason's sitting there with the axe,
and he splits it right in her head.
Whack!
We did a reverse pull-away gag on her with a hatchet,
which didn't end up in the movie at all.
I remember we watched this stuntgirl...
fly across the room with this axe in her...
It was extraordinary.
That was a fun day, actually, watching that scene.
We were in a very small space when that was shot.
And, of course, Kane takes up half the room.
We acted scared and ran upstairs
because that's what you do.
You don't run outside, you run upstairs.
I thought from the very beginning
it should be more of a stunt movie
than it would be a makeup effects movie.
And we have that great street scene
where she goes right up to him.
Jason?
I loved the twigs coming around his legs
and taking him down that way.
I had to really take a lot more abuse than I was expecting,
but I was glad to do it
because I think it made the movie look much better.
The battle continued.
It just continued and continued, and we shot it forever.
For me it was difficult
because my character was in a constant state of upset.
I would have to constantly keep myself very tense
to keep the tears rolling and flowing,
and the anger, and the disbelief and the craziness.
Going into it we relied heavily on other mechanical effects
like the roof falling on Jason.
As soon as that thing hit me, man, there was no acting.
It hit me so hard and with such force
that it just drilled me into the stairs.
We had special effects in that movie
that were actually kind of in competition
With the killing.
And we had TVs flying across the room
and explosions and the pearl necklace breaking,
and all this great magical stuff that didn't typically happen
in a “Friday” film.
And we really wanted that over-the-top aspect
with the makeup effects, with the stunts,
with the physical effects, everything.
Every time I turned around,
she was doing something else to him.
I loved the nails, and the gas in the basement.
I loved that scene. That was really fun.
And he's like fed up with all the stuff she's doing to him.
And I can vividly remember Buechler saying,
"Go like this, really move your face around."
He was talking through the whole thing.
I was always amazed and just in awe of him
because as a stuntman he had an accident
and was burned in a stunt
and has scars on his chest and his neck.
It really was a case, you know, conquering your fear
and just moving on saying, you know,
this is not going to stop me.
They truly blew up an entire house in that movie.
It was wild.
You know, putting pryro in in special places
so it would go boom, boom, boom, boom.
And the grips, everybody smoking cigarettes,
and up in the eaves inside the house
are these little ropes hanging everywhere.
And I went, "What are those?
And they went, "Oh, we're going to blow up the house."
And I went, "You mean it's all set to blow up,
and everybody's smoking!?"
Eventually the word came down that, yes,
we were ready to go.
The countdown started happening. We tensed up.
This was going to be great.
And as the button got pushed,
the whole building went up within a split second.
I was there when they filmed the cabin exploding,
and I don't know,
something must have gone wrong with something
because you could actually literally feel the heat.
There was not a piece of wood
larger than a matchstick available
to be seen the following day.
It was Apocalypse Now. It was just too big.
Lenses were smashed on the lmo's.
You know, filters were melted.
And eventually, I think the longest piece of film
of the explosion was about 20 frames, less than a second.
And eventually we created at least something
that you could say,
"Okay, there's an explosion there."
But on the day, we were heartbroken.
From the earliest days of production,
John Buechler found himself at odds
with a key member of Frank Mancuso, Jr.'s executive team.
When you're working as a director on a movie,
you have a vision.
The producer's interested in the money,
and the director is interested in the product.
In this particular case...
I kind of went head-to-head with my associate producer.
Barbara Sachs worked for Frank Mancuso
across a broad range of his development.
She was responsible for developing
“He Said, She Said,” “Permanent Record
so she was a very big part of Frank Mancuso's company.
There was occasional tension between her and John
because she was probably giving her input,
and John had his own vision, and John knew what he was doing.
This was not a new genre for him.
The "Friday the 13th" series of films
was a little bit outside her wheelhouse.
This was not in her sort of
intellectual and emotional direction.
She didn't like horror.
If you're going to be an associate producer on a film,
or even a producer, you gotta love it.
One of the things I really lobbied for
was to show Jason mask off
for the better part of the last reel of the movie.
She hated the look of Jason.
She said, "He looks like a frog. He's so unbelievable."
She vetoed the idea for me to do it at all.
And I was busy working,
and I couldn't really go over her head
and talk to Frank and get approval.
So I did it anyway.
And ultimately Frank Mancuso loved popping Jason's mask off
the way I did it.
She always just seemed to be somebody in the way.
There was, I believe, a conflict about the very ending,
about how the father would look.
The ghost of Tina's father was to be realized
as a fully animatronic thing.
I'm decaying after 7 to 10 years of being in that water.
I look as ugly as Jason looks.
And we did this makeup on John, and we did the animatronic,
and, of course, Barbara vetoed that
because I'd gone against her will.
We actually put the makeup on,
and we started shooting some of it.
Actually I came out at the end with that outfit on
and brought Jason down, and it was never used.
And so what you see at the end of the film
is John Otrin coming up with a dirty face
and pulling Jason down.
I think when people view the film they say,
"That's kind of lame."
I felt bad really for John because he had done
so many really great things in that movie,
and it was never... It was never seen
and some of those scenes were lost and deleted.
For years, fans have demanded a home video release of the film
in its fully-restored form.
Unfortunately, a truly uncut version
of "Friday the 13th Part 7” will never be seen.
It would be terrific to be able to go back
to "Friday the 13th Part 7”
and put it back together in a form
that had more, sort of, creative coherence.
Unfortunately that footage has been discarded.
Paramount destroyed all the outtakes of the film
which it's... it's pretty unfortunate.
Without the elements, without the outtakes,
there's really no hope of ever making a director's cut
or alternate version of those scenes
because the footage just doesn't exist.
Like so much of, you know, great American cinema,
it's now lost to the world.
Not that I'm saying "Friday the 13th Part 7”
was great American cinema,
but great American cinema of a certain kind.
Though it wasn't per se a studio film,
it did have many of the trappings of a studio film.
And it made me ultimately very dissatisfied
with too many cooks.
Sometimes directors can get kind of snippy.
John never did that, and he had a lot of external forces
that could have certainly made him go crazy.
We were fighting all kinds of different battles
within producing the film.
And um, he was always very kind to me,
and I'd go home at night and say,
I'm gonna look like an idiot in this franchise,
and my career is going to be over.
But I trusted him, I believed in him and it worked.
Jason... ls Back.
But this time, someone is waiting.
"Friday the 13th: Part VII The New Blood"
Little more than six months after the start
of pre-production,
"Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood”
debuted on May 13, 1988.
While its final take of $19.2 million
was respectable, it paled in comparison
to the late-summer release
of "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master,”
which took in a then record setting $49.1 million.
Although Jason may have been temporarily unseated
by the competition,
he was still a long way from being dead.
It opened at the Chinese Graumann Theater in Hollywood.
How awesome is that?
So here we are, we're in the movie theater,
the 8 o'clock show or something, and we're counting the deaths.
This is a sold-out crowd.
Every time Jason killed somebody,
the whole audience would go...
1!
2!
3!
Every time somebody got killed, they'd count 'em.
It's just amazing, the movie magic,
and the way things really come to life.
I was scared, I screamed, I jumped, I moved, you know,
I was hiding, and I knew what was coming,
I'd read the script, I'd seen a lot of the scenes being done,
but when they actually put it together, you know,
it's real!
I was very happy to see in the "Hollywood Reporter"
that "Friday the 13th Part 7”
was the highest grossing movie at the box office in May 1988
when it was released.
That says something about the enduring legacy
of "Friday the 13th
Although Tina would not be seen again,
fans have long envisioned a sequel
that would bring together the surviving characters
of "Friday the 13th" for the ultimate showdown with Jason.
Well, I'm waiting for "Friday the 13th Part 13”
to come out and it would be terrific
if the surviving girls get together
and that would be a script.
Hell, yeah. I would definitely do it.
It sounds like it would be a great time.
Charlie's Angels vs. Jason, Jason's Devils basically.
We'd get all buff, We'd get all strong
and then maybe I could run as fast and jump as high
as I did before.
He's always only fought someone one-on-one.
He's never had a group fighting him at the same time.
I would, I mean I haven't forgotten how to do it,
it's like a bike, I don't think I could ever forget.
We'd just have probably really great lives
with this terrible memory.
I would probably do another film
that would reprise that role, you know,
the years later, as long as it was done in, you know,
a good light.
I think what Tina would be doing today
is trying to help others
but still dealing with her own demons and being pulled back,
I think she would be pulled back to the lake again.
Tina being fully realized as who she is
made the movie work,
and the fact that we could pay it off
with the special effects and so forth
really contributed to the success of the movie.
Even if Jason's machete blade
had dulled slightly at the box office,
all seven films in the series
remained highly-profitable ventures for Paramount.
But with its fan base growing up
and dream demon Freddy Krueger
now taking on pop-icon status,
it was time for Jason to venture out of the woods...
and step into a much larger world.
There were seven before, obviously,
and they all took place in Crystal Lake, right?
And so the first question I asked them,
was, "Does it have to be in Crystal Lake?
Can I take Jason out of Crystal Lake?"
Rob Hedden is an infectious personality, first of all,
so he's a very upbeat guy.
He has tons and tons of energy.
Frank Mancuso Jr. Who was producing it,
I mean he was the one, he just said,
"Well, if it's a big city, it's got to be New York."
I said, "That works for me. That's a great idea."
So that's how the whole
"Jason Takes Manhattan" thing came about.
But there was fun that we hadn't seen before
about the notion of a Jason in a big city.
The notion of what would happen
if Jason got into the subway, you know all those things.
My first draft of the script had a big chase scene
across the Brooklyn Bridge.
There was a lot more stuff that we just couldn't afford to do.
He certainly had ambitions
that we didn't have the budget to allow for.
Production reality set in and it was like, okay,
instead of, you know, 75% of the movie
taking place in New York, we'll do 50%.
And then it was, well, we can't really do 50 either.
So then the concept, well,
let's do some mayhem on the cruise ship
while they're getting to New York,
and we'll make, you know, maybe the last third of the movie
will take place in New York.
Among the sea of new faces,
at least one familiar passenger was back on board.
Kane Hodder's enthusiastic and always menacing
portrayal of Jason Voorhees
ensured that the graduating class of Crystal Lake High
would be in for the voyage of their lives.
So for me it was like I looked at 7. How did he die in 7?
Okay, that's where we're going to find him. He's underwater.
He's going to get shocked with electricity.
In the film's opening sequence,
an amorous couple anchored at Crystal Lake
inadvertently awakens Jason from his watery grave.
Perhaps in retrospect
we probably shouldn't have anchored our boat
in Camp Crystal Lake
where there was a corpse of a murderer down under the water
waiting to be reanimated.
He really doesn't even need the electricity.
He could come back just because he feels like it.
Having Kane Hodder on board was really helpful
because he had done PART 7, and he knew what had been done.
And also Marty Becker was our special effects guy.
And between them and our makeup people,
we decided let's tweak Jason a little bit too.
People ask me,
"Why does the makeup change so much from movie to movie?
And the hockey mask changes and everything else."
You know, basically it's because
it's a different makeup effects person who designs it,
and they don't necessarily stay true
to the previous movie.
Plus he starts out underwater
at the very beginning of the movie,
and so he's pretty much just gooey the whole movie.
They put slime on me every single shot
so I was wet the entire movie.
Goo. Goo is great.
The moment where I get almost shot by the spear gun
was the scariest moment of the whole shoot for me,
out of the whole week,
because they did have to aim the actual spear gun
really close to my head.
And they were like, "Don't move and get it right
because we're going to damage the wall behind you."
I didn't think there was really any danger,
but it was definitely scary because it did whiz by my ear,
and it was very loud when it shot into the wall.
It also probably wasn't really smart to hide on the boat
where the murderer is coming to get you
instead of jumping into the water
and at least trying to swim for your life.
We were doing my death scene, and I saw the fake torso,
and it originally had really, really large boobs
on the fake torso which I was super excited about.
And then they were like, "We might have to rethink this."
I know they made some adjustments,
and she had really nice nipples, I remember that.
Kane Hodder was on the set one day,
and he came out with a strap-on in full garb you know,
Sounds like something I should check out.
Once again, fans have been quick to point out
inconsistencies in the timeline
and the logic of Part 8.
As far as the logic on how that ship
got out of Crystal Lake into the Atlantic,
I have no idea.
It's a tough one because it had to be Crystal Lake,
and we had to get him on a cruise ship to New York.
And so we tried to do a little smoke and mirrors
and it maybe didn't quite work.
I have a theory.
I think we were all so frickin' happy
to have a paying gig and for most of us,
it was our maiden major movie and it was like,
"This damn boat could come from the Sahara Desert
and get into the Atlantic."
I'm not going to challenge the concept.
And we ultimately just said, "Let's just forget it,
you know. People can... people may get mad at us for that,
but let's go for it."
Our graduating class I'd say it's easily, what,
about 100 kids on that boat,
and it's like only 5 of us get killed
but yet everybody's wiped out.
At the very beginning there were so many extras
and then as the shooting went on there was less.
And that was probably a budget issue.
They might've got a little scared and jumped overboard.
And Julius is like, "Hold it down."
School is out, McCullough.
I think that's the assumption, right,
is that Jason basically,
behind the scenes, was eliminating everyone.
A number of young hopefuls were initially considered
for the role of the film's smart yet aquaphobic lead.
Rennie had a special connection to Jason
because her evil uncle
was trying to teach her how to swim
when she was a little girl.
So I unfortunately,
because of an Old School understanding,
I tossed her into the water
which was a not very nice thing to do for an uncle.
And she saw Jason under the water.
My character is terrified of the water
but she decides to go on the boat anyway.
One by one the classmates are killed off or missing.
There's nowhere to go.
They can't escape from him and that claustrophobia
gave me a lot of ideas in how he could trap them
and kill them.
In 7 and 8 I was sort of absent.
I was there in spirit,
but I wasn't there actually scoring it.
Fred Mollin, the composer to the TV series,
took over writing the music to those two films,
although they dropped in a few pieces of mine
from previous films and, of course,
k-k-k...
TCH-T CH-T CH-JA-JA-JASON
As production of "Friday the 13th Part 8:
set sail in Vancouver, British Columbia
under the code titles "Ashes to Ashes,"
and "Burial at Sea,"
a last-minute change was made to a key member of the cast.
Originally when we got to Vancouver to shoot
there was this really hot guy playing my boyfriend.
That's all I remember about him. He was really hot and buff.
We shot the first day with this other guy, great guy,
really nice guy.
It was my first major film but I had done some other things,
so I shot the first scene of that day
which was like well into the script
when the ship was flooding with Peter Mark Richman.
This is Jason's fault!
Not another word of Jason, do you hear me?
No, I don't. And it's time you listened to me
if you want to get off this ship alive.
Let's get to the lifeboats.
He seemed a little uncomfortable.
The chemistry with him and the Rennie character
wasn't quite there.
I thought there was chemistry. Whatever.
Thank God for the producers because they really said,
"You know, there's a problem here,
and if we don't correct it right now,
we're going to have a problem... A bigger problem."
I think the day after that, one of the PA's came to me and said,
"The producers want to see you tomorrow night."
And I knew without them even saying it,
I'm going to be let go.
And so it was the toughest thing I've ever, you know,
had to do was to basically to replace an actor,
and that's what we ended up doing.
But, again, it was for the benefit of the movie.
And Scott Reeves came in.
And Scott Reeves was so sweet and fantastic,
and he's hot too.
Also on board were Martin Cummins
as film school geek Wayne...
Kelly Hu, best known for her roles in "X2"
and "The Scorpion King,"
and Saffron Henderson
as head-banging rocker J.J.
There was one girl in the movie who's a rocker,
and she's got the Flying V.
This place is achin' for a video!
She's got to get her head bashed in by a Flying V.
I mean, it just was like that's a no-brainer.
[Scream and splatter sound]
This is actually J.J.'s guitar
and right here you'll notice
that there's actually some of J.J.'s blood
after almost 20 years.
Forensics evidence.
I think every "Friday the 13th" has to have the promiscuous girl
who is caught doing something naughty.
And she pays.
Come and get it.
She was the Queen Bee.
She made everybody buzz around her.
And she did that by going in there
and being the edgiest, the coolest,
the one that was always doing the riskiest stuff.
I mean, seducing the teacher.
Hey.
There's a scene where she paints body organs on her.
I didn't mind the biology project so much
because it was kind of funny,
This girl comes on to me, and I was getting turned on.
I was really mmm
having it affect me.
Peter was a much older man when I was doing that,
but he definitely helped me with the scene
and made me feel comfortable.
What do you think you're doing? I'm your teacher!
- And cut it. (laughter)
I was a little nervous about, you know,
some of the revealing shots.
That was my issue really.
Rob Hedden wanted to make me feel comfortable,
so he just stripped down at the same time.
He goes, "Look. I'm doing the same thing."
And he was so awesome that way.
I did not feel exploited.
Then, again, I was the good girl
who was fully clothed throughout the entire movie.
Not only did I have a shirt,
I had a shirt and a vest
and baggy, horrible pants, macho shoes.
It was bad. It was very bad.
"Friday the 13th" has so many '80-isms in it
with the camcorder being this huge, huge camcorder,
the cocaine, and just the dress and the hair
because it was big hair, lots of backcombing
and definitely an '80s movie.
I think that a lot of creativity
rightfully has to go into modes of murder,
you know, and you know,
how is he going to dispatch his victims?
We had Kelly Hu and it was one of her first movies, you know,
and she was great.
And she was totally up for it and I thought,
"Well, okay, let's figure out a way to kill them
that doesn't involve a knife or something else.
The disco scene was one of the hardest scenes
I've ever had to do as Jason
because we did like 14 hours of work.
We decided to do this big dance thing and she's circling around
and his face is popping up here and there.
And then at the end, I had to pick the actress up
and choke her to the ceiling.
I had to say, "Well, now I have to hold you up to the ceiling,
and then throw you down hard, and you're dead.
So you can't break your fall.
Not easy to do, and the girl did a great job
because she just hit the deck hard.
That was actually one of the, at least from what I heard,
you know, one of the more satisfying deaths in it
because even without any blood or, you know, gore.
Despite its attempts to feature more fantastic effects
than outright bloodletting,
the film still had to pass muster
with the stringent MPAA ratings board.
I always thought of "Friday the 13th Part 8"
as sort of the Disney version of the "Friday the 13ths."
It wasn't quite as gory.
Well, I don't really know about the censor boards
and what they allow, or what they didn't allow,
but I'm sure they probably didn't like
"Friday the 13th" so maybe that's why the,
you know, blood situation sort of diminished.
It just seemed a little tame.
I mean, the 1980's, at the height of the success
of these movies,
there were multiple cases made that he was kind of
the modern Reagan-era killer
because he was making those kids that didn't "just say no"
and were having premarital sex, pay.
It's just sort of, watch out, young people.
Be careful what you do
because Jason's gonna come to you.
There were various things like, "Okay,
we gotta electrocute one kid, gotta electrocute somebody.
A lot of sparks. That'll be great.
Another one we did,
and this was done after the fact,
it wasn't shot during principal photography.
We decided let's put a sauna on the ship.
I actually put the Panaflex on my back
to shoot that sequence of the hot coals.
You start asking yourself is there something wrong with you
when you're spending your day
thinking up ways to murder people.
L'll never forget when I was shooting the shower scene
because when he comes in, even though you know it's a movie,
and you know you're just acting, it was scary.
You know, you shoot all night.
You shoot all night in these movies and you're exhausted,
you're freezing, you're being hosed down all the time.
You're in the same clothes for 3 months.
It was somewhat dangerous.
We were rather miserable through that period.
I had to be drowning in the ocean,
and we were in this huge oil tank
on the sound stage,
and I just remember going under the water
and coming up and just being covered in oil,
and on my face and thinking,
I think I've just taken 10 years off of my life.
One of the takes that's in the film
where Julius comes up out of the water,
the water was so violent
I'm losing the boat here. I'm losing the boat.
The boat was closer than I had anticipated,
so when I came up, the top of my gums
hit the edge of the boat.
There were so many times where I just hoped
that I wasn't going to end up in a cast
at the end of the night.
But, you know, it's show biz, baby, you know.
You keep it moving.
When the remaining cast members abandon ship
in a final bid for survival,
it appears that Jason had been left behind on the Lazarus.
Leaving fans to ponder another question...
How did Jason get to New York City?
We went through all of these, you know,
scenarios of how did he get there
and then we ultimately decided
let's just let the audience wonder
and let them try to figure it out.
He'd been doing all these other things during the movie
that defy any kind of human logic.
One image I had in my head
that really pertained to the New York thing
was having Jason rise up out of the water
into the harbor in New York,
and the first thing he sees is a giant billboard
with his face on it,
and he gives, just this little cock of his head like, what?
Operator, this is an emergency. Get me the police.
[Glass My death scene, the fans
and just the letters and stuff that I get,
it really, it really made an impact on people.
Just a great scene because it had really never been done
to try and box Jason.
Initially they had planned to have that boxing match
take place in Madison Square Garden.
His character thought, you know, l'll just wear him out
with my punches and ended up wearing himself out.
We just really went for it.
I, you know, to ask Kane. I said, "Hey, dude.
Can I really hit you?" He goes, "V.C., give me all you got."
He was punching me for real on every shot to the body.
Like 66 punches each take.
And like even at the end of that scene
where you see my knuckles very swollen
and with blood and stuff all on them,
that was real, baby.
It was, you know, it was toe to toe.
So I did, you know, I took a little abuse myself
so by the time it was time
to knock the head off the dummy, I was ready to do it.
You know, everybody else can see what's coming but Julius.
You know what I mean? So he's just standing there.
And just a classic line that he gives right before that.
Take your best shot
Motherfucker.
If you are going to sort of tire yourself out
trying to take Jason on,
don't pause and say "Take your best shot, motherfucker."
Run because he is going to knock your head off into a dumpster.
They made three. One was for close-ups.
One was heavier that actually hit the garbage can,
and then there was another one that was lighter
that they tossed up in the air.
Yeah, but I kept the one, the money shot one.
The one that was for close-ups.
It was an adventure.
It was really, really an adventure.
For veteran character actor Peter Mark Richman,
best known for his roles in episodes
of "The Twilight Zone" and "Dynasty,"
being killed by Jason was hardly the high point
of his prestigious acting career.
One of the most awful things that I had to do was my demise.
Jason picked me up and carried me over to this barrel,
and there was a rat on top of the barrel.
It was so nauseating.
We shot in some miserable street in Vancouver.
That was supposed to be New York, right?
So there was a joke running around.
It was Jason Takes Vancouver
instead of Jason Takes Manhattan,
but we were able to make a lot of parts of Vancouver
look like New York.
Let's be honest. That's not Manhattan.
I've been to Manhattan. That's not Manhattan.
You don't understand, there's a maniac trying to kill us.
Welcome to New York.
It's kind of like trying to make a nice steak dinner
on a ham sandwich budget.
Not since "Rumble in the Bronx"
has a less accurate depiction of New York been presented.
And then not only that,
they were only going to let me shoot
for one week actually in New York.
We put a 40-foot crane in the middle of Times Square,
and we did some big stuff
that none of the Fridays had been able to do before.
It gave us a different kind of engagement
with the, with the audience.
The single most amazing thing that I've ever done
as the character was shooting the scenes in Times Square.
And there were hundreds of people on either side
of the streets behind barricades watching the filming.
So I had the mask on,
and just stood there knowing there's hundreds of people,
and I just turned and looked at them.
They went nuts.
It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen.
Screaming and cheering
just because I had given them the look in the costume.
But when I was standing in Times Square
looking at this giant crane with all these extras around,
Jason walking through.
This is a real movie. This is big.
I felt like, like a rock star or something
because the way people reacted.
You didn't get me in the lake.
And you're not gonna get me now!
I felt very empowered playing the part,
especially at the end when, you know,
I was the only one surviving
and there we were in the sewers, and I felt like,
Alright, this is a nice, tough, accurate portrayal
of a girl's strength.
You know, he's chasing after our heroes
at the end and he gets hit with toxic waste
and melts to the point where it is supernatural ending
where he finally reverts to the child,
which seemed like it had more closure than the other ones
as far as Jason coming full circle.
And what was supposed to happen is that
young Jason comes out of this giant skull,
and it just looked funny.
And so it was on the famous cutting room floor.
Were I submerged in toxic waste,
I'm probably not emerging as my 8-year-old self,
particularly if I was already a mongoloid,
mentally handicapped person.
Clearly the government needs to be investigating
the healthy byproduct of toxic waste.
Part of it is that he is just a supernatural kind of being,
that keeps coming back.
You just can't kill the guy.
And I couldn't kill him either.
He-he-he-he.
The never-ending battle
between Jason and the Motion Picture Association of America
continued to make headlines
in the weeks leading up to the film's release.
The ratings board wasn't amused
by the image of Jason
slashing his way through the film's teaser poster
with a bloody knife.
And neither were New York City officials.
I remember some controversy as far as like
with the "I Heart New York" poster.
It did piss off the Tourism Board in New York.
In other news, after New York officials threatened to sue,
Paramount Pictures agreed to remove
the original promotional posters for "Friday the 13th Part 8"
where Jason is slashing through the "I love New York" logo.
As far as like capitalizing on being in New York City,
I think one of the, another way that they did that,
that was really kind of brilliant was the trailer.
They set it up with the skyline
that we all know to be New York City.
You know, Frank Sinatra's playing.
You know, you're thinking it's going to be
some beautiful, sleepy, you know, date movie
and then all of a sudden Jason's ass pops up in there.
Now New York has a new problem.
Even if you are not a genre film fan,
you're just a marketing executive,
that is a home run marketing concept.
And then shortly after we did "Jason Takes Manhattan,"
(I was asked to do "The Arsenic) Hall Show,"
in costume as a guest.
And I walk out, and he pulled the whole interview off
by talking to someone who doesn't speak.
I got some great titles I put together...
Jason and the Three Babies. What you think of that?
(laughter)
Despite its clever ad campaign,
the film opened to scathing reviews
and earned a new series low of $14.3 million.
I don't know if "Friday the 13th Part 8"
was the best episode.
I think the first one was probably the best episode,
in my humble opinion.
But we gave it our best. We really tried.
One of the things is that some of the fans,
it kind of rubbed them the wrong way,
the fact that they went expecting to see
all this slashing and the things that you typically associate
with a "Friday the 13th" movie taking place in New York City,
and, you know, it took place on the boat.
For producer Frank Mancuso, Jr.,
who would go on to produce such films
as "Species," "Ronin" and "Stigmata,"
the time had finally come to hang up the hockey mask
and bid farewell to "Friday the 13th."
The "Friday the 13ths" had a lot of negative connotations
that came along with it from a societal point of view,
and I think that that was very much a concern to me.
And if a kid got shot in a Friday the 13th movie,
it was the movie's fault,
it wasn't the fact that the kid was there with the gun.
You know, so, I can't keep on doing this
because on some level this is going to get to a place
where I can't get away from it.
So I've sort of made a conscious decision not to do it anymore.
I got along so great with Frank and just,
he just had such a great attitude.
And I was just amazed at how much creativity
and certainly insight into what was going to work,
what wasn't going to work,
and how to handle people.
I was lucky enough to be on that ride,
and I appreciate the fans
because as far as I'm concerned,
the fans are what made this movie what it is.
A cultural sort of phenomenon.
And that doesn't happen one way.
That's a two-way street.
They sort of brought a life to it
that it would have never had without them,
without any doubt.
Although Paramount Pictures never officially announced
the end of their association
with the "Friday the 13th" franchise,
after the disappointing box office returns
of JASON TAKES MANHATTAN,
there was little interest in moving forward
with another sequel.
For three years, Jason would lie dormant...
until producer Sean S. Cunningham
decided that the time had come
for the monster to return to his maker.
You know, I was away from FRIDAY THE 13TH
for several years
because they were making the same movie over and over again,
and I'd been associated with it,
but I had moved on to do other things.
I think probably after "Part 8,"
Paramount figured the franchise had gone its run.
The whole reason to come back
was I wanted to do Freddy vs. Jason.
I thought that was going to be so cool,
and it was a way to sort of breathe the life into it.
As it turned out, I was able to get the rights back
from Paramount and Warner Brothers
and set something up at New Line,
but we had to wait for a long time
before we could do FREDDY VS. JASON,
and that's when we wound up doing FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 9.
Paramount kept the rights to FRIDAY THE 13TH
and the other partners had Jason Voorhees,
Which is Why PART 9 is a FINAL FRIDAY,
not FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 9.
With the sequel rights now secured
and New Line Cinema officially on board,
Cunningham turned the director's chair
over to an ambitious young filmmaker
whose passion was matched only by his inexperience.
When I started directing the film I was 23.
And at that point I was the youngest director
New Line had ever hired, and I was a year out of film school.
And I won Best Picture when I was there for the short film
that I had made.
He had just graduated NYU,
had a script written with a friend named Dean Lorey
Called JOHNNY ZOMBIE.
It was a fun little kind of horror comedy
that started getting more and more attention
and eventually became a film called MY BOYFRIEND'S BACK
which was a major production for Disney,
and they didn't want a first-time director helming it.
So Adam kind of got bumped off the project.
Our feeling about Jason
was we can't take it too seriously.
It's got to be fun for us.
And we were huge geek fans.
We loved the series.
And it was like, 'How do we make a movie
that we want to see?'
I think when JASON GOES TO HELL was conceived
it was coming off the ill-reception of PART 8
which was not very positive.
So we tried to kind of change the formula a little bit.
The plot was actually dictated by Sean.
Basically what he said was, 'I want that damn hockey mask
out of the movie.
So whatever you come up with, let's make that movie.'
Rightly or wrongly, maybe Jason needed a little shaking up.
So we decided to go in and mess with the mythology a little bit.
Much like in HALLOWEEN 3.
They just threw out Michael Myers entirely.
Sean wasn't involved with the hockey mask.
That wasn't Sean's movie.
Sean's movie was about a mother
avenging the wrongful death of her son.
So Sean always wanted to kind of go back to themes of family
and those ideas so we were really turned on by that.
He wanted to create a mythology
out of these previous eight films
that really weren't in any way leading to a mythology,
so he had to kind of create it from scratch.
We thought how fun would it be to play with
the audience's expectations and start the movie
by killing Jason.
Incoming!
And once he's been killed,
we started to reveal a more sort of interesting,
or at least from our point of view,
version of the Jason myth
which is that Jason is ostensibly Hell's assassin.
I didn't have a clue as to what the plot was.
And we got this hodge-podge of a script.
There was something about Jason
transferring from body to body to body.
So Jason is not a hockey mask wielding maniac,
even though that's his favorite form,
but that his evil can go from person to person to person.
This was one of the first films where
the idea and the essence of Jason's evil
sort of manifesting itself physically
was really the first time they'd ever done that,
and it was definitely a departure from the other movies.
So it was a bit more of a creature movie
than it was an all-out kind of slasher film.
It's reminiscent of THE HIDDEN
which I hadn't even seen before we wrote JASON.
So we were like, 'Wow. That's coincidental. Uh, oh.'
I was so surprised when I finally saw the film
that it actually made any sense at all.
I think we figured out that the entire crew
was under the age of 25 except for me.
And I went, 'Really?'
And so there was that enthusiasm like, 'Oh, boy!
We're doing a feature film here!
This is so cool!'
I didn't know a damn thing,
and I think about the first day of production
is when I realized, 'Wow! I am so in over my head.'
As JASON GOES TO HELL begins,
a nubile young woman returns to her Crystal Lake cabin
in the dead of the night.
But in an unexpected twist,
it is revealed that Jason's intended victim
is really an FBI agent being used as human bait.
So what's funny about my character, Agent Marcus,
is that she's an FBI agent.
We try to make it like you wouldn't know that.
I mean, why would an FBI agent get naked in this cabin
to lure someone but, hey,
the girl's gotta do what the girl's gotta do.
And I remember Adam like hating my hair.
I'm like, 'Honey, if you're looking at my hair
and not my hooters, what are you doing?'
And we put every cliché
that had ever been in any of the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies
within a 5 minute section.
You'll see the mirror close, and he's not there.
I thought Adam was kind of brilliant
in the way he kind of just spoon fed you.
'Oh, you're okay, you're okay, okay. No, you aren't.
You're fucked.
I was able to bring Kane Hodder back
who had played Jason before, and he was basically
the only holdover that was left from the Paramount years.
It wasn't even a discussion.
It was, 'So who's got Kane Hodder's phone number?'
I really like working with Kane.
He took the part so seriously,
and he knew everything that Jason would or wouldn't do
so it made my job an awful lot easier.
It was probably the hardest makeup to work in,
and the least amount of days that I was in the makeup.
We really wanted to go with a sort of mutated,
diseased look where the head is sort of diseased and misshapen.
A lot more sort of Elephant Man.
The hockey mask had been on Jason so long
that the skin had grown around it in theory.
The hard thing was not being able to take the hockey mask off
between shots.
If you do something violent and, you know,
with a lot of energy, it takes your breath away.
You want to be able to take that thing off
and catch your breath.
I couldn't take it off between shots
so I had to catch my breath
while breathing my own exhaled air.
Not easy to do at all.
He's very method, and that's great for camera,
but boy, when you have to work with him,
it can be very daunting and in one scene,
he almost took my head off.
And I was supposed to run and jump around the car.
I literally jumped over the car because he scared me that bad.
And I remember coming back, and I was shaking.
I was like, 'Don't ever do that again.
Well, maybe one more time. That was kind of good.
Was that good, Adam?'
Jason has been done away with in so many different ways.
I mean, in previous movies, you know, he was set on fire.
Of course, he's shot hundreds of times.
But blown up in JASON GOES TO HELL?
I thought all that could have been done to Jason had been done
but, lo and behold.
There are a lot of Jason fans who to this day are, you know,
pissed off at me for blowing up Jason
in the first ten minutes of the movie.
They love that scene
but then they want Jason right back, right again.
And for me, I thought it was more fun
to have Kane Hodder actually in the film
making fun of Jason.
And he makes this comment about himself
when basically he says
He wasn't nothing but a big ol' pussy anyway.
And I love that. I love that!
Kane was a remarkable asset to the film
because I wanted all the other actors
who play the 'Jason Evil' in the movie
to have that same economy of movement
and that same language.
With not a single teenage character
featured in the script,
Sean Cunningham called upon an experienced ensemble
made up of recognizable faces from network television
including Erin Gray,
Steven Williams and John D. LeMay,
the only actor to play the male lead
in both the film and television incarnations
of FRIDAY THE 13TH.
We cast John D. LeMay because the director, Adam Marcus,
really felt comfortable having him
because he knew him from THE SERIES.
That was the reason I didn't want him to do it.
I married the daughter of Jason's sister.
Who knew?
But I'm happy to know that I am related
to such a cultural icon.
Tracked by mysterious bounty hunter Creighton Duke,
it is revealed that Jason is attempting to be reborn
through a never-before-mentioned relative.
Thirteen years and nine films later,
we learn that Jason Voorhees had a sister.
The reasoning for another child
was that Pamela Voorhees
had had her daughter out of wedlock.
And Jason became sort of the jewel of her eye.
This was the only child she cared about.
She fixated on this boy and sent her daughter up for adoption.
That was the idea behind it.
I was the sister to Jason Voorhees.
They needed somebody who had the DNA,
and I guess it was me and then my daughter, of course,
and my granddaughter.
I played Baby Stephanie in JASON GOES TO HELL.
When I made the film, I was about 6 months old.
I've little to no memory about being in the film
considering I was so young
but when I got a little bit older,
my parents broke the news to me
that I was in a horror film
Here's beautiful
And I wasn't allowed to watch every scene, of course.
But I did watch the scenes that I was in.
I was like, 'Oh my gosh, that's me.'
And it was just a really crazy experience
to be able to watch myself.
I think the actors were amazing,
especially John LeMay and Steven Williams
who was out of his mind and brilliant.
The finger breaking scene was one of my favorites actually.
Jason needs to be reborn again, and he needs Jessica to do it.
Just because it was so weird and twisted.
I mean, here's this guy fondling my fingers.
Ooow! fuck!
Amazingly I was able to still beat Jason up
at the end with my broken hand.
Everything about JASON GOES TO HELL,
especially the scene
between Creighton Duke and Steven Culp.
Robert: I want you to say the first thing
that comes to your mind. Okay?
Creighton: Okay.
Robert: Jason Voorhees.
Creighton: Well, that makes me think of a little girl
in a pink dress sticking a hot dog through a donut.
It was always about,
'How can we crack each other up?'
It was like two guys on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
trying to get the other guy to laugh.
After an early test screening,
New Line requested that several new sequences be added
to the film,
including one that ranks as one of the most violent
and graphic in the series' history.
I play a camper named Luke who's going camping
with two beautiful ladies.
Luke: We're going to Camp Crystal Lake.
Steven: Oh yeah?
Planning on smoking a little dope,
having a little premarital sex, and getting slaughtered?
The murder of the couple in the tent
was something that we shot after the film had wrapped.
I was petitioning to have both ladies in the tent.
I thought it would be fun. Why not?
And it was one of those sequences
where they felt they needed a really violent kill
that had a lot of impact.
So we started our scene with these kids
who are pretty lit up.
They'd been skinny dipping.
The run into the scene, they go to have sex
and what happens is they choose not to use a condom.
Oh, God, Debbie, I hate these things.
And when the killer steps on that condom wrapper,
on that unused condom,
the audience went out of their minds.
Every screening.
For actress Michelle Clunie,
later known for her role in the groundbreaking television series
QUEER AS FOLK,
the scene put her in a compromising situation...
In more ways than one.
Michelle and he had been dating and had broken up
right before we shot that scene.
And then we showed up on set and there we were,
naked together for a couple days.
So she had to do this huge love scene
with her ex-boyfriend, and they were both completely nude.
You're on a mattress on the floor,
inside a fake tent with all these guys around,
and you've got to sort of create some sort of chemistry,
some sort of intimacy between you
which doesn't feel natural at all.
And then when they finally kill her,
they put this fake Clunie on top of me.
Michelle came up to K.N.B.,
and we actually cast her in that position.
She's on top of the guy and they're having sex,
and, all of a sudden, out of the middle of her chest,
the road sign pops out and blood sprays everywhere.
(screams)
Oh shit!
And then it's torn through her shoulder blade
where she flops open.
And it was the second dummy that had been already pre-cut
with the torso cut in half,
and it had a little mechanism in it
so that it could sort of flower open.
And they're spraying blood at me with a fire extinguisher,
I remember.
It's a little sad that today that probably would have been
a digital shot of the thing coming out,
and they would have animated it.
Richard Gant who was playing Jason
was supposed to at some point crush my head.
And I think that they ran out of time and money,
and they, and so they didn't build a cast of my head.
And they cut out right as his head's coming down, I think,
and they cut to an exterior of,
and we hear me screaming and then crush.
[Off screen screaming]
Unsafe sex equals death, I was totally cool with.
What was amazing about that
was that the Wall Street Journal,
when they talked about JASON GOES TO HELL,
they called the film a return to morality in cinema
because of that scene.
The thing about Adam Marcus was he was really behind,
100% behind shooting every gag to its fullest.
[sounds of sharpening blade]
The reason for the homoerotic shaving scene
in JASON GOES TO HELL was that I knew 15 years later
everybody would be asking me
about the homoerotic shaving scene in JASON GOES TO HELL.
Again, I found these movies to be really pretty sexist.
It's always women in the shower
soaping up just before they get whacked.
And I thought, 'You know what?
I'm going to make the first one of these
where there's as many naked men as there are naked women.
Let's even the score. Something for the ladies.
Not only is it homoerotic,
but I have a middle-aged guy naked on the table.
I don't have Brad Pitt on the table.
I have an interracial kiss at the end of the scene.
I mean, everything about it was a taboo.
There's not a scene like it in any other Jason movie
or really in any other movie I can think of.
I don't know if that's good or bad but
Filming my death scene was lots of fun.
I remember in acting class,
I was good at being dead,
so I was able to bring that to FRIDAY THE 13TH.
And it was kind of fun going to work with a knife in my back
and pretending... l've been killed.
[screaming]
In Joey B's restaurant,
the carnage was fabulous.
Bodies everywhere.
It was really bloody and violent.
I just loved watching Rusty work.
She was great at improving...
This makes a whole new patty, hence,
the two-for-one burger sale.
And every time she was in a scene,
I was just mesmerized by her.
When I have my gun on John and Kari
defending the baby, the line was
'Nobody's going to touch that baby, '
but I decided to say...
Nobody's gonna touch that fuckin' ray of sunshine!
In Rusty Schwimmer's case,
she got punched in the face.
Poor Leslie. He got dumped in a fry vat.
And I know from friends that there was a big cheer
that let up when I was punched in the face
because they wanted me to shut up.
In an attempt to finally subvert the MPAA,
the filmmakers planned to release JASON GOES TO HELL
as both an R-rated theatrical cut
and an unrated home video version.
This allowed the K.N.B. Effects team
the freedom to create some of the bloodiest
and most over-the-top gags ever attempted
in a FRIDAY THE 13TH film.
As a horror film back then,
you always went in pretty gore-heavy
expecting to be cut back.
I think that the whole point was,
throw all that stuff in there
and then go to the ratings board,
and if we can't get it, then we'll do the unrated version
and give the audience what they want.
Eventually, of course,
the evil gets back into the body of a Voorhees.
Steven: That part about being reborn
through a Voorhees woman, does it have to be a living woman?
Duke: No.
Steven: That thing's in the basement with Jessica's mother.
And Jason is reborn into his hulking magnificent form.
Jason's rebirth may have thrilled fans,
but it did not sit as well with actress Erin Gray,
who was not present when an insert shot
was added to the film at the last minute.
The first time that I was made aware of this scene
was actually in the movie theater
when I saw it, and I gasped loudly.
I just thought it was inappropriate.
It was not something that I would have agreed to.
I actually felt violated.
It's the one thing in any scene,
in any movie that I've done
that I just find very distasteful,
although I've forgiven Sean since.
I do love Sean personally.
The truth is, what I was trying to do
was use Jason, the figure of Jason,
as almost a prize for the audience.
Duke: Tonight, my friend...
You will...
Steven: Jessica! Duke: Die!
[bone snapping]
Bringing him back at the end,
I wanted it to feel like your friend came back into the movie.
John's character took a tremendous amount of abuse.
We had a helluva fight out in the front of the house.
I did put up a pretty good fight.
I take great pride in my backhand to Jason
at the very end of the film.
And, by the way, you might not know this.
I'm Jason.
All of Jason's vocals, that's me.
Because I work cheap.
Kari's character was fairly tough too.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to fight her
as much as I would like,
but we still had some good scenes
where she stabbed me with the knife and everything.
Interestingly enough, at the end of the movie,
it was always scripted as a big, lightning-filled climax
with the skies opening up and all this celestial activity.
K.N.B. had a very elaborate sequence
designed for that with all kinds of puppets,
and we had a very elaborate miniature
which wound up not being used because of technical problems.
These branches or these roots of these trees
were supposed to suck Jason down into hell.
And we were all underneath the table puppetering these things.
And they were going to do these aerial shots
and big camera moves going around the two of us
as we squared off.
Originally there was one extra creature at the end
which was a demon baby
that they had, I believe, an amputee in a prosthetic suit
that had a big long tail and
ultimately that wound up being excised.
This is my doll that Bob Kurtzman gave me
after the shoot.
They didn't use it so yeah, a little keepsake for me.
But there was one parting shot yet to come.
One that would set the stage
for Jason's long-anticipated face-off
with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET'S Freddy Krueger.
I suddenly said, 'Wait a second.
We've got a chance for the ultimate in-joke in this movie.
We're with New Line.
New Line owns Freddy.
'What are we doing?
Like, that's the end of our movie.'
And they fell in love with the idea.
I mean, it was like instantly, 'Oh my God, that's great.'
In the end where Freddy's hand comes out of the ground
and grabs the hockey mask,
it was my hand wearing the Freddy glove,
grabbing the mask.
And this is your final chance... to see it!
JASON GOES TO HELL THE FINAL FRIDAY
opened on Friday, August 13, 1993
to a respectable $7.5 million in its opening weekend.
To this day, JASON GOES TO HELL
remains one of the most hotly-debated installments
of the series.
And once again, THE FINAL FRIDAY wasn't final after all.
We were trying to do something different.
Some people really like it for that and forgive its faults.
Other people only see it for its faults and, you know,
say there should be all Jason all the time.
Jason has to be in the film.
I think that was one of the biggest let-down for the fans.
It's possible that the concept jumped the shark on some level.
At the time they were trying to reinvent and figure out
how to keep the franchise going,
and how to keep people interested.
So I respect that.
I think we did something that was bold.
I know there are people who are upset by that,
but my response to that has always been, 'You know what?
There are 7 of those movies you can rent.
You can see a whole lot of Jason in the hockey mask.'
You have to deliver a certain story,
and that story had better be consistent
with the ones that preceded it,
and Jason better be consistent with what happened beforehand.
So this is not a place where you want to say,
'l've got an idea.
Let's have Jason do body swapping.'
Not so good.
The Jason audience is a smart audience.
Not just about Jason movies,
which they will quote you chapter and verse.
They know more about my movie than I know about it.
The truth is, true horror fans
know every genre of cinema,
they just happen to know horror better than anything else.
Yes, are they going to blog incessantly
about the color of someone's suit? Sure.
But ultimately, for me,
every time I see somebody blogging
about JASON GOES TO HELL or about, quite frankly,
about any of the FRIDAY THE 13TH films,
I feel really lucky that they care enough
to actually spend the time and energy
talking about this character.
For me, I really learned to always respect every audience.
And I think that's probably the most important thing I learned
from Jason.
Following the crowd-pleasing coda of JASON GOES TO HELL,
it appeared that the long-anticipated showdown
between Jason and Freddy
was finally about to become a reality.
But as the project remained stalled at New Line Cinema
throughout the 1990s,
Sean Cunningham decided to give fans one more FRIDAY.
We had been in development hell
on FREDDY VS. JASON for years,
and finally Jim Isaac,
who's the director of JASON X, said, 'Well,
if we're just waiting on FREDDY/JASON,
let's just make another Jason film.'
So Todd Farmer, Jimmy and I sat down
and just started coming up with ideas for a new Jason.
We didn't want to do anything that was going to screw
FREDDY VS. JASON.
So the way to stay away from that was to push him
into the future.
I mean, that was just kind of thrown out as kind of
like a gag at first
because that's, you know, that's where horror films go to die,
like LEPRECHAUN or HELLRAISER, l guess.
You know, space is kind of the final frontier.
Armed with a budget of $13 million,
Isaac took his team to Toronto
and set out to make the most ambitious FRIDAY THE 13TH yet.
JASON X takes place 400 years in the future.
Jason has been captured by the military,
and they really don't know what to do with him.
There's somebody in charge of the operation
who thinks that he should be rozen.
The high ranking official comes in, played by David Cronenberg,
and says, 'No, we're not going to freeze him today as planned.
We're going to take him away and study him.'
His unique ability
to regenerate lost and damaged tissue,
it just cries out for more research.
David Cronenberg supplied a lot of his own crew
for Jim Isaac.
Our first AD was, you know, David's AD.
Stephan Dupris, who I've worked for years
Who did NAKED LUNCH.
He's got an Academy Award for THE FLY
and a lot of David Cronenberg films.
He's an amazing makeup effects artist.
The rumor going around set was Cronenberg
wanted to be in the movie only if he got killed on camera.
That was the deal.
They dropped their guard a bit and, of course,
Jason gets free and creates havoc
but ends up getting frozen anyway.
In the future, earth has been completely destroyed.
It's a wasteland.
And a group of science students, kind of loser kids,
go on this field trip.
We arrive doing some archeology
and discover a frozen Jason Voorhees,
and we don't know what trouble we're in for,
but of course the audience does.
Really it came down to, you know,
kids basically having sex or drugs are going to die.
Even four hundred years in the future,
neither Jason, nor his appetite for sex-crazed victims,
has evolved.
I think in the future maybe teenagers
are a little more sexual.
Of course, some wonderful devices that I get to use
for such things as nipple tweaking.
So, yeah, it's all in there.
It's all in the curriculum.
The easiest, most fun work you can get as an actor
because you're basically just running from a monster
until he catches up with you and kills you
and hopefully you get to make outwith a hot chick
along the way.
Which is one of the things that somehow
manages to sort of stir Jason's soul and re-awaken him.
Certainly the way it's edited, it kind of implies that,
that it was just too much for him to take,
and he just had to rise up and put a stop
to all this crazy teenage love.
One of the important things in a Jason FRIDAY THE 13TH film
is to be true to Jason's character.
I think that's where Kane comes in.
My first impression of the script of JASON X was like,
'I don't know. Jason in space?'
I didn't want to make it hokey.
He took it seriously.
He took playing Jason very, very seriously.
Even though the location and everything,
all the surroundings, were different,
I just tried to keep him the same
as I had always done before and I guess, you know,
it worked out.
He definitely made sure that we were all kind of a little bit,
sort of like intimidated by him.
I think he had a tattoo that said 'Kill' in his lower lip.
I think he definitely goes to a dark place
when he plays the role.
He was also very safe when we were, you know,
when we were struggling.
He made sure that we worked out how he was going to hold me
so that I could fight without actually getting hurt.
I did my own stunt when he threw me against the window.
Which I thought was great because, you know,
sticking a girl's head in cryogenic fluid
and smashed it on the counter. Very creative.
I had to plunge my face into water and scream
and then hold my breath and just wait
because then they ended up putting, you know,
all the CGI over the top.
Technically our most difficult kill.
And we spent a lot of time on that, prepping it.
I think they made 10 heads,
but it was really, really creepy.
All these heads lined up of, you know, me screaming.
L've never seen a crew and a cast gather for an event
just to watch that effect.
Everybody just thought that was a great one.
We knew from way back then that that was going to be a good kill
and it stands the test of time.
Apparently MYTHBUSTERS a few years ago tested my death
to see if they could actually freeze a head in liquid nitrogen
and then smash it.
Guy: Absolutely nothing like the movie.
Girl: So I guess this one's busted.
Originally in the script
my death scene was going to be that he was going to somehow
use the sliding doors to cut me in half,
and I was really stoked about that happening.
I was really looking forward to them doing that.
And then I guess they thought it would be a little too difficult
to do and so they switched it to the machete blade.
Melanie's reaction to me being killed,
they squirt out my blood.
It shoots up and hits her right in the eyes,
and she just freaks out because it wasn't actually
supposed to go in her eyes like that,
and I think that's the shot they ended up using,
so I kind of get a chuckle when I watch that scene.
JASON X has some good kills, I think.
I think we did a pretty good job of that.
You had different elements as well.
You had this sort of super SWAT team
that was out to get Jason.
You had hologram games.
I thought this was an alien sim?
Yeah, it is.
This was my tiny cameo in JASON X,
and I get the privilege, myself and Dov get the privilege
of saying that we died twice in a Jason movie
because we die in the virtual reality scene
where I get my head cut off.
OK, screw this. Game over!
And then later I get my head smashed into a wall
where my stuntman lovingly broke his nose for me.
I really liked Jonathan, the guy who plays the teacher.
We're gonna be safe here.
[Screams]
Shut up!
He's just such a sleaze ball, you know,
and he's always making the wrong choices and, you know,
he basically endangers everybody.
Jason's coming at him,
and he doesn't know what's going on,
and he grabs his machete and so he says,
Guys. lt's okay. He just wanted his machete back.
[Makes slashing sound]
We didn't know how I was going to die initially.
I'm asking everyone,
'How do I get it?'
So they said, 'Ah, we're going to cut your head off.'
Came back later and they said, 'We changed our mind.
He's going to grab you,
and he's going to slam your head into an electronic box.'
I leapt up going 'Holy fuck, that's hot.'
The thing about JASON X which, you know,
we didn't really think about
was that this took place in the future
so every single thing on frame had to be built.
It had to be created.
It had to be designed and fabricated.
The future was a lot more colorful
than I thought it would be.
It was beautiful, but it was beautiful in the way
that BATMAN 3 was beautiful in that, you know,
there was lots of color and lots of neon
and just not what I was expecting.
You know, what I was expecting was THE DARK KNIGHT.
We had something like, I don't know, 800 visual effects
in the film.
Sometimes you're acting with a tennis ball
on the end of a stick.
I was very new to it.
Given the fact that we were trying to pull off
a lot of technical things,
it was pretty smooth.
We had one shot that was outside
which just made the shoot very easy
because we were on stage every single day.
Following the release of Wes Craven's 1996 mega-hit SCREAM,
'slick, smart and self-referential'
became the hottest buzzwords in horror,
and JASON X was no exception.
No wonder you wore this thing.
My only issue really was that,
as we got closer into shooting, the script got changed.
It was one of the sort of post-SCREAM films.
And suddenly all the studio notes were
'this needs to be more like SCREAM.'
So it was a movie that had to acknowledge
that the movie-going audience, we knew all the cliches.
Now what?
Now basically... we die.
At one point, Lewis Abernathy, who had written DEEPSTAR SIX
and had been doing some work with Cameron,
he was also in TITANIC.
He was the frizzy-haired guy telling the story
about how the Titanic went down.
He came in just as a fresh set of eyes.
I think they went through and polished a lot of the dialogue
and it maybe made it a less ALIENS
and a little more campy.
Aw, shit, I forgot my arm.
Yeah, here you go, dumb-ass.
Hi, hand.
Some people thought it was a great idea and fun.
Other people thought, 'Oh, no.
We should go back to basics.'
If a rusted machete would no longer cut it
for Jason in the 24th century,
his opponents also had to be tougher, stronger
and more resilient than ever before.
Both good and evil needed an upgrade.
The women in FRIDAY THE 13TH movies
are always the strong, you know,
the strong characters,
and we wanted to be true to that.
But being in the future,
we wanted to take advantage of that as well
so Todd and I came up with this idea of this robot.
And this is the lovely Kay-Em 14,
Tsunaron's little 'love-bot.'
I actually took this character seriously.
I wanted to not just be android-like,
completely robotic.
And so Jim and I talked about
what would be some kind of templates
that we could work with,
and he actually mentioned STEPFORD WIVES.
There's some strength in that
in terms of being completely unflappable
and delighted at, 'Oh, what are you doing now?
You've taken my head off. No worries.'
I'd clap if I could.
There's a scene in JASON X
where the robot Kay-Em wants to get fake boobs.
- What do you think? - Hmm?
- Do you like them? - They're fine.
And the boobs are not Lisa Ryder's boobs.
It's a prosthetic that goes over it
and then they have these fake nipples,
and they were attached to wires.
[clinking sounds, Tsunaron grumbles]
To this day, still, when people mention that movie
they are like, 'Oh, I love that fake boob scene.'
A giant challenge was my costume.
My costume was completely head-to-toe PVC
and corseted at the back.
It was hard to breath.
I think I lost like 10 pounds just sweating through that,
you know, PVC costume.
We wanted her to be the one that kills off Jason.
So it was just - it was just a way to have some fun with it.
There was a lot of gymnastics.
Just a lot of kung fu really.
Jason got shot so many times during that movie.
The wardrobe was changing every day, you know.
Here's the one that has 15 bullet holes.
Now this next scene you're going to have 45 bullet holes.
She shot off his arm, shot off his leg,
and then shot his head, and it exploded.
Yeah.
And that's when we felt that he had died.
We really wanted to play with the technology,
with taking advantage of the fact
that we're 400 years in the future,
and then we tossed around ideas
of what kind of technology might be forefront
and nanotechnology, I thought, was the obvious choice.
So we've got Uber-Jason.
So this is Jason 100 times better
than Jason has ever been before in the future.
The makeup was very easy to work in
until we got to Uber-Jason.
That was an entire one-piece suit.
It limited my motion a lot with the arm and the leg
that had the metallic pieces.
I couldn't bend at the joints as much as I was used to.
I still love the design of that Uber-Jason mask.
Then you get the red contact lenses.
Crew people didn't even want to look at me in the eyes
because it was so weird looking.
Because even though you've got the same character,
it's doing something different.
Jim lsaac's son brought his class in and, you know,
of course, I scared the hell out of them,
and, you know, kid went into a fetal position, one of them.
I guess I'm a little cruel but I gotta have some fun too.
Bar none, I mean, you can't put the guy down.
I mean he literally is indestructible in that sense.
Much to Kay-Em's sadness
because then he knocked my head off.
You guys might want to run.
Our big plan to use our robot has gone awry
so we've got this rolling robot head
that Tsunaron is in love with.
He's holding it, and he's gone crazy.
He's lost his mind, and he's holding the robot head.
We've got Waylander
who's sacrificing himself to save the day
and blows up the hull.
One of the things that's interesting about the film
is my death is sort of indirectly caused by Jason.
Jason has punched a hole from outside
into the spaceship and, of course,
when he pulls out his hand, it creates this enormous vacuum.
We're all trying to run away and poor little Janessa
just isn't strong enough or fast enough
to get away before the suction starts.
This sucks on so many levels!
Janessa has the best witticisms.
Want a beer?
Or do you want to smoke some pot?
Or we can have pre-marital sex.
The most successful scene in that movie
was the sort of hyper-reality of Jason on the spaceship,
you know, pummeling the naked campers in the sleeping bag.
You know, it's a love letter to all the other movies
because that's what they were at one point.
It was just innocent and fun.
Originally I wanted Uber-Jason
to pick up the girls in the sleeping bags
and swirl them around like this
and then hit them in the air and then throw them down.
We were running out of time and money by then.
It was the end of the show
and that would involve a lot of rigging to do that
or a little CGI stuff, so we adapted it a little bit,
which I think actually worked out even better.
The weightless environment scene
with Jason fighting another guy concerned me from the beginning.
I thought Jason might look a little comical
floating around weightless even if he's fighting
so we were able to limit that a little bit.
One way to find a weakness
because it's pretty hard to find a weakness for Jason.
Tsunaron and the Rowan character
escaped ultimately into a pod,
and they saw Brodski ride Jason off into the sunset
kind of thing.
And it was basically my head, Tsunaron and Rowan who survived.
During the year-long production of JASON X, Michael DeLuca,
New Line Cinema's president of production,
made a much-publicized exit from the studio,
and with him would go the film's biggest champion.
With virtually no support for the film at New Line,
JASON X would be left adrift in space for over two years.
You know, it just kind of sat there.
It was the redheaded stepchild for almost 18 months
um... and during which time actually
a print got leaked out on the Internet.
And I know for a couple months,
we were the most pirated movie out there.
By the time JASON X was released in April 2002,
it failed to ignite even a modest spark at the box office,
and is regarded by both critics and fans
as an interstellar dud.
When it finally did come out, you know,
a lot of the buzz that had been going on on the Internet
had kind of died down,
and whether it was deserved or not,
I think there was a bad smell to it,
and it just didn't perform as well as it could have.
There's lots of things I'd like to do differently.
I mean, I don't think there's anybody
who's sort of directed a film or, you know,
made a drawing or sculpted an ashtray or whatever,
I mean, I think you always look at it and go,
I could have done it a little bit differently.'
I don't think anyone's ever going to be happy
with the way it turned out.
Yeah, I wish it had been a little bit darker,
a little bit edgier.
You want to make the best movie you can make,
and I feel like because we were all going
in different directions, we didn't make the best movie
we could make.
And, you know, I know that people love or hate it,
but it could have been better.
I think the movie does suck on a lot of levels,
and I think that's part of its appeal.
One of the things I love the most about JASON X
is that it's not embarrassed to be JASON X.
We watched the movie. Everybody had a good time.
It was a packed house,
and we were walking out and there were these girls,
and they were like, 'Oh. You're in the movie,
you're in the movie.'
And one of my buddies said, 'Hey, you want his autograph?'
and the girl went, 'Nah..
I went right from doing JASON X to a TV show called ANDROMEDA
which the parallels were astonishing.
Lexa Doig and I both were in both.
It marked my, you know, the beginning of six years in space.
I look back now and I realize how lucky I was.
Of course, I was complaining,
and I thought my career was over
as I would see what was becoming of it but, you know,
it was what it was.
There have been an absolute tremendous number of spin-offs
for comic books, novels, all that sort of stuff.
I think with the JASON X franchise,
I think you can continue telling those stories
in the future.
And, again, look, even those movies,
if you really love the series, they have their merits.
I mean, we all sit and watch these things
when they play the marathon on Spike
or whatever channel they're on every year,
and there's no question, if it's a Friday the 13th,
we're going to go check cable
because you know a couple of them are going to be on.
And no matter what they are
or how ridiculous they might be at times,
I'm going to sit and watch them.
And probably enjoy them at an unhealthy level.
I think in general I should have fought a little harder
for the script that I fell in love with originally.
You know, that's your job as a director
is to fight for what you think is right
and that sometimes is difficult
when you're under the gun, time, money and all that.
But, I mean, as far as it being crazy and fun and different,
Pm pretty happy with it.
But really I think at the end of the day,
it got Jason back out there again,
gave the little push forward that FREDDY/JASON
needed to really take off
and get us back to where we are right now.
Ever since the idea
for a pairing of FRIDAY THE 13THs Jason
with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET'S Freddy
was first suggested in the late 1980s,
fans had been anticipating the ultimate showdown
between the two horror icons.
It was funny because when we finished our FRIDAY,
it started to go around that,
what about bringing Freddy into the series, you know,
and actually have a FREDDY VS. JASON.
The kids had been talking about it.
Whether it's letters to the editor in Fango
or at conventions or in fan clubs,
they'd been talking about Freddy and Michael Myers,
Freddy and Jason,
Jason and Michael Myers.
You know, who would win?
There was always the talk that Freddy and Jason
would somehow be combined,
and I think the ownership of those two properties,
of Freddy and of Jason,
kind of mish-mashed around various studios
and ended up finally at the same place.
Then after JASON X,
they started seriously talking about it,
saying they were going to have a script done,
and, you know,
then it was definitely a real project
and appeared to be the very next one to be done.
And you've got to remember even,
almost a decade in front of that
when you look at JASON GOES TO HELL,
it had been set up, it was clear it was coming.
And our idea was Jason was Hell's assassin,
so Freddy is the other assassin,
and both of them had just been killed.
So now these guys are both in hell,
and the devil proposes a contest to these two guys,
which is, I'm sending you both up.
Whoever brings me the most souls in this given time slot,
you're the winner and you get to stay up there as my assassin.
The other one is gone forever.
So that was sort of our idea for Freddy vs. Jason
back in the day.
But New Line had, you know,
no interest in giving, you know, the rights over
and Paramount was not going to go the other direction.
And it took a long time for Paramount
to finally lose their option.
They wanted to distribute the film.
So it was a combination of things.
I got the first draft of FREDDY VS. JASON
when I was a freshman in high school in 1994.
I bought it for $15 at the Motor City Comicon in Detroit,
and I remember pledging right then and there,
'I need to get to New Line, I need to get to LA
before they make this movie,
or I'm never going to forgive myself.'
And I made it my goal.
I dropped out of college
specifically to be able to get there in time
to make FREDDY VS. JASON.
And credit to Jeff Katz because, you know,
you've got to be kind of a dog with a bone
on these things.
There's so much... not just on FREDDY VS. JASON,
on every kind of movie,
it's always easier at a million different stages
just to say no.
But after more than a decade in the works,
and millions of dollars
spent on some of Hollywood's most sought-after
screenwriters and directors,
it seemed that Freddy and Jason
might forever be trapped in Development Hell.
They had gotten Rob Bottin attached.
Rob Bottin was a huge special effects makeup guy.
You know, he'd worked on Carpenter's remake of THE THING.
And Rob Bottin was going to make his directing debut
with this project.
And so it incubated and then there were scripts
and scripts and scripts.
I think there were 13, 14, 15 writers on that script.
There were so many different specific takes
and so many different, you know,
versions of that movie from beginning to end.
The first draft I ever read was the Peter Briggs draft
which was actually taking very good care of continuity
to where Alice the Dream Master was in it,
the Freemans from JASON GOES TO HELL were in it.
It was about the kids and the families coming together
ultimately to stop them.
They didn't like the script, and they didn't like the director.
Then they didn't like the script.
Because Freddy Krueger's origin
was that Freddy was a child killer,
a child molester.
He had actually molested Jason and actually drowned Jason
so that Jason wouldn't tell anybody what had happened.
You had another series of scripts
where I believe the character's name was Dominic Necros
if I get this, if I remember correctly.
It seems to me that a third of this movie
needs to be about Freddy, a third needs to be about Jason,
and a third needs to be about a new character.
So I created the head of a cult of Freddy fanatics
who were called Fred Heads.
But it was really, just look, it's Freddy and Jason.
They're the stars of the show.
I certainly wouldn't buy a ticket to a movie
Called FREDDY VS. JASON
to go spend the bulk of my time with a guy named Dominic Necros.
I didn't buy a ticket with his name in the title.
In our version they find Jason's grave
at the Crystal Lake Cemetery,
and there's a headstone that says Jason Voorhees, you know,
born 1958, died 1963, and that was crossed off,
1978 and that was crossed off, 1981 was crossed off,
1982, 1983, and there were like 20 dates on there
of like all the times he had died.
So that's probably a documentary all unto itself.
It's all of the writers and all of the drafts.
Ultimately, a young screenwriting duo
came up with a take that would pit the two terror titans
against each other while remaining true
to the established histories of both franchises.
The writers lobbied hard not only for the assignment,
but also to put the project back
on the studio's fast track.
When Freddy's glove comes out of the ground
and pulls the mask in, and we asked ourselves,
'What does that mean?
Why is Freddy grabbing his mask?
Why is he pulling it down?
Does he need him for something?'
And that's kind of the seed that kind of grew
into FREDDY VS. JASON.
Our angle was we started by saying here are the things
that you should not do and then we went backwards.
And then we sort of got them to understand
what this movie could be, you know what I mean,
and then got them excited about it.
Those guys ultimately,
because they grew up as fans of both these franchises, got it.
I think if you ask most of the fans,
I want to see Freddy as I know him and love him best,
Jason as I know and love him best
and just let these two sort of forces of nature
go head-to-head and ultimately,
thankfully, we ended up in that place.
While Sean Cunningham undeniably
retained creative control of all things Jason,
the same could not be said for Wes Craven,
the mastermind behind
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET'S Freddy Krueger.
I never really had any participation
after NEW NIGHTMARE.
That was kind of the end of it for me.
Wes also had moved on to other things,
the SCREAM franchise and everything,
so he really didn't really care too much
about FREDDY VS. JASON.
Outside of Wes, who's certainly being paid every time
the character is used, getting his credit and all of that,
it wasn't a case where Wes could actually control,
I don't want Freddy to do that,
that wasn't a possibility,
whereas in Jason's case, Sean has that ability.
When it finally got together,
we had trouble finding a director too.
They met with probably 40 directors.
They met with every director you could think of
on this project
because a lot of guys wanted to do it.
We went to one of the executives and said,
'You should really think about this guy Ronny Yu'
because we were big fans of BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR.
New Line agreed to meet with the action director
from Hong Kong,
who had recently brought another American horror franchise
back from the dead with BRIDE OF CHUCKY.
That first meeting, my intention
really was to go in to tell Bob
that I don't want to do the movie.
He's been getting, like, directors,
tons of directors,
like saying they grew up with these two franchise,
and they're crazy about this
and then there come this Chinaman comes in
and tell them that, you know,
he doesn't care about the franchise
but he knows how to make an entertainment movie.
So he said this is what he want.
We wants somebody come in with a different angle.
He had never seen a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie
or a NIGHTMARE movie...
and that seemed like a very odd choice for me,
for a director to direct the most important one
of each franchise.
You know, at this point we were looking for journeymen.
I liked the guy's cultural influences,
and he was also a nice guy
that I felt like I could get along with.
Just that little outside-ness that Ronny Yu brought to it,
being a Hong Kong director,
I think really, really helped it.
Don't take it too seriously.
You know, have fun with the monster.
This is what I learned when I was making BRIDE OF CHUCKY.
Chucky: What would Martha Stewart say?
Tiffany: Fuck Martha Stewart!
It was never a question in the minds of genre fans
that Kane Hodder, who had already played Jason four times,
would be back for FREDDY VS. JASON.
But as pre-production began,
rumors began to circulate that Hodder was out of the running.
I had planned, in my own mind, I guess,
for years to do that movie.
I thought they had planned for me to do it as well.
In that fan boy base there was a dispute
as to whether or not Kane Hodder
was going to be as good as some other Jason might be,
and frankly I never thought of anybody else playing the part.
I really was excited about doing it.
Got the script.
Then the director was hired
and things started changing, and I wasn't sure why.
Before I'm onboard,
already the studio decided that they wanted a new Jason.
The decision not to use Kane Hodder
really had nothing to do with Ronny.
Ronny said from day one,
'If you guys want Kane Hodder, I don't care.'
But one of the executives at New Line said, 'No.
Let's go a different way.'
In terms of Jason, I certainly personally point
to parts 3, 4 and 6 really at the end of the day.
Tall, lanky, clean mask.
And I think that there was an attitude
that when you shot them side-by-side,
one had to look like a sort of force of nature,
a tank, that being Jason.
You know, I think it was just the stigma
of all of the Jasons that led up to what we were doing.
They'd all been sort of, you know, forgive me,
but a little cheesy and not too expensive to make.
And I think New Line, when they decided to make this movie,
decided they wanted to do something different.
And different just didn't mean Kane Hodder,
it meant everything.
I says fine, you know.
This is their call, and I'm fine with it.
I always did feel kind of bad that, I had been, you know,
pushing for this whole match-up in interviews for 16 years
in playing Jason
and then not be allowed to do it.
And a lot of people were unhappy and still are.
And, you know, part of me really wishes
that, you know, those fans had been able to see
that dream that they were always looking for,
which was Robert and Kane.
And unfortunately that didn't happen.
But, you know, this is showbiz
and apparently we're all replaceable.
I get the issue on this one,
but I also sort of know the larger movie business,
and the way things go.
It was going to happen at some point.
I would say to you at the end of the day,
do I really think it affected box office? I really don't.
You know, it was going to be a success no matter what
just because people wanted to see the two characters together,
and I just, I really wish I had been able to do it.
The producers' search for a new Jason
led them to a six-foot-seven Canadian stuntman
who had donned Jason's trademark hockey mask once before.
This time, however,
not only would Jason have to convincingly swing his machete,
he would have to show
that even an unstoppable force of nature could have feelings.
One of the people that we'd seen early on
was a big-time stunt player in Vancouver named Ken Kirzinger.
Jeff Katz who was at New Line
so passionately wanted to cast Ken Kirzinger as Jason.
He just thought he would bring something special.
Something in the eyes he saw different or better.
As it was put to me when I auditioned for it,
is they wanted to convey some emotion in Jason.
Actually he had been a stunt double of Kane Hodder, I think,
on one of the Jason films.
In JASON TAKES MANHATTAN
there was a shot where Jason gets hit by a police car
and since Ken Kirzinger was doing the stunts
on the show too, he doubled me for that shot.
That was a question that I put to them at the beginning.
Like, you know,
because Kane had sort of established the character,
did they want some of the trademark moves
that Kane does, you know, the deep breath and stuff,
and they didn't.
They really wanted a more unique character
and Ronny Yu and I had some discussions about, you know,
movement and the fact that they wanted to do
a lot of close-ups on the eyes.
He was big enough. His attitude was good.
He looked good in the wardrobe. So we cast him.
I was a little leery because a lot of the feedback I, you know,
that fans were putting out there was negative, I think,
in the beginning.
But then when the movie came out,
it became very, very positive.
Jason was not the only role to be recast.
Once again, the script called for the return
of Jason's maniacal mother.
We literally underlined cameo, and we wrote in the script
Betsy Palmer.
I believe they contacted Betsy Palmer,
and she was not interested.
I was asked three times to be in three different pictures
of FRIDAY THE 13TH,
and I declined each time.
First of all, they didn't want to pay any money.
They probably said, 'Hey, we'll give you a plane flight
and a sandwich, and she was like,
'Well, everybody else is getting paid.'
In the script they had me standing in a graveyard,
I guess, and saying, you know,
'You promised me you'd kill all those people.'
Mommy has something she wants you to do!
I mean, what sort of lines are that?
That's nothing for an actress to do, for God's sake.
Make them remember what fear tastes like!
Jason finally appears after his mother says like,
'Wake up. Go get these people.'
And then he somehow, finds my house.
I live in the house that Freddy has, you know,
tortured people for years,
and then Jason shows up out of nowhere.
Surprisingly the bed death was not initially popular
when it was in the script.
We thought it was one of the highlights of the script,
but, you know,
that was something that they wanted us to take out.
Whoa, babe.
I told you about kissing me after you smoked.
He wasn't a very nice guy.
He used to yell at my friend Gibb a lot,
played by Katherine Isabelle.
You know I don't like to be touched after, okay?
Just mouthing off and Jason literally
just snapped his mouth and his body shut.
[screams]
[giggles]
You know, and then they said, 'Well, it's too brutal,
it's too gory, it's too this, it's too that,
and then we just kept saying,
'Listen, this is not something you want to cut.'
That was actually the last day of photography.
It was the last thing we shot.
When we went to the first test screening, and that, you know,
the audience really loved the movie
and that got the biggest reaction
and you really couldn't hear any of the dialogue,
like in the previous scene,
because people were still cheering.
It was really satisfying.
To be drowned in a lake, already have deformity,
be insecure about it,
and have to watch your mother's head get cut off,
I think the fact that he just is killing people isn't that bad.
With Freddy using Jason as his pawn
to stalk the kids of Elm Street,
a cornfield rave sets the stage
for one of the film's biggest and bloodiest set pieces.
The cornfield massacre is one of my favorite one.
I loved the burning Jason, you know,
going after the kids with a machete.
That was, that was the most difficult sequence in the movie
without question.
First of all, it smelled to high heaven
because it was actually like the cow field
and just the smell of the manure or whatever
was horrible.
I think there were like 400 or 500 extras in that scene.
Those kids that were smoking pot said
Why don't you go find yourself a pig to fuck?
And they called him a corn poke.
And that's when he just breaks his neck,
and, I don't know, once again he felt like ostracized
and like he didn't fit in.
Maybe he was just there to party.
I don't know.
Burn, motherfucker!
But shooting that sequence is really tough
because lighting fire in a dry cornfield
is the most dangerous request.
When they gave me the part of Jason,
they made a point of telling me,
'Ken, you're an actor on this movie.
We're going to have a stunt double for you.
You know, we don't want you getting hurt.'
And I went to them and I said, 'Listen, you know,
there's one stunt I really, really want to do in the movie,
and that's the fire burn in the cornfield.'
Very, very dangerous because you could only,
an actor or stunt actor could only be in a burn suit
and burn for 30 seconds maximum.
And they wouldn't let me do it.
And I was really disappointed
because that should have won the stuntman's awards that year.
You know, the big top shot of seeing this burning,
burning figure just running,
running across the cornfield
creating a path, for me, that visual, that image is,
I thought is fantastic.
It took forever for them to figure out
how to keep this machete on fire.
They had to keep putting like petroleum
and all this stuff, and we would do like part of a take
and then it would burn out.
And, so, that was a very, very long night of shooting.
Some of the extras, some of the kids,
didn't know that a burning Jason
going to dash out from the cornfield.
So some of the reaction from their faces are real.
Jason probably did more damage, had more carnage in that scene
than several of the movies he's been in before.
We need those pills.
Can you get us back to Westin Hills?
We're going to get some of the Hypnocil
so that we don't dream, so that Freddy can't get us.
Jason shows up and starts causing shit,
as he is want to do.
He had to break through the glass door with the machete
and Kelly Rowland and I
were screaming at the top of our lungs.
L've never been... so terrified,
and I didn't know the line between reality and fantasy.
My favorite personal part of the film is,
for my character, is the big standoff
where I'm actually possessed by Freddy.
Let me handle this, bitch.
And Jason comes down the hallway,
and he comes up and ba-bam into the neck,
plunge him in...
Sliced right in half.
Which is a pretty awesome way to go.
You need to have one guy
that the audience should invest a little bit of their emotion.
And for me, personally,
I thought we should invest a little bit more on Jason.
Dude, that goalie was pissed about something.
Freddy obviously, even before he became Freddy Krueger
and was a burn victim and this crazy dream demon,
he was a bad guy.
Jason was just trying to go to camp and have a good summer.
When Lori enters the dream world of Jason Voorhees,
she witnesses the childhood tragedy
that unleashed his inner rage.
In FREDDY VS. JASON you see him confronted by fears
that he never had before or people didn't realize
or wasn't shown in the other movies.
So you are afraid of something after all, huh?
Just knowing myself, I would have tried to fight
against the Jason-fearing-water part of that movie.
I just want to put the record straight.
We never said that Jason was afraid of water.
We never wrote that. That was not in our script.
- Very important. - That was not in our screenplay.
That would, that came afterwards.
That was in a re-write.
All we wanted to do was say
that Jason perhaps would have a subconscious fear of drowning.
And there was some debate of,
in that scene where you see Freddy's blade
going into the little poor kid's brain.
But there is a flashback to when I go back to Camp Crystal Lake
to try to save him.
I really genuinely cared for him and saw him in a new light.
I got to see him as a little boy that was picked on.
If I had been there,
I would have killed all those horrible camp counselors
and stuff.
Throwing him in the lake and teasing him.
It was awful.
JASON VOORHEES?!
And sort of for the first time, I think,
in FREDDY VS. JASON, they touched on that,
and I think that would be really interesting
to get into Jason's head more.
While Elm Street is said to be located
in the fictional town of Springwood, Ohio,
Crystal Lake is approximately 600 miles away
in rural New Jersey.
Fans have asked, how were Lori and her friends
able to get Jason back to Crystal Lake in record time?
Where is Crystal Lake located?
That was a big problem for us in FREDDY VS. JASON.
We had to get them to be able to drive there.
But for us it was important that it was far,
like those two things.
So we had all these scenes where they were going like
all night and all day, and of course,
when the movie gets cut it looks like
they're like right next to each other.
Look, we're almost there.
Jason is in the back of a van.
They've got him all taped up, and they've been drugging him.
Kelly Rowland despised the scene
where she had to give Jason mouth-to-mouth.
As much as I'm saying I loved Jason now,
and I have a certain compassion and empathy for him,
I don't know that I'd want to give him mouth-to-mouth.
[sputtering sounds]
And then the drugs wear off, and the van flips,
and he comes shooting out of the back of the van
which is probably the biggest stunt I did on the movie.
The mother of all battles between Jason and Freddy
is waged in the real world,
and on Jason's home turf.
The moment of truth had arrived.
For fans awaiting the ultimate slasher slugfest,
the time had come to place their bets.
My philosophy is everything in the movie
should set up for the end fight.
Yeah, that was an amazing, amazing finale there.
I'm like wrestling with a 6 foot 7 Canadian stuntman
who's been in over 100 movies
and is buff and hard and can drink me under the table,
and it was a rough shoot.
I did a lot of my stunts.
You know, I think Freddy got the best of that one.
He's pretty much kicking his ass the whole time.
I think there were a couple moments where I felt
kind of maybe crossed the line a little bit,
where we wanted to have Jason to kick his ass
a little bit more.
Hey, asshole!
Originally in ours it was
- He calls him a mama's boy. - Mama's boy.
Which I thought was good, you know.
He's a little character related. Calls Jason a mama's boy.
And they changed it to 'Hey, Asshole.'
And I remember backing up in the scene and saying...
Freddy vs. Jason, place your bets!
And it never actually ended up being in the movie.
I still don't know why they cut it.
Place your bet was not in script, and I didn't shoot it.
It's basically just for the, for the trailer.
Quentin Tarantino saw the movie and was so disappointed.
He went to the premiere and he said,
'Where's the place your bets?
That's what made me want to see it.'
At the end with the set piece,
we involved with all different special effects,
like, you know, fire, water, wind, smoke, explosions.
One of the bloodiest battles you'll ever see in a movie.
And that was all Ronny Yu's doing.
And none of it was CG.
We'd have sometimes six hoses going in
and blood spraying everywhere and Ronny still screaming,
'More blood! More blood!
We were like, this looks like a Monty Python movie,
I mean the amount of blood spraying,
it was unbelievable.
So over the top,
the violence and everything
that the audience would laugh at the violence
rather than really affected by the violence.
Jason, he and I almost became teammates.
And we were both against Freddy,
and he actually saved my life in the end
when Freddy was about to kill me on the dock
at the very end of the movie.
And so he was protecting me.
Welcome to my world - BITCH!
He allowed me to be able to cut Freddy's head off
at the end and kill him.
And I really felt like he and I
had some sort of bond or connection.
Out of respect, I throw the machete back in the water.
So in the end who won?
The claw or the machete?
Fans of both franchises
were equally passionate,
and New Line feared that tipping the scales in either one's favor
would alienate just as many as it would appease.
I always have problem with the original ending.
I hated the ending.
I thought is a wrong focus.
Well, the original ending was that it's six months later,
and Jason Ritter and I are in bed together
and then he turns into Freddy at the end.
Which I thought was really interesting.
And we test screened it and then the audience loved the movie
but hated the ending.
That's how they decided to do the re-shoot
which I was a part of.
Originally I was up for the role of Jason,
and I had had several callbacks for the part,
but months later I got a call to do the re-shoots
to play Jason and I was just thrilled.
I was like, 'Oh my God.
I'm going to actually get to do this.'
Not only did I get to step behind that mask,
but I got to play Jason in a film
with Robert Englund, Freddy Krueger.
Ultimately, FREDDY VS. JASON
would end not with a whimper or a bang...
but a wink.
I would say that Jason won the fight,
but the war might not be over.
Look, Freddy's the one who doesn't have a head
at the end of it, now granted he winks.
But I think the ending, what was great about that
was the great Rorschach test for the fans.
You got the Robert Englund/Freddy Krueger fans
who say Robert Englund won.
You got the Jason fans say Jason won.
It's kind of left up in the air.
It gets people talking.
I spent three years
working in the professional wrestling industry,
so I learned very early on
that even if someone seems to have won,
the feud will go on.
Freddy or Jason, who won?
Me! I won!
I made Freddy defeat Jason and then I killed Freddy!
So I'm the winner. I'm the victor. I won!
In anticipation of the film's release,
New Line put the FREDDY VS. JASON publicity machine
into hyper-drive with a pre-fight press conference
and boxing event held in Las Vegas.
What's the matter?
Can't you speak for yourself, hockey puck?
Soon Jason Voorhees was everywhere.
From officially licensed hats and mugs,
to comic books and even children's lunch boxes.
And for the first time in his more than twenty-year history,
Jason was even given a proper Hollywood premiere.
It's something the fans have wanted.
It was, that's really a fan-inspired film,
and that's probably one reason it did 135 million worldwide.
When the movie came out it was the highest horror opening
of all time,
and I think it was the highest grossing of the bunch.
I think it opened to $25 million or something the first weekend.
It was incredible.
But to those who toiled in the early years
of both franchises,
FREDDY VS. JASON was more hype than holy grail.
After seeing the movie, I guess I was kind of hoping
that I would see a scene to say,
'Oh, that's why.'
But honestly there's nothing in the movie that I saw
that I wouldn't have been able to do.
I went to see the film.
I found it really just kind of brutal
without being very imaginative.
I love Ronny and I think he did an excellent job?
But you know, he was maybe a little more influenced
by WWE type stuff and you know,
you can see that in the film, and that's not a criticism.
But definitely in our screenplay,
we thought that there would be scenes,
maybe there'd be a little more tension.
While it's got its faults, I think it was pretty true
to the spirit of those characters
and tried to show a little love for the continuity
which was very much intentional.
It was able to sort of help breathe a little new life back
into the genre on the whole.
After the film's record-breaking success,
the question was inevitably asked,
would there be a rematch?
At that time I just thought, you know, great.
We should do THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
type of movie with the HALLOWEEN guy, you know.
The Myer vs. Jason vs. Freddy.
But then you've got two kind of quiet killers.
I think it's kind of an overkill there.
There were some interesting ideas at one time.
There was a, you know, a Freddy vs. Ash vs. Jason
that was talked about
which I think that Sam Raimi wanted Bruce Campbell to win
which I thought was a terrific idea.
You know, making the world safe from sequels... Ash.
Sam and the camp are very interested.
We negotiated sort of on and off over two years.
As is the nature of Hollywood, deal making,
it comes and it goes.
We try again and it comes and it goes
until ultimately the deal's just not going to make.
Well, I love EVIL DEAD. I love EVIL DEAD II.
I love Ash.
Groovy!
But I think that that would be even harder than it was
to pull off FREDDY VS. JASON and as you can see,
it wasn't that easy.
But I think that's perfect idea for a comic.
Several years later in actuality,
David lmhoff at New Line Licensing at the time said,
'You know what?
We should take the treatment that I had written for the film
and let's go do this and do it as a comic.
At my last horror convention,
one of these fans brought up to me this comic book
FREDDY VS. JASON VS. ASH and I said,
'Where did you get this? This is amazing.
This is what the sequel was supposed to be.'
And he said, 'I know.
Do you want to see it? You're in it.'
The heroine from the first one always has to die pretty quickly
in the second one.
But you know who kills me?
Jason.
Two pages in, I have a machete hacking through my head.
And he wouldn't even have that machete to kill me
unless I returned it to him. I did the right thing.
And then he cuts my face in half?
Freddy hadn't even shown up on the scene yet.
I changed my mind. He doesn't have morals.
He's just a heartless, soulless killer.
I'm very honored and at a large level
kind of humbled that in comics now
we sort of have the responsibility
of keeping the original continuity going,
and FREDDY-JASON-ASH because it was going to be
the legitimate sequel and that was the take
we were going to use,
it's an incredible honor because it's basically,
to the fans like myself that care about the continuity
and want to know where Tommy Jarvis has been
and what he's doing,
it's a thrill to get to kind of deliver that
for them ultimately.
And at least let the people
that want to keep the Freddy and Jason
that they grew up with and love,
let them sort of keep living on in another medium
while these new sort of re-interpretations are done.
Of course I'm very happy and very excited
with the end result.
But more importantly,
I just felt that my instinct was right
in the very, very beginning.
I'm so happy that the audience also endorsed that,
endorsed my gut feeling.
You know, we love NIGHTMARE and FRIDAY,
and, you know, we were, you know, stewards of it, I guess,
a little bit, you know, for a short period of time,
and, you know, we always try to do our best.
We always put our, you know, the fans first,
and, you know, hopefully some people out there
think we did an okay job.
Two months after the box office smash of FREDDY VS. JASON,
another horror icon was given a new lease on life
With 2003s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.
This time, it was neither a sequel nor a crossover
that left audiences screaming.
It was a remake.
If the mother of all slasher films was no longer sacred,
then a remake of FRIDAY THE 13TH seemed inevitable.
Platinum Dunes is a company I started with Michael Bay
and Andrew Form, my two partners,
and I knew that New Line had the rights to FRIDAY THE 13TH.
That was a title that we'd always talked about
wanting to make.
I guess when you do a remake
you sort of play with people's expectations.
You try to know what those expectations are
and you give them what they want
but not what they expect.
I rang Marcus up and I said, 'Marcus, you know,
I'm not quite sure why we're doing this film.'
And he explained to me that he had enjoyed a great success
with THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE remake and that, you know,
basically he was taking this film
because he felt like his career needed
that shot in the arm again.
When I did TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
I was actually surprised to see like the outcry, you know,
how dare they?
FRIDAY THE 13TH, in a Way,
it's less of a holy cow to bring to the butchering block.
Aided by partner Michael Bay, director of ARMAGEDDON,
PEARL HARBOR and the TRANSFORMERS series,
the Platinum Dunes team
spent the better part of a year securing the rights
from both studios.
Yet no one could see the point
of faithfully retelling the story of Pamela Voorhees
and her murderous rampage at Camp Crystal Lake.
The audience wanted Jason.
So the producers brought back two of the series' biggest fans
to conceive a new vision of FRIDAY THE 13TH.
Shannon: As kind of a reaction to FREDDY VS. JASON,
we wanted to adjust the tone.
Yeah.
We wanted to make this less goofy.
Yeah.
More serious, a little harder edge.
Jason didn't kill in the first movie as we know,
and we didn't want to make a movie
where, that didn't have Jason, that had Mrs. Voorhees killing.
So we took elements of the first four.
We didn't really ever think of it as number 12.
It was like, you know, this could be
like we're starting all over again.
This is the story from the beginning.
There are many words for making a movie again,
I think retelling is a fashionable one right now.
Definitely not a re-imagining
because we are just basically going back
to what Jason was in the first place.
It could have been called a sequel in my opinion.
A mash up, or a poupou platter.
More of a hybrid.
- It was a reboot. - A reintroduction.
- A potpourri. - A greatest hits.
I don't even really know what it is.
From the get-go for me it was always 'this is a reboot'
and that was sort of drilled into our heads.
It's a re-box-officin-ing. That's what it is.
It's sort of the Reader's Digest of slasher films.
We did not want to say none of these movies happened.
I mean, it was important for us not to sort of say,
'Hey, we're starting over and that didn't exist.
Absolutely.
That's not something we wanted to do.
But, of course, you know, they wanted to just call it
FRIDAY THE 13TH, you know what I mean,
so it kind of started over.
But, you know, for me it lives sort of in,
along with all the others.
It was really important to us to go back to Crystal Lake.
It had been a long time since Jason had been there,
and we loved the setting of the camp.
This is really a New Jersey story and for some reason,
we wound up shooting this in Texas.
There weren't even camps around, you know,
and not the right type of lakes.
I don't remember specifically discussing
where we were geographically in the United States.
I don't believe that's addressed as to where it is.
I think it's kind of like in THE SIMPSONS.
Crystal Lake, I mean, there's a lot of Crystal Lakes out there.
You know, it could happen anywhere.
Do you know how many lakes are probably called Crystal Lake?
Crystal Geyser, Crystal Water.
For the next actor chosen to wield the famous machete,
playing Jason wasn't just another job,
it was the role of a lifetime.
I'm a huge fan of the FRIDAY THE 13TH series.
It's my favorite horror series of all time.
Derek Meats waked through the door and, you know,
you don't know what to expect after seeing his pictures
from past movies and clips
and he turns out to be the sweetest guy.
And then you find out he actually does cage fighting
as a hobby.
When I was in school, I have a disorder called alopecia
which means my body sees hair as a foreign obstacle
so it rejects it, and when it started originally falling out,
it would fall out in little patches,
little pieces here and there,
and I was kind of the different kid in school.
And I looked and I go, 'Oh my God,
I'm like a, I'm like a little Jason, like we're similar.'
And so I kind of had a relation there,
a tie to that character.
Derek Mears was the only person
we considered to play Jason Voorhees.
When that phone call came in,
trying to be professional and be stone-faced,
'Well, that sounds great. Well, cool.
We'll work the days. Where are we shooting? Fantastic.
We'll talk to the managers.'
But inside you're like
a 13-year-old cheerleader, schoolgirl,
'Oh my god, that's amazing.'
The fact that Derek got to come in
and recreate this character,
someone who is so passionate about FRIDAY THE 13TH
as a whole and every film that's come in the genre before,
I feel like it couldn't have been a better fit.
He was constantly in his head,
talking to the producers, talking to the directors,
what about this, what about that, you know,
and he'd go through different films.
Well, you know, Jason did this before,
or are we going to do something different?
When I approached the character of Jason,
I did a lot of research on child psychology
being that Jason saw his mother get murdered in front of him
at such a young age,
being that he was an outcast
and teased and picked on from all the other kids.
His mother, his only tie to life,
that's his only source of love
and seeing that taken away from him,
how does that affect a person?
It'll be easier for you than it was for Jason.
This is about a victim who is lashing out in vengeance
for the death of his mother.
You should have been watching him... every minute!
Ultimately Jason's still a person.
He's just a very damaged person obviously.
So I think Derek really wanted to explore that.
You know, he's been rejected by society. That's his area.
And so when the kids come into his area,
he's forced into a corner, again,
kind of like a wild animal, and he retaliates.
It's very similar to John Rambo from the FIRST BLOOD series.
John Rambo: Don't push it or I'll give you a war
you won't believe.
And the discussion was, 'ls he running or is he walking?'
He ran in the first few films.
You know, in 2, 3,4 he was running.
Why not go back to that?
It feels like if you see him running,
all 240 pounds of him with that 4 foot machete,
that it feels scarier than if he just pops up.
We actually shot a lot of scenes kind of two different ways.
One was like more empathetic
so the audience could understand and feel for Jason,
and one was more aggressive.
You know, it's not an easy job wearing all that makeup
and running around and carrying the machete,
and it's easy to get aggravated and mean.
And every day he was a pleasure to be around and just a happy,
grateful guy to work with.
There couldn't be a greater contrast in personality
for a serial killer.
Derek is the nicest guy that any of us have ever met,
perhaps the nicest guy that exists on this planet.
I mean, it's so funny that for someone who plays
such a dark and scary character,
he couldn't be a warmer, more loving person
filled with more light. I just think the world of him.
I'm ruining my bad-guy career right now.
I'm going to have to punch somebody
just to establish dominance.
When you discuss the makeup,
or the costume really that Jason Voorhees is wearing
in our film, that's Scott Stoddard.
I was inspired by the asymmetry of what Tom did
for the original makeup for the little kid,
and what was done then in Part 4.
But I also really wanted to combine what Carl Fuller did
and had done in Part 2.
I thought that kind of mountain man, you know,
just longer hair falling out, kind of grizzly looking guy,
was something that I wanted to put into it.
Scott did an amazing job.
I remember the first day that Derek came on set.
I had - I mean, like chills ran down my spine.
I was like, 'Oh my God, Dude.'
They wrote in the sackhead in the script and when I read it,
I was like, 'Okay, great. Brings me right back to Part 2.'
The sack cloth was really scary for me too.
I think in some ways more scary than the hockey mask.
I think both versions, the hockey mask
and the sack head version of Jason are terrifying.
To me the hockey mask does seem more iconic though.
You know, that's what I associate with Jason.
The film opens at Crystal Lake
in one of the longest pre-credit prologues
in FRIDAY THE 13TH,
and perhaps motion picture history.
This remake centers around
this brother-sister story between the Whitney character
and the Clay character played by Jared Padalecki,
and it starts off because their mother is dying.
I don't feel right being here, so far away from my mom.
My boyfriend drags me away from taking care of her
to go on a camping trip,
and we don't realize that it's Camp Crystal Lake.
And it doesn't go so well.
[random screams]
With the crew being around you, once you sort of got outside
of all the lights and stuff,
you could really see how creepy it would be
to be out there in the pitch black
and not really know your surroundings.
The dark woods outside of Austin, Texas
provided the perfect cover for a practical joke
on actor Jonathan Sadowski by his fellow cast members.
We were shooting in the dark woods late one night,
and, it was like 3 or 4 in the morning, super tired.
Of course, the portapotties are like a walk.
It's a hike to get there, and it's pitch black,
like there's nothin' out there.
This would make the perfect serial killer story,
that somebody actually got killed by a serial killer
in the woods while shooting FRIDAY THE 13TH.
And we're all watching the monitors,
watching the scene that's taking place,
and Jonathan pops up from his chair and goes,
Well, gotta go to the bathroom,
and he walks off in the darkness.
And so Feldman and Mennell
like thought it would be a really great idea
to convince Derek to hide in the bushes.
So he goes out and, of course, Derek sees him
disappear into the woods
and Derek goes to the opposite side of the woods
and hides and waits for him to walk back.
He hid in the bushes like halfway through the walk
and jumped out at him with his mask and machete.
I have never seen an adult man get so scared
as Jonathan Sadowski who literally,
when Derek came charging at him out of the woods
in full costume, didn't know what to do,
so just ran in place like a cartoon character.
Ahhh-ahhh-ah-haha!
His feet are jumping back and forth.
His hands are going up and down.
What happened was that part between fight and flight.
He goes, I didn't know, I was so scared I didn't know
if I should run or punch you in the face.
And the whole set just died. Just killed everybody.
So I'm like, Oh, mission accomplished.
I felt pretty good about that.
Our movie has a ton of nudity in it.
And as a kid when I was going to movies,
that was part of the genre and for some reason
it kind of went away.
And it was important to us to bring back the nudity.
America and I are in the tent and we are loving each other
biblically from behind.
Oh, you like that?
Yeah baby, wait for me,
- No I think I'm gonna... - No, don't do that again-
As it turned out, playing the role of sex-starved Amanda
was more than original actress Moran Atias bargained for.
America Olivia bares her breasts in the beginning of the film.
That was written into the original screenplay.
And we shot that scene with another girl
who when it came time to bare her breasts,
she refused to do it.
You know, I think she'd recently come from Israel
and was ready to do some serious acting
and FRIDAY THE 13TH, I think,
was not exactly what she had in mind
when she came to do 'high art' in America
and, I guess to put it plainly,
I think there were just too many boob shots.
Hey It looks like you.
No, it doesn't.
It does. lt's cool, you should keep it.
When Mike and Whitney go into the cabin,
and she finds the locket, because she's wearing it,
yes, it does save her life to a certain degree.
That symbol of love is that locket,
it's that confusion, oh, that's my mom.
He's not all there but it's that tie in to him needing love.
Little Oedipus.
[scream]
I think for me if there's wooden boards involved
and someone's falling through or bashing up into them,
that's the kind of death scene I like.
I don't know why. I'm just creeped out by it.
And I jump into the bathtub,
and I'm trying to pull Nick into the tub with me.
There was a lot of thrashing around and Derek Mears,
Jason, was out of town.
He was actually getting married, funny enough
while we were shooting.
And they had a stunt double for him
that was supposed to grab me.
I bashed this guy, kicked him straight in the eye
and gave him a good shiner.
I run back to save Amanda, and she is hanging from a tree
in a sleeping bag on fire and burning to death.
That is when I stumble upon a bear trap.
[scream]
We shot like 10 takes and after a while I'm like,
my leg's kind of like dented and like a little bit bleeding
and like black-and-blue and so I was like,
Guys, can we loosen up with the bear trap?
And they were like, Oh my God, that's the real one.
Can somebody just get him the rubber one?
Jason comes at me at the end of the scene
and puts a machete through my forehead
and then he turns on Amanda Righetti's character,
and we cut to black and then the real movie starts.
Jared Padalecki goes back to Crystal Lake
because he thinks that that's where his sister is.
So he kind of goes, he's there on a mission to find her,
and he finds some other kids who are hanging out
and partying at Crystal Lake.
I have a cabin. I'm very rich and I want people to like me,
I guess, even though I don't like anybody
that I really bring to the cabin.
Hey, take your feet off the table please.
Jenna, you know, registers what Clay is going through
and how hard this must be
despite the fact that all her friends
are just focused on partying and having a good time.
I'm trying to set up myself to get laid
with this beautiful girl.
She ends up going to this other guy.
I'm definitely jealous, a little pissed off.
So you don't want to be friends after this?
Don't want to hang out?
Two boys wanting to duke it out over a girl.
Like that's a story we can all relate to.
I would probably leave soon before I get pissed off,
and, you know... Yeah?
Yeah.
The new film attempted not one,
but two, versions of the scene
where Jason discovers his iconic hockey mask.
The original scene was, in my mind,
not nearly as interesting as the one that we shot later on.
Donnie comes into his pot den in the barn,
and he's getting high.
And he puts the hockey mask on,
and Jason comes in and grabs him by the head.
You don't see him get his head chopped off
but then you see the head drop out of frame
and land on the ground.
He's looking at the mask and puts the mask on
and there it was.
That's how he was going to get it.
And then a few months later,
they decided to go and re-shoot that a little different,
and it was when he goes upstairs, confronts Donnie,
That shit ain't fuckin' right, dude
Cuts his throat, pulls something aside,
and there's the hockey mask.
I also think the scene's quite effective.
I think it's an interesting moment there.
Not only when he gets the mask,
he puts it on, and he goes to the mirror.
I think it's quite an effective scene.
I'm really glad we shot that.
I thought they both worked well.
It would have been fun if they had Shelly from PART Ill
who introduced the hockey mask,
where he's like working with Donnie doing something,
You know, there he is. There's Shelly, you know.
In keeping with FRIDAY THE 13TH tradition,
several of the film's death sequences
had to be reconceived and re-shot.
So there's a kill in the script with Willa Ford's character,
originally it was written where the boat sequence happens,
Ryan's character gets shot with the arrow,
she gets hit by the boat, and she's stunned.
As she's kind of coming to, and she realizes
there's a guy wearing a hockey mask,
and she's kind of confused and all of a sudden,
the guy pulls out a machete, and she's like,
Oh my God, oh my God.
And so she starts to swim parallel to the water,
and he just slowly walks with her keeping the same distance.
It cuts to the kids back at the house
having a big party, having a good time.
It's a very long scene there.
Then it cuts back to her and now the time is passed
where it's dark, and she's been treading water
for a long time, and Jason hasn't moved.
He's still just staring at her.
And so it was more of a psychological kill,
like she's so afraid to get out of the water,
she'd rather drown in the water.
And I thought that was brilliant.
But they changed it where she faked it
and comes up under the docks,
has the machete get the top of her head
which is still a great kill.
The kills are obviously such an important part
of this franchise and of horror movies in general,
and I loved them in this movie.
I thought everyone had a really unique and disgusting way to go.
We were talking to the producers and they were like,
Did you realize there are 13 kills in this movie?
And I was like, Yeah, it was intentional.
And they were like, Really? Wow. That's great.
The other part of the formula, I guess for us,
was we wanted to have kids having fun.
We wanted to bring back some of that feeling
from the 80s where it's kind of sex, drugs and violence.
Well originally we did want to put it in the 80s,
I mean, that was sort of important to us,
and then once you start talking to like the studio guys,
they go, yeah, it's not going to happen.
It's very modern, and we didn't step back in time at all.
We really brought that modern energy to it.
As Form and Fuller once explained to me,
'These kids have got to be fuckable.
The guys have gotta want to fuck the girls,
and the girls have gotta want to fuck the guys
in the movie.' So that's what makes them care.
My character did have some good lines in the film.
I know the one that I did not want to say was
Your tits are stupendous.
And they said, Trust me. It'll get a laugh. lt's funny.
I said, Okay.
And then we were doing the sex scene,
and, it was like a twelve-hour day for that thing,
and it sounds like, Oh, man, you had to do that for twelve hours,
you poor guy, but seriously, twelve hours a day
wearing a little cock sock,
it's not really the most comfortable thing.
This is a man's sport.
Aaron Yoo, who plays Chewie in the movie,
he had to have full stomach surgery
while we were shooting.
He had an obstruction in his stomach,
and he was rushed to the hospital from the set.
He came back with, I don't know, 30 staples in his stomach.
I don't know how he held up but he kept going like,
'Hey, look, can you actually throw me?
Can you like do it for real?'
I go, 'Yeah, I can do it for real. I'm not doing it for real
because I don't want to hurt you.'
Are you looking for this? 'Cause it, uh...
completes your outfit.
And he was like, 'l'm good for one.
Is that cool with everybody?' 'Okay, dude, if you're sure.'
[screams]
And all I'm thinking is if his guts pour out
while we're doing the scene... l'm going to shoot that, right?
'Cuz I can use that in the movie if his guts pour out.
There's a point where I'm stabbing him,
and he starts to choke, and he's gagging,
and he goes to the ground, and we end the scene.
I go, Dude, are you okay? What's going on?
And he goes, No, no, no. I had the blood in my mouth,
and rather than just coming out of my mouth,
I tried to inhale it into my sinuses so it would come out.
I go, you are far too committed for this.
That is insane.
No, but it looked really, really cool.
Take that, motherfucker!
My death scene, it hurt the most.
And you know, oh, he's getting away and then all of a sudden
you just see [noise] axe.
I'm screaming for help, and you can hear me.
Oh my god, please!
It's always interesting to me to see, you know,
a bomb drops, you know,
a bunch of kids scatter around like roaches on the kitchen sink
and how do they interact.
- You can't go out there. - We have to help him.
No we can't, ok? He's using your friend as bait.
You know, at least someone said we have to help him.
Somebody's gotta do something!
I was like, Do it, be a friend, go out there
and save your buddy.
And we're all like, Whose life is more important here?
Ours.
As I was watching the movie,
I thought of so many different scenarios
of how I could have been saved.
Spineless bastards.
[screams]
I mean, I think I die three or four times in the movie.
I get suffocated by Jason.
Then I get hung on these hooks.
And I get shot through a door.
Then I get thrown out a window.
Marcus, I guess, wanted to try to get a little more creative,
you know, like the things that make you squirm.
The poker through the eyehole, that was... errrrr.
Anything with eyes, like when you watch that movie ZOMBIE.
As the remaining characters make a last bid for survival,
an on-set accident nearly resulted
in a real FRIDAY THE 13TH casualty.
Whenever you're making a horror movie
and kids or people are running and they have sharp objects,
someone's bound to get hurt.
We were shooting one of the scenes
where we run from upstairs to downstairs.
And we're coming down the stairs.
I'm backing down as fast as I can
like pretending I'm a frickin' FBI agent or something,
and I run into Danielle and I slam her into the wall.
He somehow pushed me into the windowsill,
and I hit my chin, and I split my chin open
and fell back and gave myself a concussion.
She hits her head,
and she almost gets knocked out unconscious.
And she had to go to the hospital.
I think - it was just bad.
So I still have a teeny tiny scar on my chin
that will forever remind me of FRIDAY THE 13TH.
I feel bad but it was - I mean,
I guess it was payback for her going to the other guy.
So I got her back.
I think the most brutal kill
would probably have to be Travis's.
He had the iconic scream.
[screams like a girl]
I think he probably out-screamed all the women
that have been in any of the FRIDAY THE 13TH films.
My death scene in this film was a great one,
and I think the whole purpose of my character
staying in the film as long as he did
was you wanted the audience to really slowly hate me
and hate me more and more
so that when I died it was a big payoff.
We went through probably 10 gallons of blood.
Gets the machete basically all the way up his body
until he's lifted off the ground.
Then he lets me down, lifts me up
and throws me on the back of a hay bale spike
that goes through my chest as the car pulls away.
So timing had to be perfect. I had to be strapped in.
It was just a really... It's a gnarly death.
He was the asshole, he was the jerk,
and, as we all know in films, we want those people to die.
So he got what he deserved.
And then they drive away with my dying body.
So, altogether I'm... that was one of my favorite parts
was to watch me die.
The original script that I read,
it involved a much more intricate scene
involving Jared's character
and Amanda Righetti's character and my character,
in more of a battle with Jason
and Jenna was definitely more involved in that version.
They needed to find something
that wasn't going to be too difficult to shoot
and that was going to fit in their schedule.
So Jenna had to die in the tunnel
I loved that about this.
You know, the sort of, she follows all the rules
of a quintessential Jason movie, and she doesn't swear,
she doesn't have sex, she's not a hard partier,
and yet she still gets killed.
And I think it's fun.
I think it's a great talking point,
and I love that people are so invested in it.
With the Platinum Dunes partners
closely watching over the set,
and with the mounting pressure of constant script changes,
tensions flared between the producers
and director Marcus Nispel.
The working relationship that I had with Marcus
shifted quite a bit in the course of making this film.
Kind of a recluse. He would just keep to himself,
and he would say things to you when you needed to hear them.
There's a fine line between genius and madness.
He's such a visual guy. He gets so excited.
'Da-da very good scene. I want you to burst in.
You're going to attack her. The energy stop there.
Oh they can't help it. You're going to rip them apart!
I think I had a better relationship
and better communication with Brad and Drew.
They were the producers that were on set
the entire shoot.
Unfortunately there was a lot of conflict
between those parties.
Marcus was trying to push this film forward
but they kept changing the script
and rewriting the script. And they were forever at odds.
Almost every shooting day would start with,
you know, some sort of discussion
or conversation about what we're shooting.
No, no, that's not even a scene anymore.
There may have been something between them,
but by the time it gets to us actors,
everybody's... you know, it's like mom and dad.
If they fought it was when we went to bed.
As time went on I realized this is no way to carry on
making a film.
We have to somehow arrive at an amicable agreement
where we can just carry on and, you know,
and that never really happened.
As filming drew to a close,
one question still remained...
How would this FRIDAY THE 13TH end?
And we ended up going back out to Austin
a few months after we had wrapped the movie
to re-shoot some of it,
and they wanted to see me stab Jason.
The original ending we shot for FRIDAY
when Jason's getting pulled into the wood chipper,
we actually shot where the mask pops off.
He's staring, he's confused
because, you know, he loves her so much.
It's like the confusion of like he loves his mother,
and she's not his mother, but she kind of is,
and so he's like, Why are you doing this?
And then she stabs him with the machete.
Jason! Say hi to Mommy... in Hell!
'Jason, say hi to Mommy in hell.'
I fought that tooth and nail.
I was like, Oh, guys, really? That's cheesy.
What they were looking for is the entire audience going like,
Yay! The bad guy's dead!
But instead the entire audience was silent.
And so they changed the ending.
I prefer the more, the emotional one myself
because it adds more depth.
Obviously the big pressure is will there be a big,
big scare at the end,
and then, of course, your biggest trick as a director
is to see what you make look like an end or not,
the false end, you know.
What are you going to do? You know, it's hard.
It's hard to top what happened in the first movie.
The first movie has one of the great, you know,
jump scare endings of all time.
So it became a really tough bar, I think,
for every other filmmaker.
It's like well we need something.
And they just couldn't decide.
There was one point where we were both in a canoe
and then the canoe goes over.
And then there was one point
that maybe it was just Jared in the canoe,
and I was on the dock.
And then it ended up, no, we'll both be on the dock.
They weren't sure if they were going to do a sequel
but they wanted to keep it open-ended
if they did do a sequel.
And then they ended up just deciding, Okay,
he's going to just come out of the water and grab you.
[screams]
On Friday, February 13th, 2009, FRIDAY THE 13TH
was released on 3,105 screens in North America.
Although it brought in an astounding $43 million
in its opening weekend,
negative reviews and a backlash from hardcore fans
caused the film's box office to plunge 80%
in its second weekend.
Nevertheless, the film went on to earn
$65 million domestically,
making it the highest grossing film
among any of the slasher remakes
and proving that Jason Voorhees can indeed survive anything,
including his own reinvention.
Any film that gets remade ever
is going to come across a lot of criticism.
We're messing with something that to a lot of people is holy.
So it doesn't surprise me that there were people
that weren't happy or satisfied
with the way they depicted where Jason was living
and how he was going about killing these people.
The diehard fans
kind of got their panties in a wad about it,
but I thought it was a pretty good execution.
If you're really a fan of those original things,
and you're mad that we messed with some original things,
then go watch the original movies
and don't come see Michael Bay's remake of it.
Well, at least Jason wasn't like living in space.
I had a friend send me something the other day
saying there was a list of recognizable characters
in the franchise, and that I was one of them.
I'm like, That's really cool.
L've been very fortunate because the fans, fan boys,
can sort of fall on one side of the fence,
and they've been very kind to me,
and I'm very grateful for that.
We tried to make a fans' dream.
Because we are fans and I mean I don't know if everyone says,
You guys aren't really fans.
But I really am. And I love these movies,
and we just wanted to write the movie that we wanted to see.
I just knew I worked on a film that I loved working on
with a great group of people
and then when the people started seeing it
and watching it and coming up to me and telling me
what they loved about it,
then I was able to look at it and go,
I just worked on a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie.
This is so cool because this is what I grew up on.
I never thought about growing up
to try and make one of these films.
I don't think you dared to dream that high.
I make no bones about it. I loved making this movie.
I would love to make another 12 of them.
You know, I think there's probably more life in Jason,
and there's just another way to reintroduce him
into the next generation.
This is how much of a nerd I am.
I got chills, which is crazy.
It's such an honor to be a part of the series.
It's mind blowing because when I hear Jason I think of Kane,
C.J. Graham, Ted White.
You know, I think, Oh, yeah, that's right.
I got to play Jason. How unreal is that?
If they do a sequel, I would like to return.
But if not, even if I'm not asked or I don't return,
I'm a fan of the series.
I just want to see more Jason films,
and I'm totally cool with that.
No matter when or if
Jason Voorhees ever hangs up his mask and machete,
fans will always have their Crystal Lake Memories
to remind them that the world would indeed
be a must darker place without FRIDAY THE 13TH.
It's fun to think that Jason,
who started off as just this little surprise ending
on the first one, has turned into a pop icon,
a virtual cottage industry.
I don't think anybody,
myself, Sean or Steve
or pretty much anybody involved with that picture,
had any idea that FRIDAY THE 13TH
would spawn twelve and who knows how many more films?
I know I didn't.
Honestly, FRIDAY THE 13TH has given me a gift
that is just bigger than life itself.
A movie that I didn't give two cents for
in the beginning has brought me into the world
and into the lives of people who have viewed it
in a very special way.
If that's how people saw me,
as kind of the strong, intelligent woman,
it made me feel pretty empowered.
To be able to carry it with me for the rest of my life,
this fun cult film,
it's something to talk about,
it's a great conversation starter.
I can say I was in FRIDAY THE 13TH,
and I gave Jason his hockey mask,
and nobody doesn't know what I'm talking about.
Everyone knows what what is.
I'm really proud of it.
I'm part of history, film history.
You know, this is my first job ever,
and there I was the lead of this film
and that sort of, I think that started me off
to a good path of eventually lots of doctor and lawyer roles.
It's like a badge of honor, you know,
of all the iconic horror figures, you know,
to be killed by Jason, it's really cool.
The quote is 'you're not an actor
unless you've done a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie.'
There are so many people I run into all the time that say,
You know, I was in a FRIDAY THE 13TH.
The fact that We become an 'non
is the weirdest experience of my life.
Because, you know, there's no reward
when you're making the damn thing.
It's a year later when it comes out.
You're listening to the screams and the applause
and that's what that's why we do it, you know.
We went and had a great time watching people
watch the movie.
Again, you don't see that very much now.
Well I guess in some weird way these are classics?
So I'm happy people enjoy 'em,
and can laugh about it and not take us all too seriously.
A lot of actors tend to like kind of shy away from it,
kind of put it in their past, look the other way,
act likes it's a porn or something
that they're not proud of and they just would rather not admit
that it ever happened.
For me, I feel quite differently about it.
I'm grateful to the fans of the horror world,
and I am grateful that, you know,
I was welcomed with such open arms
by the fans of the franchise.
I loved playing Tommy Jarvis.
Corey set it up so great in PART 4
that it was like passing the torch.
And of course he goes on to PART 6.
He at least lives, so I must have done something right.
I just want everyone to know I had a great time,
I was really proud to be a part of it.
I am very grateful,
and I'm glad we can all share a good laugh... or a scream.
Ethel: Ayyyy-ahhh!
No matter how twisted these movies seem,
there's something that actually kind of interweaves
this whole big group of people that makes it one big family.
Host: Never in the course of film history
has a single date
meant so much to our culture
than that of FRIDAY THE 13TH.
It was a party for the launch
of the Crystal Lake Memories book.
And then of course, Jason showed up and, you know,
cut the cake with a machete and that was awfully fun and silly.
[cheers and applause]
And I got to meet my father and mother
from the films, and we had a photo,
and we felt like we were a family reconnected,
found each other again.
And she's this little adult now,
I think she's going off to college, bless her heart,
we did really well, she turned out great.
FRIDAY THE 13TH has been an anchor for a lot of people
for those who just had it as entertainment,
but for filmmakers, directors, writers.
Several years back I had the great opportunity
to be cast as the standby for Hugh Jackman
in the Broadway show The Boy from Oz.
His whole dream to grow up and become an actor
was based on Jason, he wanted to play Jason.
REPORTER: So do you ever think that you'll ever play Jason
in one of those FRIDAY THE 13THs?
HUGH JACKMAN: Oh man, you've done your research.
That's what inspired him to be an actor.
I saw everyone was committed to doing their job
to 100% and, you know,
it made me in a way fall in love
with what it is that I do.
I do think these movies are essential.
I think they allow us to live out some weird dark part
of our personalities.
I think they're healthy.
I don't think they're negative on society.
I think that's an excuse.
We all love, you know, being scared
and wondering what's happening behind us and around us.
[scream]
I think that's why they last, honestly.
FRIDAY THE 13TH is always a great date movie, you know.
We like to say we've been bringing people together
for thirty years.
[scream]
For guys like us who like horror,
and who like Jason, Michael and Freddy,
they're part of our culture and so,
you know, we'll tell our kids about these stories.
That is what made it scary
was the fact that you could only deter them.
There was no way of killing them.
They were gonna be around for the next generation
and the next movie,
No matter what you did to them...
they were gonna be back.
How long will this go on? Who knows?
It could go on for another 20, 30 years. Who knows?
The amazing following that we have,
I had no idea, and I'm so pleasantly surprised
of the fans and everybody.
They're so nice, and I feel really proud
to have been a part of it.
I'm just amazed at the phenomenon this has become.
I never dreamed when I was doing the film then
the effect it would have on so many people
and how there would be such a following 30 years later.
And I'm so grateful to the fans for their loyalty.
They've shown me a lot of love
and that's been very uplifting and surprising.
L've never met as many people
that are as excited about saying hello
to some guy that wore a hockey mask
and getting his signature.
They know more about me than I know about myself half the time.
And they're terrific. They're terrific, terrific people.
You know, as Andy Warhol said,
we all have fifteen minutes of fame.
And thanks to FRIDAY THE 13TH,
my fifteen minutes, it keeps going.
You know, it may be a one-time thing for me, I don't know,
but it has been a great experience.
I'm taking pictures with 4-year-olds
with machetes and masks, babies with masks on.
Most of them come up to me and say,
Hey, you scared the shit out of me
when I was 8 years old, you know.
And I say, Well, what were you doing
watching the movie at 8 years old?
When you get that cult following,
when you get that group of people who's so into it,
it never goes away.
They would have stopped making those movies a long time ago
if they weren't successful.
And success isn't just money, it's people want to see 'em,
it's desire, and they trigger something,
and they become an institution.
It's so weird now to go into these different stores
and see these plastic hockey masks
that are just there because of the FRIDAY thing.
Between toys, novelizations, non-fiction books, video games,
if everyone remembers that wonderful Nintendo
Entertainment System game.
He is no less marketable than Ronald McDonald
or Mickey Mouse at this point.
It's really become part of the everyday culture
in the American culture and throughout the world.
It's just an incredible opportunity
of experiencing something that, you know,
you're going to look back 15, 20 years, 30 years,
and just remember that you were part of that.
What gave me nightmares as a child,
now it's like a weird full circle. lt's so bizarre.
How the heck did I get here?
It's kind of like I've jumped in through my computer monitor,
and I've joined this secret, fun, murdering society.
Playing a character that's known around the world
is an amazing feeling
and something I'm really proud of,
and I never expected anything like that
going into this career as a stuntman,
and I've just been very lucky,
and I'll always love the fact that I was Jason.
FRIDAY THE 13TH in this long odyssey
towards becoming iconic horror filmmaking,
it's just an amazing phenomenon.
I swear to God, I don't understand it,
and I'm just grateful that it happened.
And there you have it, the story of Jason Voorhees.
For now he may be quiet,
but he will be back.
The one thing we know for sure...
Jason's horrific reign of evil
is eternal...
immortal...
and unstoppable.
Jason is still out there...
and maybe... just maybe...
he's closer than you think.
Kill her, Mommy.
Paul there's somebody in this room.
There's somebody in this fucking room!
Whooo! This feels good!
Dude, that goalie was pissed about something.
If Vera had...
Boo!
[Scream] Ohhhh!
It's that creep Shelly. What a sick sense of humor.
Why do you do these stupid things?
I just want you to like me.
I have seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo
wearing a mask is never friendly.
I don't think so, Maddy.
You could use a little touch-up work first.
Need a little bit of touch-up work, my ass.
This sucks on so many levels!
Now I say we regroup,
and let's go find this mother-fucker
before he finds us. Huh? Are you with me?
You didn't get me in the lake, Jason,
and you're not going to get me now!
Tommy! Tommy, get the hell out of here!
That's what's known as screwin' the pooch!
Bad news Crews.
I'm in the mood for I feel like a Jarvis Sandwich!
When I looked into that mirror I knew I'd always be ugly.
I said, 'Lizzie, you'll always be plain.
Are you ready for Tony the Wonder Llama?
I told you to sit on it, Tonto.
Hey, you're lucky you weren't alive
during the Microsoft conflict.
We were beating each other over the heads
with our own severed limbs.
Come on, Sara, strip and dip?
Freddy died by fire, Jason by water.
How can we use that?
Dude, that's not a good look for you.
You ask the one black guy to pump the gas for you? Shit.
Do you...
You know, I gave up a weekend with Mary Jo Conrad
to be here with you.
You know, Jimmy, you're a dead fuck.
Yeah, well, I guess I do owe you.
You slut! [laughter]
Stay here. Relax. L'll be right back.
I'm gonna chop you into itty- bitty little pieces, my friend.
Just like I done to that piggo
over at that fuckin' crazy farm.
You tell 'em, Ma!
Ayyyyyy-ahhhh!
Melissa's a bitch. [laughter] No, I can't even do it.
Jason belongs in hell. And I'm gonna see that he gets there.
Wherever the red dot goes, ya bang.
Nobody's gonna touch that fuckin' ray of sunshine.
[tongue lapping sound]
Rrrrrrrrruffff!
My earring
Must be my imagination.
Survival's the name of the game,
and that flag is mine.
We never should have let her play.
Oh God, somebody help! He's trying to kill me!
You're not just a lousy doctor,
you're a blank-blank-blank coward! [laughter]
Aww, what scary man?
It's the best. The best!
You're talking to the prom queen, Eva.
Do you really think I'm going to risk getting caught?
What's brown and sits on a piano?
Beethoven's last movement.
[party horn sound]
Hey buddy, where are you, Michael?
Hey buddy? [party horn sound]
Ben? Are you coming back or not?
And then [slashing sound]
That's it. Come to Momma.
Mmmm. Smart and sexy.
[sounds of agony]
The story could have happened anywhere, dude.
That's how they get little kids to shit themselves.
May I please have the wallet ma'am.
You've got perfect nipple placement, baby.
L've actually said that to a woman before.
Wow, you really know how to make a girl feel special.
Jason's out there. And he's hungry.
Ma'am... we didn't find any boy.
Then he's still there.
Yeah, when I was doing the films CLERKS, MALL RATS,
CHASING AMY and JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK,
um... wait a minute... I wasn't in those movies.