So you guys all know the story of Camp Crystal Lake, right?
I mean, come on, surely you have to know about the legend.
All right, well listen.
I don't want to scare anyone...
but I'm gonna give it to you straight about Jason.
It all happened at Camp Crystal Lake...
Camp Blood.
And Jason... was just a little boy at the time.
He drowned one night.
His mom, who worked at the camp...
she blamed all the counselors.
Said it was their fault.
She decided to kill each and every one of them.
Well, legend has it that Jason didn't drown.
He survived.
And he watched his mother get beheaded that night.
He took his revenge.
Every year, on Friday the 13th,
Jason would just keep coming back.
Now if you listen to the old timers in town,
they say that Jason's still out there,
Which means the Voorhees Curse is alive and well.
Friday the 13th is his day.
And Camp Crystal Lake... is his domain.
That cost $500,000,
which to date has grossed just under a billion dollars.
It's just an amazing phenomenon.
And not only were we shocked and surprised and pleased,
but amazed that we even finished the film.
I hear from people all over the world,
and I don't quite understand what the wonderful,
captivating thing is about this particular film.
I never dreamed when I was doing the film then
the effect it would have on so many people.
There's actually a lot of thought
and a lot of real talent that goes into these pictures.
"Friday the 13th" was one of the innovators,
I would say, of this slasher movie
but where the characters all represented people
that each one of us knew.
The best horror movies find a way
to tap into something that's truly human.
And there is something so compelling about the genre
that people will always come back to it.
I think that the goal is about scaring the audience
and fear and vulnerability.
We don't know why but it's something in us
that likes to be scared.
I don't watch the movie,
I pick somebody out in the audience,
and then watch the evolution of their heart attack.
It's not rocket science. It's fun. lt's exciting.
The fans so adore this character.
They like Jason more than they like the survivors.
They sort of brought a life to it,
that it would have never had without 'em.
That's where the power lies is Jason never dies
because the audience brings him back to life,
the devoted fans of Jason.
It's a great character to watch and see what he'll do next.
I don't think it'll really ever come to a complete end.
A lot of us relate to Jason because Jason is the outcast.
Like in school, either you're too tall, you're too short,
you're too heavy, you have buck teeth,
you speak with a lisp, we all tie in somehow,
going, 'Oh, I understand that, I was the different kid.'
lt's just a basic part of the human struggle.
Jason represents that force that you're going to come up against.
You know, we all want to be that person
that feels like we can, you know, stop evil
and save the person that we love.
I think that we need these monsters, these bogeymen,
these characters who embody all evil
because we can't deal with the real evil
that we have to in our day to day lives.
If you can take that darkness out and look at it,
then you can conquer it, you can defeat it,
you can actually deal with it.
It's when we try and hide it from the light
that it overcomes us.
In the early 1970's,
Connecticut-based filmmaker Sean S. Cunningham
was struggling to make a name for himself,
scraping by on a diet
of industrial shorts and commercials
and even the occasional soft-core porn.
Back in the early 70's, a big change was happening
in the movie business.
There had been success with documentary forms
and with hand-held cameras.
And there was a sense of anything was possible.
You know, just grab your camera, grab your equipment,
get in the back of the station wagon and go shoot it.
You can compete with the big guys.
He was making little movies.
There was a film he made called "Together,"
and it starred Marilyn Chambers
who went to the local high school.
It was a marital aid film
for couples who were trying to strengthen their marital bond,
as it would be, in the bedroom.
We had a mutual friend. His name was Bud Talbot,
who I was working with on a film.
I think he helped Sean raise some of the money,
and uh, this movie, "Case of the Full Moon Murders,"
and it starred Harry Reams. It was very soft.
In the softcore world.
7:35 a.m. We were shown to a bedroom.
A male corpse with an enormous erection
was covered with a blanket.
Our suspicions were immediately aroused.
In the mid-seventies, everybody said we need
nice, clean, wholesome films.
So we did two very nice, clean, wholesome films.
And they made absolutely zero dollars.
And now I had to get another job.
Somehow or other I had to get something going.
That something turned out to be 1972's "Last House On the Left."
To avoid fainting, keep repeating:
"lt's only a movie. Only a movie..."
The film produced by Cunningham,
and directed by Wes Craven,
who would go on to create 1984's "A Nightmare On Elm Street,"
presented a brutal portrait
of violence and visceral horror in small-town America.
Well, we were co-producers of "Last House on the Left,"
which I think was a very important horror film.
And it's still playing today all over the world.
Although none of Sean Cunningham's early efforts
achieved mainstream success,
his next brainchild, with a considerable debt
owed to John Carpenter's 1978 screen shocker "Halloween,"
would launch a whole new sub-genre of horror.
I had thought of this title some time ago
called Friday the 13th. And I said to myself,
'If I had a film called Friday the 13th,
I could sell that.
And Sean called me up and said,
"Halloween" is making incredible money at the box office,
let's rip it off."
That is keeping it real.
And I said, "Here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna take out an ad in Variety,
and put at the top 'From the people who brought you
"Last House on the Left"
comes the most terrifying film ever made.
"Friday the 13th."
And that's all we had.
We really didn't know what we were going to make.
We just wanted to see if anybody would be interested
in buying it.
Cunningham was able to secure financing
for "Friday the 13th" through the same trio
of east coast investors
who funded and distributed
"Last House on the Left."
Robert Barsamian, Stephen Minasian, and Philip Scuderi,
owners of the Esquire Theaters chain,
and who, under their Georgetown Productions banner,
were ready to make their mark on motion picture history.
But first, they needed one thing: a script.
The longest part of the process
of creating the first "Friday the 13th"
was figuring out the venue.
So I had to find some territory
that was adult-free, more-or-less.
Camp Crystal Lake is jinxed!
Oh, terrific.
So we came up with summer camp, Sean said, "let's go with it,"
and that was that.
The thing about the story in "Friday the 13th,"
is that it's so profoundly simple.
I think part of that had to do with the fact
that we had very little time to waste
on conventional things like character and plot.
We had this notion that these kids
would be out at a summer camp,
and would be threatened by some kind of serial killer,
and we would then be surprised to discover
who the serial killer was at the end.
Who are yam?
I thought that basically what I had done
was I had taken mom and apple pie,
and the clean, wonderful, let's have a ball Pepsi generation,
these clean cut kids who are out having fun
and unfettered by adult restrictions,
and stood it on its head.
And I just knocked them off one-by-one.
By the fall of 1979, with a script in hand
and a production budget of approximately $550,000,
Cunningham and his protege Steve Miner
began searching for the ideal location
that would become the cursed hamlet of Crystal Lake.
The film was shot in a small little Boy Scout camp
called 'Camp No-be-Bo-Sco.'
It was off-season so all the kids had gone home,
and we were able to take it over.
So it was a standing, working camp.
And, it was a whole bunch of log cabins and all that stuff.
It was an archery range, it was a lake, it was everything.
It was just a little bit colder
than it normally would be in the summer.
Like most tales set at summer camp,
"Friday the 13th" begins around a campfire.
It's Friday, June 13, 1958,
and lovelorn counselors Claudette and Barry
soon find their late-night tryst interrupted
by a murderous stranger,
making them the first on-screen victims
in what would become one of the biggest body counts
in film history.
Fans have often asked if we planned to shoot
a more gruesome on-screen death for the character of Claudette.
There are even photos that show her throat being sliced open
by a machete.
I think it was Savini, you know,
fooling around in the makeup room,
because we didn't have time to shoot
that kind of a big production,
As I originally laid out the character of the killer,
and the clues as to who the killer was,
in the original scene, you saw a missing finger.
And so that every time you saw this hand without a finger,
that would be your clue that this was the killer.
And for time and budgetary constraints,
that got dropped out.
As the film shifts to present day,
we are introduced to a cast of fresh faces
culled from New York's thriving theater scene.
And as would become the rule for all future Fridays,
the young, would-be victims had to be likable,
and they had to work cheap.
My partner at the time, Julie Hughes and I,
were pretty much the major casting people on Broadway.
But we had done a few films.
So we looked forward to doing this,
particularly with the idea of finding all sorts of new talent
for the young kids in the film.
Julie Hughes had said, 'You know, you're not right for this,
but they're doing this movie, and they need camp counselors,
and you would be perfect.'
So then they sent me to meet Sean
and audition for "Friday the 13th."
Hi, I'm going to Camp Crystal Lake.
You have to figure out as many different ways
of making the teenagers dumb without being really stupid.
Uh, I think we better stop.
Because the audience has got to be saying
as they sit there as part of this roller coaster ride,
'Don't go in there, girl! Don't go in there!
Oh, no!
To play their heroine, the filmmakers required
a resourceful and intelligent young actress
who could not only fight back
against the machete-wielding killer,
but could also hold her own against the amorous advances
of doomed camp owner, Steve Christy.
Do I really look like that?
You did last night.
My backstory to Alice was she was an art student,
art major, psychology minor,
and she had gotten her job through a friend of a friend
who knew Steve Christy.
Give me another chance.
He obviously had the hots for her.
Alice was big on space, you know?
She needed lots of elbow room. She had to think things out.
She was very confused.
L'll give it a week.
And who knows, maybe at the end of the summer
something would have happened.
But he was gonna have to be patient.
And he didn't seem like the patient type.
Well, there's no crazy people around here!
In the role of resident prankster Ned was Mark Nelson,
who had recently starred on Broadway
with his "Friday the 13th" co-star Jeannine Taylor,
whose happy-go-lucky character Marcie
was given a fitting posthumous surname.
The character wasn't named Marcie Cunningham.
She didn't really have a last name at first,
and later on, after we wrapped,
Sean Cunningham decided, I guess, to adopt me,
because I ended up with his last name.
For the role of Bill, the proverbial 'good guy'
who proves to be a contender for Alice's affections
as well as a potential suspect, the filmmakers cast the son
of one of Hollywood's most beloved legends.
Harry Crosby was the son of the legendary singer, Bing Crosby,
who was a popular singer in the 30's, 40's, and 50's.
He had so many great stories about his dad,
who had just passed away,
so it was probably kind of emotional for him
to share much about his father.
How can you guys eat that stuff? It looks like dead animals!
Playing the nurturing and animal loving Brenda,
who learned just how dangerous and deadly
an archery range could be, was the late Laurie Bartram,
who sadly lost a long battle with cancer in 2007.
Laurie Bartram, we miss her so dearly.
She was truly the heart and soul on that production.
I remember her, she was who you saw.
You know, worried about everyone.
I was really shocked and upset to hear she'd died so young.
Beautiful person, inside and out.
But the young man whose fame
would far surpass six degrees of Friday the 13th
was, at the time, a struggling New York actor
whose biggest film role to date
had been in the blockbuster 1978 comedy, "Animal House."
I was surrounded by terrific young talent,
and particularly Kevin Bacon.
I just thought he was so good and so professional.
I remember when I called his agent
to see if I, if he would do "Friday the 13th."
The agent said, 'Well, what does he do in the film?'
I said, 'Well, mostly he just, you know,
makes love to a lot of girls.'
And the agent said, 'Well, Kevin loves to do that.'
"Footloose" was his breakout moment.
Let's DANCE!
And of course he skyrocketed,
but it was very obvious to me
that he was going to be a star.
One of the most memorable characters in "Friday the 13th"
was Crystal Lake's resident 'prophet of doom, '
played by veteran actor Walt Gorney,
who passed away in 2004.
I know a lot of the fans of "Friday the 13th"
love and admire Crazy Ralph.
It's got a death curse!
And this sounds strange, but it's the truth.
I thought that Walt Gorney really was crazy.
He kind of frightened me.
And I realize now he might have been a little eccentric,
but he was just a very, very fine character actor.
It's so sad that he wasn't here
to share all this acclaim over "Friday the 13th."
He would have would have loved it
As filming commenced on September 4, 1979,
cast and crew experienced their share
of low-budget filmmaking misfortunes.
And Cunningham's silent partner Phil Scuderi
remained dissatisfied with certain elements
of Victor Miller's script.
Enter Ron Kurz.
I was sent down there to do some rewrites and basically
to also see what was going on.
I don't want to say I was a spy, but (laughs)
The only scene I had a problem with
was the inclusionary scene of the motorcycle policeman,
which really argued against the concept
that this was a geography
that was kind of off bounds for the police.
I had never been on a motorcycle before,
and in fact, I did fall on my ass. (laughs)
The motorcycle fell on me,
and course, Sean and Steve Miner come running to help me,
'You okay, Ron?' They lifted it off me I says, 'l'm fine.
Although all of the human actors who met their on-screen demise
came out of the film unscathed,
one on-screen fatality was, in fact, very real.
I remember all of us playing the scene,
and the poor snake, it was a real snake.
And he was chopped into bits.
And for that, on behalf of myself
and anyone who's ever harmed a snake,
I would like to tell all snakes,
poisonous or not, I'm sorry.
Wanting to up the ante on Halloween's minimalist shocks,
Sean Cunningham needed to find someone
who could create the realistic, larger-than-life death sequences
called for in the script.
In the world of practical special effects,
a new Dawn was emerging.
When I decided to make "Friday the 13th,"
my job was to try to figure out
how to make something scary for very little money
and very little production value.
The original Friday the 13th came out
after "Dawn of the Dead."
And "Dawn of the Dead" was sort of the first film
that put gore effects really in the forefront.
Sean had seen "Dawn of the Dead,
or somebody had seen "Dawn of the Dead" and said,
'You know you're doing "Friday the 13th,"
you gotta get this guy.
And there were other make-up artists, you know,
but my effects had a reputation
of being more realistic. And that could be
because I was a combat photographer in Vietnam.
If the stuff I created didn't give me the same feeling I got
when I saw the real stuff,
then the fake stuff wasn't good enough, it wasn't real enough.
And I think that had a lotto do
with the reputation for my effects.
Up comes this guy in a BMW, and it's Tom Savini.
He comes in, he's got this script all marked up,
and he said, Okay now, let's see.
We've got a hunting arrow up through the chest,
that's not a problem.
I've got an axe in the face here on page 40.
Do you want a real face and a fake axe,
or do you want a fake face and real axe?'
lt's porno really, isn't it?
So the money shot in these slasher movies
is the big kill.
Sean was very insistent that we borrow from Hitchcock,
that piece of "Psycho," which was to surprise the audience
within the first twenty minutes
with, 'These people are not screwing around!'
People have said to me that my character was sort of
like the Janet Leigh in "Psycho,"
because I'm, I'm the set-up.
You know? I'm the set-up character to follow.
Excuse me, how far is Camp Crystal Lake from here?
It is a lot of fun being the first person killed
in 'present-day' time of "Friday the 13th."
But I didn't last too long.
We did the little stunt, jumping out of the jeep
and running through the woods, and that was really,
that was really great fun.
You see her up against the tree.
And the knife comes up (makes a swish sound)
and passes through frame.
And she's standing there for a second.
She puts her hand up, and you're thinking,
'Oh, maybe she's okay.'
And then the blood pours out.
The piece was very small that was on my neck.
So, there was already a slit in the piece.
And it was covered very well.
So, the tube, you know, just ran down my sleeve,
and Tom was right there working the blood.
Just right off camera. It really did look great.
The beauty of these movies
and kind of the slasher movie genre ultimately is,
you can go and just, if you want to go see people get killed
in a variety of interesting and compelling ways,
you can go and have that.
If you want a little bit of nudity,
chances are you're going to get that as well.
And I know as a young man, that's what I wanted.
I needed the T&A for me,
to hell with the audience.
You know, bikinis and swimming, and it's all just
young and hormonal.
Everybody wants to have sex with each other.
Oh my god! I actually took my clothes off!
Yes, it was for a great reason.
I got to have 'screen sex' with Kevin Bacon.
Then, when poor Neddy is on top,
we don't actually see him killed,
but I thought that was so brilliant.
With the blood dripping down. It's like AHHH.
There you have Kevin Bacon all satiated and smoking dope,
and he gets an arrow through his neck.
I thought that was so creative and so brilliant.
Probably my favorite.
But I had done George Romero's Martin,
and in Martin the guy had to get a stick in his neck.
And in Kevin Bacon's case,
we put that wife beater on the fake body.
He's like on his knees under the bed
with his head here, and here's the fake body.
And me and my buddy, Taso, under there and you know,
I'm pushing the arrow through and Taso was pumping the blood.
But an accident occurred.
The tube separated from Taso's pump,
so he grabbed it and blew in it.
And that's what made the blood shoot out and gurgle.
Which was a happy accident, it made the effect,
you know, bloodier and grislier.
She screams and the axe comes up.
And you see the axe make contact with the light.
You know, that was completely Tom's idea,
as to make the audience realize that this axe is a real axe.
It has substance to it, and it's heavy.
I don't remember precisely what showed up on film,
but I do know that the scene was a lot longer
than what ended up in the final cut. No pun intended.
Sex is part of the driving thing.
There is this war between sex and violence that goes on.
Sex ...die You know, have sex, die.
That's the premise, that's the underlying thing, you know,
going through the "Friday the 13th" movies.
Is Sean Cunningham like a devout,
born-again Christian or something?
I don't believe "Friday the 13th" was a morality play.
Alice had sensibilities,
and she was not part of what I called the clique,
or the in-group or whatever.
The reason the girl who didn't make love survived
was that she was not distracted.
It's not that she was more moral than the others,
she just had had nobody to make it with
so she was not busy.
I remember one particular one
where Adrienne is in the kitchen.
And she thinks she's safe.
And there's a place where she just goes, [sigh]
And just as that happens...
WHAM! Somebody comes flying through the window.
You didn't see Laurie Bartram die,
the girl on the archery range?
She was just thrown through the window.
It was actually me
in her nightgown and wig, going through the window.
But Cunningham's insistence
that he would not give the audience any clues
that would hint at the killer's real identity
resulted in "Friday the 13th's" penultimate surprise.
Where is the killer? Who is the killer?
And we bring in Betsy Palmer.
We cast Betsy Palmer.
And this was really my strong feeling for Mrs. Voorhees,
that she should be somebody warm and comforting.
So when that door opens,
and the audience sees it's this nice mother type.
I'm Mrs. Voorhees. An old friend of the Christies.
And you would think of her and be predisposed
to think of her as a nice person,
who then we find out is crazy.
I had heard, I think probably from Sean,
that Estelle Parsons had been offered the role first.
And because Estelle and I
are actresses of the same age and all
Because "Friday the 13th's" production schedule
got moved back, she could no longer do it.
So it was strictly a time thing.
It wasn't that she didn't like it, or they didn't like her.
By the way, when I read this script,
I said 'What a piece of junk'.
I thought, 'This will come. It will go.
Nobody will ever know or ever see it'.
So I run into Mrs. Voorhees,
thinking she is the one who is going to save me
I felt, 'Oh, this poor thing'
and she's telling me about all this disastrous stuff
that was going on
They're all dead. They're all dead.
And then we find out that she had this kid
Did you know that a young boy drowned?
The year before those two others were killed?
Poor woman. She lost her son, Jason,
while the camp counselors were fooling around.
Jason was my son, and today is his birthday.
And this becomes, 'Oh boy, look out now.
Now I get it.'
You let him drown! You never paid any attention!
Look what you did to him.
In retrospect, I think "Psycho" got in
in a way that I was not conscious of at all.
Well, a boy's best friend is his mother.
I basically reversed Tony Perkins and his mother.
And I had the mother alive, and the kid dead.
She's revenging poor Jason's death.
And she believes that it's our fault.
All of a sudden, I hear the voice in my head saying
Kill her, Mommy! Kill her!
There's another place where Betsy,
who's really an incredible actress,
she did a thing,
and I even pointed it out to her one day,
and when you say the line
He wasn't a very good swimmer.
And you smiled.
You're crazy, you know it,
and you don't care. (laughs)
And that's really scary.
I won't, Jason. I won't.
I came up with the idea for Jason's name
'cause originally I had called him, it was going to be Josh.
But the more I worked on the film,
and the creepier the whole subject of that got,
I stuck with the ' ♪ and went to Jason.
And I knew a kid named Jason when I was, oh,
about 8, 9 or 10 years old.
And he was one of them sneaky little bastards,
who was always telling on people.
And he was a mean little guy.
And so I never really liked his name.
Despite having played arguably
one of the most demented villainesses
ever to appear on screen,
Betsy Palmer has amassed a large,
and largely-sympathetic, cult following.
When I'm doing the autographs, signing, conventions,
they put their babies in my arms
and this killer lady (laughs) holds the little child.
The little children come up and all.
I've said to people, I've said, 'Why? Why do you love her
as much as you do,
when she's supposed to be this dreadful human being?'
And they say, "Because we understand
why you did it."
Mrs. Voorhees, is, to my thinking,
had every reason to keep a camp closed
because otherwise somebody else's son would drown
just like her little Jason.
And that's all she was doing,
was making sure that that never happened to another mother
ever again.
I've never felt that she was anything
but a mother who was trying to care for a poor,
wounded cub.
I mean I couldn't imagine. I'd just go crazy, myself,
if my grandson, who I'm raising as my son,
if something happened to him.
So I can clearly identify with Betsy Palmer's character.
Here's a child who's been ignored, neglected.
I honestly felt like, 'Hey, here's one for all those kids
who have been set to the side because they were different.
Many years ago, with the help of a very fine psychologist,
I saw that Mrs. Voorhees is the mother I never had.
She is the mother who will kill people
to avenge her son's death.
Undeniably, one of the film's most memorable characters
is its iconic musical score.
And the now-infamous sound effect
created by composer Harry Manfredini.
So much of the delight of "Friday the 13th"
and the experience of it, came from the sound effects
and the music.
Somehow or the other, the music
had to evoke and point out the fact
that the killer was there.
It wasn't just the camera shooting.
It was the POV of the killer.
Harry's delightful signature piece,
the ma-ma-ma-ki-ki-ki...
If you go to the end of the film,
you'll see a very close-up of Betsy Palmer's,
Mrs. Voorhees' mouth.
Where she's saying, to herself...
Kill her, Mommy.
Kill her.
I just went, and I took the consonant sound of the 'K',
'Kl' from kill her, and 'MA' from 'Mommy.'
I went up to a microphone and just went 'k-k-k-' 'ma'.
And we ran it through something called an Echoplex,
which was a gizmo back in the late 70's, early 80's.
And it ended up becoming 'k-k-k-ma-ma-ma',
and that of course, became the instant sound
that I needed to bring the killer
into the first reel, and throughout the picture.
And I'm sure that without Harry's music,
and without the sound effects,
we never would have had the success
that finally happened.
I think the women were stronger in this film
than the guys were.
You know, look who it came down to.
The battle was between Mrs. Voorhees and Alice.
There was a sequence that I was to,
well, I'd begun to really lose it.
Smack her, you know, give her a hit alongside of her chops.
Well, when we hit somebody on stage,
we hit somebody.
So I hauled off, and I gave her a smack.
Well, she fell to the ground crying,
'Sean, Sean, she hit me. She hit me.'
And he came over and he said, 'No, no, no, Betsy.
We don't do that in movies.'
I said, 'Well, what are we supposed to do?'
He said, 'You'll miss her.'
And he said, "We'll just bring in the sound afterwards."
Alice doesn't want to die. And she fights back.
And then they go through this incredible beach ballet.
We're, of course, pounding away at one another,
and I have her hair.
And then she goes at me with some sort of a boat oar.
My favorite kill of all... Mrs. Voorhees slow-mo.
It doesn't get better than that. The ultimate kill by Alice.
The assistant director came up, and said,
'Hey, we're gonna cut your head off.'
He said, 'Don't ya wanna see how we're gonna do it?'
I said, 'You've got to be kidding.
I could care less how you're going to chop my head off'.
Taso Strevakis was my assistant on that movie.
We actually made a cast of Betsy Palmer's head,
made a rubber dummy of it.
We decorated the inside so when it severed you would see
anatomically-correct gore in there.
It was Tommy Savini's assistant.
It was attached to him in some way.
And Tommy Savini is the one that cut it off.
What I did was I attached it with toothpicks.
So the toothpicks were just kind of holding it in place,
knowing that when I whacked it with that machete,
it would go through the toothpicks.
And I wanted to whack it so the head would spin,
which luckily it did in the first take.
Oh, I mean, I don't have hair on the back of my hands,
you know, like he did.
I thought that was a little weird in one shot.
If you watch the movie when Betsy Palmer is decapitated,
her hands come up into the frame,
in kind of like grabbing air.
They're Taso's hands with hairy knuckles.
It's not Betsy Palmer.
It's these big meat puffs that he's got as hands.
Even after the dramatic death of Mrs. Voorhees,
a final, crucial scene remained.
One that would prove to be Cunningham's master stroke,
and a defining moment
that would, unbeknownst to anyone at the time,
spawn a franchise.
You know, in talking to Sean about the ending,
They really didn't have an ending so,
and I had just seen Carrie.
You know in Carrie they did a beautiful job.
Brian De Palma convinced you the movie is over.
She's walking around in the graveyard,
the hand comes up and grabs her.
Scared the bejesus out of me,
and I'm sure anyone else who ever saw it.
So I said to Sean,
'Why don't we have Jason jump out of the lake, you know,
and attack her?'
But Jason's dead, ' he said.
And I clearly remember that, you know, if it's a dream,
you can get away with anything.
You could call it an homage,
I call it a theft. You know, grand theft cinema.
I mean everybody, including the special effects man
(laughs) to the girl who typed up the memos,
to the girl who went out for lunch,
claimed to have written this scene (laughs).
But, I wrote it.
At first, they were thinking
of having Noel Cunningham, Sean's son, do it.
But his wife would have none of that.
My mother said, 'You're out of your mind
if I'm going to let my kid spend four hours in a lake
in the middle of fall in New Jersey
to be in your stupid movie.
Were it not for her, I would have been Jason.
I would have been the first Jason.
And I'm not bitter
Prior to that I had been in "Manny's Orphans,"
and I played this kid Roger,
who was like a slightly sex-obsessed little kid.
So Steve Miner just kind of said,
'Hey, let's get Ari to do it.'
My investors in Boston
wanted to have it more extreme and seaweed,
and maybe he could be deformed a little bit,
and Tom Savini said, 'Oh, I've got a great idea.'
And he started to make his head lopsided
and put a weird eye on him.
And it just became more and more extreme.
We dredged up part of the pond
and Tom Savini used real swamp muck for that.
I came upon a picture in this group of Polaroids
and I said, 'And who's this?'
And he said, 'Oh, that's your son.'
And I said, 'Well, why does he look so strange?'
And he said, 'Well, he said, he's a mongoloid.
I said, 'He's what?!'
I said, that wasn't in the script!'
That's a nightmare Jason that comes out of the water.
The real Jason was probably just an almost ordinary child.
And so that part is a total dream,
or it was in my mind.
We wind up having this gorgeous, idyllic setting.
You know, on the lake, in the canoe.
I did everything I could to tell the audience
that it's okay now. You can relax. lt's over.
But the strongest aspect is Harry Manfredini's soundtrack.
That was really the first time in the film
where the music stopped being the music for the killer
and started to really manipulate you.
It's over. The police have come. The cavalry's here.
It went on so long that even the people
who were positive something was going to happen
pretty much gave up that something was going to happen.
Alice has this look of hope.
And she's just trailing her fingers in the water.
And BAN“.!
And it was a wonderful addition.
I mean I think that Sean's idea is right.
That it really wasn't finished until that.
One of the really delightful things that we could do
is go to a screening and watch the people jump at the end,
because for whatever reasons, this ending got 'em.
I'm telling you, people just flew out of the seats
and ran out of the theater
and Sean was just like a little kid going,
'I got 'em, I got 'em all!'
I think without that single moment,
I don't think Friday would have been half as successful
as it was.
Because the people got to leave, strangely enough,
with a smile on their face.
They got tricked, and they loved it.
And then the next scene Alice wakes up,
and they tell her no one else was found.
It was only her. Everyone else is dead.
I remember the scene in the hospital vividly
because, when I sort of ask,
when she asks me about the boy and I go,
Ma'am, we didn't find any boy.
And she says
Then he's still there.
And he certainly was.
I knew that we're looking at a Part 2 here.
Those little drops at the end,
Those little ripples in the water at the end.
It's like, well, was it a dream, wasn't it at dream?
Were those raindrops, or were those air bubbles?
And I think now we know the answer.
In early 1980, the film was picked up
for domestic distribution by Frank Mancuso, Sr.
VP of Paramount Pictures, who planned a national release
and a multi-million dollar marketing campaign.
The risk paid off, and for Paramount,
Sean Cunningham and Georgetown Productions,
"Friday the 13th" was about to become
their lucky day.
Frank Mancuso was head of distribution at Paramount.
And he had the idea of treating this little movie
as if it were a real movie.
And had no stars, and nothing recognizable
except this sort of strange, superstitious title.
And went out and sold it like crazy.
1
2
3
Friday the 13th. You may only see it once.
But that will be enough.
"Friday the 13th" opened on May 9, 1980,
eventually taking in $39.7 million at the U.S. box office.
If the reason behind the film's immense popularity
was lost on mainstream critics,
who not only hated the film, but eviscerated it.
No one was more stunned by its success than its creators.
For better or worse, "Friday the 13th"
would change their lives.
And the horror genre... forever.
When it first started, it was repeat business
that made it successful.
It was teenage girls going to see it
and then bringing their girlfriends,
and then dragging their boyfriend to see it.
It was all this repeat business.
Before "Friday the 13th," maybe the most successful
quote-unquote horror movies
were handled on a very limited basis,
like "Halloween" or even "Carrie."
They weren't treated as major motion pictures.
The fact that that one became so wildly successful,
the producers jumped on it as this is an opportunity
for us to sell this off and make more and more films.
You also have to remember this was back in 1980.
This was before cable TV. Before the internet.
Before VHS really. Before DVD.
So if you wanted to get anything that was really titillating,
horror was the only place you could go.
There was something, um, exciting about it
'cause it was breaking new ground.
And of course your parents didn't want you to see it,
which only made you want to see it that much more,
and made it that much better when you did see it.
The modern horror movie was kind of born,
because it now became a possible player
in the mainstream distribution of movies.
It's like "Night of the Living Dead" with Romero.
Those guys involved in that all had careers after that.
I thought it was a piece of crap.
And I, truthfully, didn't care if my name got on it or not.
At that time. (laughs) And then when it opened,
(laughs) My god!
The critical reaction to "Friday the 13th,"
was so abysmal that I knew we were going to be a success.
I mean, there was one critic who wanted us all arrested
and tried for horrible crimes against humanity.
I'm convinced it has something to do
with the growth of the women's movement in America
in the last decade.
I think that these films are some sort of primordial response
by some very sick people, of men
saying 'get back in your place, women.'
And I was upset by all of the terrible publicity,
and the scorn and the ridicule.
Gene Siskel gave us this scathing review.
I think he even may have published Betsy Palmer's address
saying, 'write to her nasty things
because she's a terrible person.
How dare Betsy Palmer play a role like this
in "Friday the 13th,"
when she has made herself so lovable,
on "I've Got a Secret all these years,
and all the television shows she's done.
How dare she play a role like that,
and insult her viewing audience?
And I thought, 'Well, those who can, do,
and those who can't, criticize.'
The first of the slashers
were to reflect the changing attitudes and ideas
about women and what they could do.
I think we go back to Jamie Lee Curtis in "Halloween,"
Sissy Spacek in "Carrie."
Sigourney Weaver.
Alice, all of a sudden, is the sole survivor.
And I believe it was a direct reflection
of what was going on in the world.
And I think "Friday the 13th" really empowered women.
So after "Friday the 13th" was released,
there spawned a whole new industry
of teenage horror films based on holidays,
or based on a serial killer,
based on very low budgets and low writing.
Strangely enough, I think that people often sort of imitated
my mistakes rather than the stuff that I got right.
Well, "Friday the 13th" was the greatest experience for me
up until the point of after it opening.
It was huge. It was fabulous.
It was an actor's dream come true.
It certainly was for me.
And then, slowly I realized I had a stalker.
Stalking was not taken seriously back in 1980.
And it wasn't, it wasn't something
that everyone was aware of.
I was starting to get phone calls back then,
it was so easy to get phone numbers.
He, he got into my apartment.
For over a year, I didn't know who my stalker was
and what happened was, he befriended me,
he actually worked his way into my life
so I was actually giving him information
about my stalker.
I had an ordeal with him up close at one point,
which in itself, is a horror movie.
Eventually, I had a gun to my head.
And I was able to talk the fan down.
It really took its toll for a while.
But, it's all okay now. It's all good now.
And having three generations of fans
from around the world that fly in to wherever I am,
at a city or a convention,
that really talk to me and care,
and tell me how much it affected them
when they found out.
It's just a gift. It's a beautiful thing.
And, I thank them.
I've turned around my thinking about it.
I think it worked out just the way it was supposed to.
And I have never felt that I damaged my career.
If anything, there are people that would never know I existed.
We had this tiny little movie that cost $500,000,
made in a boy scout camp in New Jersey.
I (laughs) just cannot imagine how we got here from there.
It kind of launched the whole mythology.
And it wasn't by accident, but it was kind of good fortune.
By the end of 1980, Friday the 13th
had already unleashed a slew of imitators,
throwing open the floodgates
for fledgling independent distributors
and major Hollywood studios
looking to cash in on the new slasher film craze.
With each film seemingly made faster,
cheaper and gorier than the last.
With Paramount Pictures pushing for a sequel,
Sean S. Cunningham grappled with the question
of what to do when virtually the entire cast
of your film and its villain - are dead.
So, now this phenomenon takes place,
and “Friday the 13th” opens around the world,
and it's a big hit.
And the powers that be said,
We have to make a sequel.
And I'm saying, Why would you make a sequel?
I didn't think there was going to be any others
after the first one.
We were never led to believe that.
Mrs. Voorhees is dead,
and the image of Jason in the lake
is completely a fabrication of the mind.
I don't know what in the world we could do for a sequel.
Let me make one thing totally clear:
at the beginning of my movie
Jason is dead. There's no two ways about it.
Jason is totally, unalterably dead.
They offer me Part 2, and then I got the script,
and Jason is running around.
I thought, What are you doing? There is no Jason?
You know, the mother is the killer.
Jason was the kid that drowned in the lake.
Oh oh, we're going to change all that.
Well, they never did. So I chose something else.
I chose "The Burning, which is sort of a rip off
of “Friday the 13th."
I understand that it would be very expensive
to bring Mrs. Voorhees back to life,
especially after we cut off her head.
So, we had to go somewhere, and of course
Jason was the most logical place to go.
Part 2 was basically his journey
of seeking revenge of the death of his mother.
And that's a very basic foundation of storytelling.
Legend has it that Jason saw his mother beheaded that night.
If you try to track that on any kind of a timeline,
it makes no sense whatsoever.
He just shows up some X number of years later.
And I don't know if I'd want to try
to fill in the blanks of what happened
in between all those years.
If you listen to the old-timers in town,
they'll tell you he's still out there.
He didn't drown in the lake.
The mother thought he drowned in the lake.
So what happened to this child? He was young.
He kind of found a way to survive,
and he grew up in the woods.
Surviving any way he can.
So what is he?
Is he living off crayfish by the pond for 35 years
and nobody saw this weird kid out there, you know?
The first film was obviously a thriller.
It was, you know, almost a murder mystery.
Who's doing all this killing and why?
Oh, my sweet, innocent Jason
So the notion of having a surprise
as to who it is, or what it is, changed completely.
So, what the stories became
was sort of a ritualized telling
of a group of young people who go someplace
where they shouldn't go.
You change the characters a little bit,
but it stayed inside of a very deliberate form.
While Cunningham ultimately went on
to pursue other projects,
including "A Stranger is Watching,"
"Spring Break" and "Deep Star Six,"
his 29-year-old protege, Steve Miner,
was given his first feature directing assignment
on “Friday the 13th, Part 2."
Steve Miner was definitely up for
“Friday the 13th” Part 2, for directing it.
He and probably with Sean's help, cast it.
They found the location.
They did all the preliminary work on the show.
And I know that he was involved with some of the writing of it.
Steve had been around all of us for many years
so that he actually was so young at the time,
they called him 'The Kid'.
That was his nickname.
By the end of September 1980, a mere four months
after the release of the original film,
Steve Miner and his crew were already back in production
with “Friday the 13th Part 2.
Code-named Jason.
New to the team was 22-year-old
Frank Mancuso Jr.,
who would become the driving force
behind the “Friday the 13th” franchise
Frank Mancuso, Jr. called me up before the show,
and said that he was going to come down
and be a P.A. on the movie.
I knew, of course, by this time
his father was the president of Paramount Pictures.
I got involved in "Part 2" when I was just graduating college.
And my dad knew the guys from Boston,
Phil Scuderi and Bob Barsamian,
who sort of initiated the first movie.
He, you know, went to work with us
and was treated like a member of the crew,
became a member of the crew.
Those kinds of experiences I really feel helped, you know,
kind of form what I became as far as having, you know,
a keen understanding of what everybody does,
how they do it.
And he was really just there to learn, I think.
And that's how it started. He quickly caught on.
And a couple of the people
that were above the line weren't working out
so they were getting rid of some of those people,
so I kept on, like moving up the food chain
kind of strangely.
And I think that that can only happen on that kind of a movie.
"Part 2" picks up two months after the events of "Part 1,"
with an extended prologue that would see the return
and the demise of the original film's traumatized final girl.
The fans have told me at convention after convention
that they felt, quote-unquote, ripped off
about the way Alice died in "Part 2."
I do, too.
I mean she was such a tough cookie in "Part 1,"
and then (throat cutting sound).
That was pretty much a necessity.
I think originally she had been approached to star in "Part 2,"
but her agent, as I understand it,
just wanted too much money.
So, she was basically written out.
Honestly, when I got on the set that weekend,
I didn't know it was over for Alice until I got there.
So, surprise!
They never gave me a script for "Part 2."
They said, 'Oh, it's just gonna be improv.'
I'm not kidding you. This is how it happened.
They, 'Slam-bam-thank you, ma'am? '
Roll around on the bed for a while.
Intercut. Okay, go to the door,
that whole phone conversation...
I just have to put my life back together,
and this is the only way I know how!
Not scripted. All improv. All improv.
After Alice's discovery
of Mrs. Voorhees' decomposing head in her refrigerator,
she is confronted by the vengeful, and fully-grown,
Jason.
I shot that scene in one night.
And it was a prop man I met,
one who didn't check his props.
And so the first time the ice pick went into my temple,
it did not retract.
Yikes!
After an explosive main title sequence,
the story jumps ahead five years in time
as another group of unwary counselors
arrives at Crystal Lake to open a new summer camp
headed by the enterprising Paul Holt.
I'm also sure there's one thing I don't have to tell any of you.
Being a counselor isn't the gravy summer job
everybody thinks it is.
And I was a little older than everybody
because I was the head camp counselor.
He, you know, thought he was somewhat older,
and knew more than these people,
he was a little prissy and stuffy or something.
You know I thought that would be kind of a funny thing to do
with the character.
Assisting Paul is the spunky and intelligent Ginny.
Who would become one of the most memorable
and well-regarded characters in the “Friday the 13th” series.
To know that I did one of these films
where they get all these women in that are so vulnerable,
and to be the one that people think was strong
and intelligent, it just, it feels good.
There's always the last damsel in distress
who, you know, summons up the courage
to fight back.
And then I guess with my character,
it was pretty great because somebody who was strong enough
to fight back and kind of stay present
in the face of danger.
And I was so young that I didn't create
a whole other life
'cause I think that what was really called for
was exactly who you were as a person,
to bring that to screen.
Her character was written for her,
and it was written well.
She was very, very well liked on the crew as well.
Amy slept with everybody in the entire crew,
the actors and most of the people in Kent.
I'm just kidding.
Well, there's something about the chemistry
that we both have a very similar sense of humor.
It's a little bit sarcastic.
(laughs) So we could look at each other and kind of laugh.
I think that's why it might have worked.
PAUL: Ginny, I was starting to worry about you.
GINNY: Bullshit, Paul.'
We actually stayed in a camp
that was no longer in use because the season had passed.
So we were in these big barracks.
I mean, it was insane.
Basically, it was a children's camp,
and we wanted to keep it that way.
We didn't want anything to stand between
the good feelings that people had about the children
and a healthy environment, which was a little bit different
than the Jason environment.
It was cold. Everybody had heaters and stuff.
And it was pretty basic.
It was like living at night for two months.
You just start getting kind of creeped out.
You know, everything looks so calm down here.
I'm looking pretty closely, I don't know,
it would be amazing if all of a sudden Jason just popped out.
They weren't sure which role they wanted me to play,
so I wound up auditioning but I think there was a point
where Steve said, 'Hey Stu, tell a joke.'
I did, I told a joke.
They wound up, in the movie, using jokes
that I had invented like this
TED: 'What's brown and sits on a piano?'
VICKIE: 'Your face.'
TED: 'Beethoven's last movement.'
There was a sign on the side of the road
in the beginning of the movie,
but we do have that sign as a remembrance
of that particular scene.
We come back to Crystal Lake to open up this camp again,
I thought all of us would have been smart enough
not to go back to a place like that,
but here we are going back to a place
where all these people were murdered.
The first night that we're there and everybody's gathered,
and everybody's made it to the camp,
Paul Holt basically scares the shit out of everybody.
I don't want to scare anyone...
but I'm gonna give it to you straight about Jason.
I had never been to a camp in the country,
so while he's doing that monologue,
little Lauren-Marie Taylor is thinking inside her head,
Ahhh!... For real.
I thought that John did a great job of, you know,
kind of, in the scene, of building the tension,
you know, then to break with Ted, you know,
jumping out and scaring everybody.
[Ted howls and Group Screaming]
And we just think it's going to be a regular summer,
the kids are going to arrive.
And then these horrible, horrible things start happening.
And one by one Jason Voorhees kills us
and continues to do what he does best.
With the departure of gore wizard Tom Savini,
another renowned Hollywood special effects artist,
the late Stan Winston, was initially brought on
to create the film's bloody set pieces.
Due to scheduling conflicts, however,
Winston was forced to drop out of the project,
handing his duties over to up-and-coming
special make-up effects designer, Carl Fullerton.
But a key casting decision still needed to be made.
Who would play murderous mama's boy Jason Voorhees?
That question would, like the character himself,
grow into the stuff of legend.
They give me a black script.
It said "Jason" on the front of it.
'Well, we like you, you know, for this counselor role.'
I guess this was the role that ultimately John Furey got.
And so then they said, 'Well, would you like to be Jason?'
Well, sure, yeah (laughs),
I'd love to do anything you want me to do.
I could never figure out the deal with Jason.
They had a guy for a while.
I believe his name was Warrington.
And then he didn't seem to like doing it,
or he didn't want to do stunts or something.
And then, he didn't stay for the whole movie
I got a call from Cliff Cudney,
who happened to be the stunt coordinator
on “Friday the 13th 2,"
and he had called me and said,
'Listen, I'm up here in Connecticut doing this film,
and the guy that they hired to play Jason
can't do his own stunts. We got big problems.'
He says, 'Can you get up to Kent, Connecticut?'
I know that the rest of us on set,
we knew that there was stuff going on about Warrington
and Steve and in terms of who was doing what.
If you had asked me who was Jason,
I would have said Warrington.
Warrington Gillette was my Jason Voorhees.
He got all the hoopla, you know,
for everything that I did.
Cliff Cudney, the stunt coordinator, said to me,
'You're the guy that was the Jason.
Tell your story. You did all the work.
Ironically, neither actor played Jason the first time
the character appears on screen.
For the film's moody opening,
Jason was played, for the first and only time
in the series' history by a woman...
Costume designer Ellen Lutter.
It also fell to Lutter to come up with a disguise
for the hideously-deformed Jason.
One that could only be called a first step
in the evolution of one of horror's most iconic faces.
It was through Steve, I remember him and Sean
having these talks up in Sean's office
and coming up with designs
for you know "Part 2" with that canvas bag.
Instead of using an ugly face or an ugly mask for Jason,
he would just cover it completely
in a sack or a bandage, or whatever.
And everybody in the audience would have their own images
of what is the most horrible person they can think of.
And it worked pretty well.
The movie, "The Town that Dreaded Sundown"
had a serial killer wearing a potato sack,
and so I think that could have been, you know,
an idea that was definitely well utilized.
The costume designer was the one that brought us
the pillowcase to cover Jason.
I didn't like it at the time.
But, I know why it was chosen.
It was chosen because it was an artifact
that was readily available.
That was the bridge to the hockey mask,
which became the icon, and it was a great icon.
Once I put the bag over my head, and I ran in the woods,
I couldn't see anything 'cause the bag flopped
back and forth.
We'll put double face tape,
and we'll hold it right close to your eye.
This way you'll see where you're going.
And it worked marvelously. It was terrific.
But to me, you know, the real talent came in
with Carl Fullerton trying to create this face
that was pretty pretty intense.
And yeah, you would get in the makeup chair at noon
they'd be ready to go at seven.
So it's a process.
Another notable character from the first film
would also meet an untimely and early demise in "Part 2."
I told the others. They didn't believe me.
Walt Gorney was just there for a very short time
at the beginning of the movie,
and at the beginning of our production.
I'd say near, between the American flag
and that stop sign,
that's where they had the phone booth.
And the actor came riding through on a bicycle
when they were in the phone booth, and said,
'You are all Doomed!'
You're all doomed.
Amazing guy.
I remember Walt being sort of quiet, but very, very nice.
Very and very, very kind of elegant.
A really good actor.
It was interesting, when they did set up that booth
in New Preston,
they took a break for lunch, and while they were eating lunch,
two young girls came and they tried to use the telephone.
And of course, it was a dummy phone,
and everyone was just hysterical watching them
trying to use it and coming out angry.
Crazy Ralph was choked.
He was, I believe, the first death
in “Friday the 13th” Part 2.
Yeah, yeah, I killed Ralph with a garrote and a thin wire
and you take his head like that.
What are you kids doin' out here?
I'm proud to be known as Deputy Winslow.
In the original script, I wasn't named.
I was just kind of an officer of the law.
But in the book that followed, I was given a name,
and the name was Winslow.
An interesting anecdote is that I was hired as this cop.
And I had to drive a police car.
Now, I've never driven a car in my life,
before or since.
And for a time they were giving me some lessons,
and I almost killed more people than Jason.
Now if you were a policeman, and you were doing your job
and you came driving down the road here,
and you saw a shape rush across the road into the woods,
you probably would do
what that policeman in “Friday the 13th” Part 2 did.
He pulled over, got out of the car and ran into the woods,
chasing the figure.
Unfortunately, the results weren't so good to him.
In shooting that death scene, Jason has this hammer.
The claw end of the hammer
went right in the back of the cop's head.
Before we started to shoot,
I went to this make-up place
and they made this exact replica of me.
And they put some blood bags in there,
and they were gonna smack me in the head and (raspberry)
everything was gonna go like that,
and they never used it.
It intrigued me that we killed Walt and the sheriff so early.
And I think it was just to remove any possibility
that the cavalry would come over the hill and save the campers.
So you knew that they were in jeopardy,
and that there was just no turning back, or no help
from the outside going to come.
So there I was, sitting in this fast food joint.
I think that Muffin was,
I don't know if it was someone's personal dog,
or it was actually a trained performing dog.
It was very likable, very friendly.
I think it actually got its name above my name
in the credits.
Do you want to dance?
No, thank you.
My character, you know, was just striking out
with women and with the girl he was after.
But the dog, she showed me a lot of love in that movie.
One of the cuts that I love from “Friday the 13th Part 2,"
is the camera is on the dog and all of a sudden
it cuts to hot dogs on a barbeque grill.
And it's just funny, and Steve is like that.
He has a sort of like a very wry sense of humor.
Well, I think that if Muffin was still around,
you know, we probably would have stayed together
and but I don't want to get too specific about that. (laughs)
One of the actresses went swimming in the nude,
and of course that was a big talk in the group,
and everybody volunteered to come there
and help with the scene.
They were looking for a towel boy.
Somebody who would wrap towels around,
I believe it was Kristen
who would come out of the water in the nude,
and everybody volunteered.
Looking for something?
I was so innocent. You know, I don't know why I was killed.
I don't know why Jason had it in for me. lt's crazy.
My mother calls me the night before and she goes,
'Do you die today in the movie?'
I go, 'Yeah.'
She goes, 'Why are they save that to the very end?
Is this a snuff movie? Are they going to kill you?'
I said, 'No, I don't think so, mom.
This is Paramount.'
The snare was attached to a sapling tree.
And when he cut the rope on the sapling tree,
it pulled the rope up, which would have the victim's foot
in the rope and he'd be hanging upside down.
AAAAHHHHHHH! AHH! HELP!
In effect, it worked perfectly and nobody was hurt.
My head gets pulled back by Jason, and he slits my throat.
First they put the machete against it,
and then he would pull it and as he slit,
it looked like he was actually cutting it.
But they used the dull side of the machete and many times
people have said to me, 'It looks like you were cut
from the wrong side of that machete.'
And it's quite true.
The role of wheelchair-bound Mark
was played by openly gay actor and model Tom McBride,
who sadly passed away in 1995.
I started flirting with Tom McBride very early
in the process.
And he finally said, 'Lauren, not gonna happen.'
And I went, 'Oh, shucks.'
He's actually the only one I flirted with,
but Tom McBride was great.
And he was just a sweetheart.
If you watch the movie,
the most uncomfortable moment I have
is when I look at Tom McBride in the wheelchair,
and I'm supposed to be smoking a joint?
And I say... Toke?
You can tell I have no idea what I'm talking about.
And everyone on the set knew it.
And they never let me forget it.
I was such a good Catholic Girl.
McBride's death scene in “Friday the 13th Part 2"
remains one of the series' most memorable and controversial.
I thought Tom McBride's kill was cool.
He got a machete in his head and went down a series of steps.
It was just, seemed so cruel.
You know, here's a guy in a wheelchair,
and you know he's got no way to defend himself really.
To me that's like, how could you
go much further than that? That's really far.
Actually, he had constructed a rail
for the wheelchair to travel on,
and to make sure that the actor wouldn't get hurt.
It was a tremendous amount of work put into it.
It was a fantastic, fantastic stunt
back down that staircase.
I don't know if you've ever tried
to go down backwards, on a wheelchair,
with a make-believe machete in your head,
but it's a challenge.
Many of the film's most inventive murder sequences
were actually suggested by the late Phil Scuderi,
who never took credit for his creative contributions
to the “Friday the 13th” films.
Phil Scuderi was more, I would say,
like the architect of the series.
He came up with some great scenes himself.
I mean he, and it was embarrassing sometimes,
he'd get up in a restaurant and act them out for me.
You know, 'This is what I want you to write, ' you know,
and he'd act a scene out for me.
Of course there was a couple in the bed having sex.
And we all know in a horror movie,
if you have sex, you have to die.
Because it's wrong.
Which is not the case in real life.
Oh, I thought it was great, are you kidding?
You know, I remember I was a young guy, you know.
You'd be able to, you know, film this, you know, love scene.
And then, and then get a spear. I thought it was terrific.
Essentially, there's a hole in the floor and both characters
were standing in this hole.
Carl Fullerton who was our make-up guy,
I had gone to his place in New Jersey
and they had made a latex back,
which actually you never see in the film.
So he was actually skewered on camera.
That spear actually went into his back on camera.
It was fabulous.
It was just really fun.
The sound guy at one point,
I'm sitting there on my knees and he comes over to me,
and he says, he says, How are you? How you doin'?
Are you okay? I said, 'You know, yeah.
I'm alright, you know my, you know I'm a little uncomfortable.
He said, Open your mouth.
And he blows some powder into my mouth.
And I'm telling you, they could have filmed it 15 times.
I was having a great time after that.
Fullerton's human-shish-kebob
was one of the many graphic special effects
deemed too disturbing
by the Motion Picture Association of America.
To date, the scene has never been released
in its uncut form.
That skewering scene was actually really fun to set up
and really fun to shoot.
And what a disappointment that it all hit the floor.
When we were prepping "Day of the Dead,"
Carl Fullerton said, 'Oh, do you guys want to see
some of the gags from “Friday the 13th” Part 2?'
We're like, 'Yeah, of course. That would be great.'
Before it got butchered by the ratings board,
the fact that the guy's on top of her,
and she sees Jason coming, and she's struggling
and she's trying to push him off of her
so she could get out of the way.
It was such an effective, disturbing sequence
that, to this day, I could, I still remember
exactly what it looked like.
For all its gory inventiveness,
the scene has been widely accused of ripping off
a nearly identical murder sequence
from Mario Bava's 1971 Giallo thriller,
"Twitch of the Death Nerve."
It was kind of fun after the fact
to discover that Mario Bava had made a film
called "Twitch of the Death Nerve,"
which I had never heard of and never seen
until long after the fact.
This is going to sound really, really weird,
but I was a great screamer.
I hope nobody takes that the wrong way.
But, I was. I could scream, I mean... (screams)
I was really good at that,
and I think once they figured that out,
they decided, 'Okay, we're gonna have her scream a lot.'
So they made it really long.
And it started with just that little swipe on the leg.
Where he, kind of, missed whatever he wanted to cut off.
But then he kept, you know, it was like...
(makes Psycho sound effect)
They didn't use a dummy for that
when they dragged me down the stairs.
They actually dragged me down the stairs!
So when you saw my feet going 'blump, blump, blump,
that was a crew member dragging me down the stairs.
There was a scene later on, where everybody's at the bar,
and everybody's you know,
partying while the rest of us are getting killed.
Ginny: What if there is a Jason?
Paul: Oh, bullshit, Ginny!
Ginny: I mean, let's try to think beyond the legend
and put it in real terms.
I mean, what would he be like today?
The character of Ginny Field,
she somehow really understood
that there's more to a person than just the bad side.
You know, and everyone wants to demonize somebody.
And so, she had some kind of insight that this,
something had to go wrong somewhere in his childhood
or his upbringing.
He must have seen his mother get killed,
and all just because she loved him.
I think Ginny kind of understood that some,
that there's more to it than just this demon guy
with a pillowcase over his head.
We went to that bar and none of those people,
I think, had ever seen a movie,
had been around a movie.
And they were all hired as extras.
And it was pretty funny.
And we actually started drinking a bit in that scene,
so by the time four in the morning came along,
we just kept drinking.
Arguably the luckiest character is fun-loving prankster Ted,
who decides to stay behind at the bar,
thereby escaping certain death.
I did another movie, a John Carpenter film, "Christine,"
and there's a scene in that where I got killed.
Where I got squished.
And they originally filmed it as me getting crushed
underneath a car coming down.
In the movie they wound up not using that scene.
And I'm convinced that it's because I don't die good.
(laughs) So I'm glad that they didn't try to kill me here,
'cause, you know, to make believe me dying as an actor,
has got to be one of the silliest things
for a grown-up to do.
This is the site of the old Lake Waramaug Casino,
and this burned down about a year after it was used
for some scenes in “Friday the 13th Part 2."
It starts to rain and Amy Steel and John Furey
are coming out of the bar.
And they're about to get into their,
her little red Volkswagen.
But I convinced Steve Miner
that I could run through the scene
in the parking lot.
As they're getting in the car,
you can see me running into the restaurant.
You can't even tell that it's anything
other than a body running through the rain, but it's me.
I come back from the dead.
Unaware of the carnage that has occurred in the main cabin,
Ginny and Paul make a gruesome discovery,
and the terrifying final confrontation with Jason begins.
When I'm down there waiting, and they're coming in,
and I'm behind the couch, I was like a little kid.
You know what I mean?
I was like, I couldn't wait,
I was, oh, this is gonna be good.
Paul, there's someone in this fuckin' room!
Amy with the screaming, and the whole thing.
And that's when the chase scene started.
There was a lot of physical action in the film.
I had to jump out of this window.
And I remember the stunt guy said you know,
'Maybe you could get a stunt adjustment for that.'
But yeah, it was a lot of running.
Splashing through the puddles.
Jumping, hiding, a lot of it was hiding.
I really like Amy, I mean, I always liked Amy.
She brought a great sort of buoyancy to whatever she did.
I mean, she came in, she was enthusiastic,
she was down with whatever the program was.
Here I am under the bed,
and Jason's walking around, and I'm scared to death,
and all of a sudden a rat comes right in front of my face.
I thought Ginny was so scared she peed her pants.
Maybe it was the rat, I don't know.
But it wasn't a large amount of pee for a rat?
I gotta give Amy Steel a lot of credit
because all during the filming Amy never spoke to me.
Off camera.
I didn't have much communication with him,
or I kind of kept him very separate.
Amy was non-existent. She didn't want to come near me.
She didn't want to know anything about me.
I respected that. I stayed away from her as well.
But mostly, you know,
they would shoot him and then shoot me.
So we were never exactly at the same place at the same time,
with the exception of the sweater scene.
That final scene we used to call Chez Jason.
Where Amy goes and dresses up as Mrs. Voorhees.
And Jason is somewhat stunned by, wait a minute.
This is my mom.
And she psyches him out.
In her only cameo in any of the “Friday the 13th” sequels,
Betsy Palmer appears to Jason
as the ghostly visage of Mrs. Voorhees.
They said, would I come and let them make up my head?
Again.
And that they needed that and do a few voice-overs.
And I said, Sure, I'll do that.
Which I did.
He's a tragic figure because he was looking for his mother.
Now here, after all this time,
Amy's in the lair, and she says
Jason, mother is talking to you!
Jason, Mother is talking to you.
And when I listen to what she said,
that's when I did the, you know, the tilt the head.
Is that my mother? Is that my mother?
My heart broke. I really felt bad for poor Jason.
I felt what I was doing through the whole thing,
I really did.
That was the point of the film where I went,
'That's really where we're going.
That's what the sound of this is.'
So there was a certain ethereal, sort of spacey,
kind of sound that permeated the picture from the beginning.
I have the machete behind my back.
And I'm instructed to pull the machete up.
And just as Mrs. Voorhees' face is revealed,
he's supposed to bring up this pickaxe.
And then that's when I bring the machete down.
There was a lot of discussion before that scene was shot.
It was ultimately decided that Amy could do it.
So Cliff took her, and he walked her through it
a couple of times, on what would happen.
'Make sure you hit the pickaxe in the middle,
and so forth, and so on.
She is a great actress, but unfortunately that day for me,
she was trying to kill me.
So I guess I got really anxious,
and I brought the machete down
when he still had the pick-axe like this,
as opposed to this.
She missed the pick-axe, and she came down on my finger.
And I felt so bad.
But the actor who played Jason was really cool about it.
You know, he just said, 'Hey, this is what happens.
This is what happens when you're a stunt person.'
So then he goes to the hospital.
I think he had the machete through his chest or something,
and walks into the emergency room and they're like,
Oh, my god!
I come walking in with the machete
sticking out of my shoulder,
and everybody in the emergency room went...
And I walked up to the desk,
I says, Have you got anything for a headache?
I've got a very bad headache.
They stitched him up.
But, he was professional, he came back,
and they finished the scene with the bandage under the shirt.
And I have 13 stitches in this finger to show you.
It's right here, this, it's 13 stitches.
So, very apropos.
Muffin comes tottering in. (laughs)
'Oh, Muffin. You're alive!'
Come here, Muffin.
The scene where Jason comes careening through the window?
Look, you thought he was dead.
And it's the greatest shock.
I know that the Jason coming through the window
was a nightmare for me.
I had to do it three times.
And it was really scary.
And yeah, it's plenty scary.
The mystery of the unknown.
What is behind that potato sack?
We never saw the make-up.
And he didn't want me to see it.
And he wanted to look really real.
You know, because we could have walked up to the make-up area
and seen what this guy looked like
so we wouldn't have been as shocked, you know,
when he blasts through the window.
They built a platform outside the house.
The platform was probably 4 feet long.
So we coordinated how many steps it takes.
One, two three, bah, you know, through the window.
And at this time in my life,
I was not a well-seasoned stuntman.
So this was the first time I jumped through a window.
Steve was, he knew how I felt about that scene.
And I remember he was, you know he goes,
Hey, let's go have lunch.
And he was trying to kind of play it really cool
and not let me know.
And then all of a sudden he said, Guess what?
We have to re-shoot that scene again.
Ruined my day.
But anyway, look, the proof is in the scene.
Cause we got it right, and people are still talking.
Much like its predecessor,
Part 2's ending would ultimately pose more questions
than it answered.
Chief among them, what happened to Paul?
The end of “Friday the 13th Part 2"
is still one of the most confusing endings
of that series.
You didn't know what happened to my character.
Like she says at the end of the movie,
she says, "Where's Paul?"
And they said, "We don't know. We haven't found him yet."
So they purposely left it ambiguous.
And I'm not sure exactly what did happen to Paul.
Too bad he didn't come back in Part 3. (laughs)
As noted, we've seen a dog that earlier in the film
it's suggested has been killed, shows up again.
There is, of course, some speculation
that it's a dream ultimately.
Maybe that's one of the good parts of the movie
is that you get to decide that for yourself.
I guess there was talk of an alternate ending.
It was not anything that was prominent
when we were shooting it.
At the very end, they zoom in on Mrs. Voorhees' head.
It was just sort of sitting there on the altar.
I know when they were shooting it
I think they couldn't decide
whether the eyes should open or not.
I think that they did make her eyes go open.
Although the alternate ending of “Friday the 13th Part 2"
remains unreleased,
production stills have surfaced of actress Connie Hogan,
who played the decapitated head of Mrs. Voorhees
in the film's unused final shot.
In my world that was never a serious contender
for an alternative ending.
And we spent a lot of time getting it right.
And we did. It's a fabulous ending.
One of the guys came to me,
I was from the camp office. And he said, "Thanks a lot.
We left you a Thank You down at the lake."
I came down there and what I found was a head
hanging from a tree in a little net basket.
And, I guess that was my thank you
for the courtesies extended to these guys and the cast
who were down there.
So I still have that head and I've had a lot of fun with it
over the years.
As a matter of fact,
I've had a number of people who wanted
to purchase that and the Crystal Lake sign,
but they bring back too many happy memories to me.
Paramount Pictures released "Friday the 13th Part 2"
on April 30, 1981.
Continuing the original film's winning ad campaign
highlighting the escalating body count,
PART 2 brought in a final domestic box office take
of $21.7 million.
Even if the sequel didn't achieve the monster success
of the original,
it was still a bona fide moneymaker.
If nothing more, it proved there was much more lifeblood
to be drained from Jason Voorhees.
The film came out, and it was amazingly successful.
We were all very proud of it.
We made it on a very small budget
and pretty adverse circumstances.
You know, somebody from Paramount called me up one day
and they said, 'You're starring
in the number one box office movie in America.'
You know, it sort of sinks in then.
And I'm glad that it's an iconic kind of horror movie.
I was shocked.
I had no idea that there was such a fan base
for this film, and for Ginny.
And everyone I've met has been excited
and just been nothing but gracious.
When I got involved in the second “Friday the 13th”
I had never seen the first one,
so I didn't know what I was getting into.
And I very quickly had to sort of get up to speed,
and I had to very quickly sort of had to assimilate myself
into a place that I hadn't been because of the opportunity,
and the faith that people had in me, that they gave me,
it turned out to be a, you know,
like a life changing sort of dynamic for me.
We were actually shooting the end of the movie,
and Frank comes up and says,
'Can I talk to you for a minute?'
and I said, 'Sure.' So he said,
'I have two job offers when this film is over.
One is I can be Robert Evans' assistant.
He's doing a film for Paramount.
Or, I can produce my own film.
Which do you think I should do?'
And I said, 'You know, I think you should do your own film.
I think that that would be great for you.
I think you're ready to do that.'
And I was just really thrilled that he asked.
And I had no idea what he was talking about.
And it turned out to be Friday the 13th Part 3.
And off he went.
And he did a great job with the series.
I had no idea it was going to work the way it did.
In fact I really thought
it wasn't going to work the way it did.
And I'm delighted to have been so wrong.
Bolstered by the success of “Part 2.”
“Friday the 13th” managed to survive its sophomore slump.
A third installment seemed a foregone conclusion.
This time, however,
the previous film's surviving character
would not return to face Jason.
“Part 3” was going to have me as a trauma patient
in a mental hospital
and that Jason was going to come to find me
and now his focus of revenge was all on me.
And then he started offing all the patients,
and they were going to call it “Friday the 13th
Meets Cuckoo's Nest."
I was offered to write "Part 3" but I turned it down.
I didn't want to be pigeon-holed
as “Friday the 13th” guy.
I said no because I thought I was going to go on
to all these like other things, and I didn't have time.
But in hindsight I should have just done it
and had a great time.
Once again, Steve Miner returned to the director's chair
while script supervisor Martin Kitrosser,
along with his wife Carol Watson,
wrote the screenplay.
This time, the Boston-based investors
put the film into the hands of a young,
but extremely capable, new producer.
These guys in Boston were used to working
with people that they knew,
like they knew Steve Miner from the first movie.
He was a PA. Then the second movie he directed.
He directed the third movie.
So they liked sort of hanging onto people.
Despite receiving a serviceable first draft
from Kitrosser and Watson,
the producers ultimately decided that the script
needed more work before the project could be green lit
for production.
I was friendly with Frank Mancuso,
and he mentioned that they had the screenplay
in a series of horror movies,
it was called “Friday the 13th.”
lt's not a bad script, but it has to be re-written.
It has to have a different kind of atmosphere.
It has to be a lot more sinister,
a lot more menacing.
In addition to injecting the screenplay
with more horror and menace,
Steve Miner felt that “Part 3” could benefit
from the revival of a gimmick
that he hoped would draw audiences back into theaters.
And one that would make it possible for Jason
to literally jump off the screen.
“Friday the 13th Part 3” would be shot in 3D.
Back in the early 80s, Frank Mancuso, Sr. and I
sat in an office in Toronto
and discussed the idea of really trying to do
something radically new in film
that would help the theaters out a great deal.
And what kind of a movie should we make?
Should we do something like "Star Trek 3D"
which is what was originally discussed,
or should we try to do something that's horror
and to try to really break the ground in horror films?
We spoke a lot about the horror films
that came out in the 50s in 3D.
I had not seen many 3D movies, maybe one or two only.
He took me to a 3D screening of "Dial M for Murder"
which was he, Steve Miner was a fan of that movie,
and a fan of Hitchcock in general.
Frank Mancuso, Jr. Really saw the idea
of what the potential was.
That whole idea of going to a theater,
putting these kind of goofy glasses on.
You want to have that fun and so, you know,
that was part of the charm, I think.
To help defray costs associated with the new 3D technology,
the production team moved to the west coast.
And by the spring of 1982,
the search was underway for yet another resourceful
female survivor and a youthful cast
of soon-to-be victims.
I sat in on the casting,
and I was surprised how different my ideas
of who should be the girl were
compared to who was selected by Steve Miner.
Well, I had done a film called "Sweet Sixteen,"
and I guess the producer/director
saw me in that,
And I went for an audition and basically met with Steve Miner
and that was it.
I didn't really have to do a whole lot of auditioning for it.
There was a group of us. There was the jock,
and the good-looking girl,
and the nerd and his good-looking date
I don't think so.
And the stoners.
They didn't really tell us much on the interview.
It was very secret. There wasn't a lot talked about.
My mother was an agent at the time,
and I was getting ready to go to college.
I had been working as a child as an actress,
and it was time to go to college,
and I was excited about that.
My mom called my agent and said,
"There's an interview for a movie of some sort.
Crystal Japan.
But when we finally found out what it was,
oh, it was so exciting. It was wonderful.
Actor Larry Zerner was literally approached on the street
by the film's screenwriters,
who thought he was perfect for the role
of the overweight, insecure prankster.
Andy: Relax. Be yourself.
Shelly: Would you be yourself if you looked like this?
Shelly was unattractive and heavy,
and he just had very poor self-esteem
so he thought that if he had these little tricks,
that would bring attention to him,
which would make people like him.
Shelly: I guess I fooled you, huh?
He's a little misguided that way.
Vera: Why do you do these stupid things?
Shelly: I just want you to like me.
I think given Vera's character,
she did see the good in him,
despite the fact that she was supposed to be a babe.
And I talk to people who go, you know,
I really love Shelly or I love the character and I love you.
And then I do talk to a certain amount of people who go...
Hated Shelly. Worst character in the series.
After the dilemma
of finding a capable stuntman in "Part 2,"
the filmmakers decided they needed someone more agile,
more athletic and more powerful to play the savage killer.
I was actually working as a stuntman in LA.
My background is actually circus.
I spent most of my life as a flying trapeze artist
in the circus.
He looked like the boogeyman.
He looked creepy and scary
in the way that Richard Brooker had him moving.
There's a certain malevolent intelligence
to the character in 3 that's not seen in the other movies per se.
I didn't get any direction from Steve Miner at all actually.
He actually came to me and said, you know,
"Don't ever come to me and ask me what your motivation is
because you have no motivation.
You're just a mindless killer, and you just go out and kill.
You're like the living version of "Jaws."
The creative choice that Steve Miner made
to keep Jason lurking and unseen,
I think was just a masterful creative choice
that added to the suspense.
Steve knew that it was better to try to keep Jason
kind of in the background as a shadowy figure
as opposed to, you know,
just turning around and having Jason stand there.
And he kept that going throughout the whole movie
so you really didn't know or see, you know,
how big Jason was until right at the climax of the movie.
Steve Miner was a very laid-back director,
and there was not a lot of tension on the set
so it was easy to work with him.
I had worked in the business since I was 2 years old,
and I had worked with a lot of directors.
And a lot of in my mind, directors were grown-ups
and Steve was another kid.
Never difficult. Never hard on us.
Just a nice guy.
In an homage to his idol Alfred Hitchcock,
Steve Miner appears in an early cameo
playing the newscaster reporting on the grisly aftermath
Of "Part 2-H
Crystal Lake was shocked today
with reports of a grisly, mass-murder scene.
Naturally, the ominous warning goes unheeded
by Jason's next batch of victims.
I have warned thee!
You know, a lot of kids don't listen to the news, you know?
They got better things to do with their life.
So I think it's understandable that all of us would be,
you know, heading up to Crystal Lake
to be with our friends.
The day after the events in "Part 2,"
so it's technically Saturday the 14th,
but don't tell anyone.
It was filmed at a ranch in Saugus, California.
They actually built the set there
so everything was in one location.
They built a little lake.
They built the barn.
They built the house and so everything was done right there.
Shooting was put off for a day or so
because there was an infestation of bees around.
So there were rattlesnakes everywhere
and some of the guys, some of the grips had guns
and then they'd hear this gun going off
because they were shooting rattlesnakes.
Here we are on the set of "Friday the 13th Part 3,"
In 3D.
Over here's the house that we used,
that unfortunately burned about a year ago,
but the fireplace is still there.
But this house was built just for us.
It was a great atmosphere.
Our producer was young. Our director was young.
The whole cast were a bunch of young kids.
And it was a very relaxed atmosphere.
Everyone having a good time, and everyone having fun.
Well, it was also the first movie with the 3D camera,
which was kind of exciting.
I mean, it was a very unusual camera.
This was the lens that was used
to shoot "Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D."
As you can see, it's really lightweight and handheld,
and it permitted you to really make a horror movie
the way other horror movies are made.
We could do things like shoot long lenses with it.
We could do rack focuses with it.
Steve Miner did wonderful work with Gerry Fiel
by shooting a whole picture on a moving Louma crane.
The first feature film
to utilize the all-new Marks 3D system,
"Friday the 13th Part 3" encountered more than its share
of technical mishaps along the way.
The 3D was very difficult.
It was a brand new process. No one had ever used it before.
Today 3D, I'm sure, has come much farther
and is a lot easier to shoot.
Back then it would take hours to set up a shot.
There was a lot of time to just, as an actor,
to just sit around and wait.
That's what we did mostly.
And there was always something going wrong with it.
We were using at the time, which was very new,
a Louma crane.
And in the first run they did down the track,
it collapsed.
The whole thing went over.
So, you know, they had to start all over again.
And I remember the guy who ran it,
he showed up one day with a shirt that said,
"I Hate the Louma."
The first thing we shot was the scene at the store,
and they ended up basically throwing that away
because it was really just a test
to see if it could be done and then they revised it,
and we came back a week later and then we did it.
You had to do it exactly the way you were directed,
or the 3D effect wouldn't turn out.
So it was very precise.
Often times we would do additional takes
just because there were technical issues.
So as an actor that was a little frustrating.
When we're doing takes, you know,
I'm throwing the wallet at the camera in the store just
it's just take after take
because you have to hit right to the camera
otherwise it doesn't work.
So things did take more takes than usual
because I had to be perfectly right into the camera.
You weren't really worried so much about your acting skills
as much as could you get that yo-yo
to go right in the lens.
That was more important than anything else.
Director Steve Miner focused on creating
a totally new look for Jason
and a host of gory practical effects
that needed to leap out at the audience in 3D.
Some of the good 3D gags,
he puts a knitting needle through a woman's mouth
so it comes out the front.
When it comes out her mouth,
it's actually a plastic version of the knitting needle
connected to the original one,
and it's actually behind Richard's hand.
She just has her mouth open,
and it's being fed down the side of his hand
and out through his fingers.
It's definitely a movie that should be seen in 3D.
If you watch it on DVD,
it just a lot of the stuff just doesn't work.
When you watch it on 3D, it's like a whole other movie.
People who see it in a good 3D projection
do say it is one of their favorites.
"Part 3" had me at the credits.
When those credits came out part way and the whole music,
the whole disco thing,
and then they came out further, was so cool.
The creative force behind the film's now famous disco theme
was renowned music producer Michael Zager,
who shared credit with a fictional band
that he named "Hot Ice."
I'm not sure if disco was dead,
but it was certainly it was still around.
Disco really never goes away anyway.
Once you hear it, you start to move,
you feel you feel the groove, I guess, you know.
I had no idea that this would become such a huge
and popular thing.
For example, in all the discos, gay clubs.
I understand there's actually a tribute band
who plays that particular piece live which astounds me.
People just come to me and like,
"I just really love that tune."
Get yourself a little drum machine
and you're on your way.
You, too, can be Hot Ice.
In one of the film's more memorable scenes,
Shelly and Vera are accosted at a general store
by a fearsome motorcycle-riding trio.
Hey, we're back in the store where we filmed the scene
in "Friday the 13th Part 3."
This is the Spunky Canyon Market.
It is located in Green Valley, California.
This is the scene where we go to the store to buy stuff,
and Vera goes to talk to the cash register girl,
and she says that famous line
We don't accept no food stamps.
The other two members of the gang, Fox and Ali,
played by Gloria Charles and Nick Savage,
were great and I think that, very much like myself,
I don't think that that was their natural role.
Then they throw the condom thing in.
Is this your rubber?
I was more embarrassed than the character,
the other character was supposed to be
about someone talking about a condom.
Right behind me it was where the motorcycles were.
There's that scene where the car backs up
and one time I did hit the motorcycle on accident,
and they were not happy with me.
One of the first things we shot
when we started shooting the movie
was the sequence in the Volkswagen
and somebody smashes the Volkswagen window out,
and Larry Zerner looks to the camera and said
You went too far this time.
Shelly gets us out of there
and I think shared experiences, you know,
like that bring people together.
Shelly: I did it! Did I do it?
Vera: Yes, you did it. You were great!
So there was a scene that was in the original script
that we never shot
where the Volkswagen headed down that road
and then the motorcycle gang got on the motorcycles
and chased us down.
And Shelly had a champagne bottle
that he bought at the store,
and what he did is he popped the cork
into their face
which caused the motorcycle to fly off
and them to be able to get away.
And it would have been a whole lot of fun
but we never shot it.
And I don't know why.
One of my favorite shots in the movie
is when we're going to siphon the gas out of the van
and that great shot of Tracie Savage
that goes basically from her behind to me.
[BARKS LIKE A DOG]
I love the idea of siphoning gas
with a lit cigarette.
It's amazing. The barn's still here.
Right above is actually where my little body
was swinging back and forth.
The swinging part was the scariest part for me
because they had this harness on me inside my pants
that were way too tight.
I was absolutely afraid of heights.
And I took this as an opportunity
for me to just face that fear and say
This feels good!
Inside is where I so stupidly walked in.
Amazing. That's where I was pitchforked.
The stunt coordinator had hooked her up on a wire support
to the rafters so she was already in position.
The fork was actually a real pitchfork
but had the two prongs in the center were collapsible,
and the hard part was for me to not giggle
while I was hanging there.
Same thing for the one biker guy who Jason stabs.
So we had to cut off the tangs in the back
and that welded to a plate and put that on his back.
We needed to get the impact of the pitchfork
and then be certain that the handle
was sticking at the direct point of the camera.
I didn't put up a struggle.
I didn't, you know I just said "Okay, it's my turn."
I was a fairly good juggler before being cast in the movie,
and originally they had asked us to do paddle balls.
No matter how good you are,
you can't get the ball to go into the camera.
The ball goes like that.
You can'tit won't go into the camera.
So it just wasn't working with the paddle balls.
Jeffrey could juggle a little bit,
and I helped him get a little better
and so me and Jeff did the juggling scene.
Later in the film, it is revealed
that Chris was attacked by Jason several years earlier.
But for actress Dana Kimmell,
the implication that her character may have been
sexually violated by Jason simply went too far.
He had a knife... and he attacked me with it!
I came on the set and Dana and Steve
were arguing about what the character should be like.
Steve was insisting for a sort of daring girl
and which she remained in the end.
But Dana wanted someone that had a certain kind of purity.
He ran after me.
He caught me, and he pulled me down to the ground.
As far as the monologue goes,
I don't remember all the particulars that go with it,
but I know I always wanted Chris to be portrayed
as a very positive character.
I don't know what happened after that,
I just don't know!
In fact, the revelation that she might have been violated
was the most shocking
because that scene was a sort of controversial scene.
"Should we have it, should we not have it?"
At any rate, it was something that she won,
so to speak.
Dana Kimmell
was and is the consummate professional,
and she worked hard.
I mean, certainly the movie had a bunch of goofy
sexuality innuendo in it as it was,
but I don't think it was hurt by that
if that was indeed the case.
The film's true defining moment saw the transformation
of Jason Voorhees from slasher movie footnote
into movie monster legend.
And no one would ever look at a hockey mask
the same way again.
In "Friday the 13th Part 3,"
Jason wears, for the very first time,
a hockey mask which he has taken from Shelly.
You just see Jason suddenly turn up in Shelly's hockey mask.
So you know that, you know, Shelly's dead.
He not only has the hockey mask,
he has another mask that he actually wears
earlier in the movie.
He actually thought to bring two masks up to Crystal Lake,
along with the spear gun and a wetsuit
and I guess a change of clothes, all in this little bag
Vera: What do you got in there?
Shelly: My whole world.
This dock behind me,
this is where the legend of Jason was born.
This is the first time we saw him step out in the hockey mask.
The birth of Jason.
I was never a huge fan of the sack
because I just felt like
it didn't have any real substance to it,
and we wanted something that would mask Jason.
But at the same time, you know,
it had to have a level of menace to it.
Sam Winston made a latex mask.
And that's what I wore all the way through the movie.
For some unknown reason they didn't like the mask.
They thought it looked too much like a monster,
and so they came up with the idea to cover it
with a hockey mask.
I don't think at the time it really struck me,
when I saw the hockey mask,
that this was going to just go on and on
to "Friday the 13th Part 11 and so on.
But I can see why.
It did kind of create this imposing, ominous character.
I think the whole hockey mask thing was kind of a fluke.
I'm not really sure how it came about.
God, who came up with the hockey mask?
I don't really know.
My recollection was that, you know,
multiple kinds of masks were brought around
and so on and so forth,
and then somebody brought the hockey mask and said,
"Hockey mask, that's great."
I think it was Frank that brought the mask.
I'm sure it was Steven.
I mean, he was really thoughtful and really knew that genre.
The one thing that everybody likes to take credit for
is who put the hockey mask on Jason.
And I must admit, in modesty,
that I put the hockey mask on Jason.
Peter Schindler, Marty Becker
and Marty Sadoff were all hockey fans...
and it was their idea to come up with a hockey mask
to cover the face up.
Success has a lot of fathers,
and everybody's willing to take a little bit of credit for it,
I think, and maybe that's just the best.
Once we had the mask, it was sort of said, "This is it.
This is ourthis is our signature piece."
lt's part of the iconography of what this movie is,
and so I wanted to make sure that we held onto that.
With the look of its iconic character now fully realized,
Jason could get back to doing what he does best.
Hey, now cut that out right now. That's not funny!
When that spear comes out in the audience,
everybody is reflexively avoiding that.
I mean, that was awesome.
And there was a cable that was actually set up
on the post that ran across
to where she was standing,
and I basically think,
kind of was rigged in such a way
that I actually hooked the gun onto the cable
and shot it so it went straight down the cable.
And then we made an acrylic plate that fit over her eyeball.
We had to do it in one take
because the minute I hit the water,
the little prosthetic was kind of spongy,
and it would absorb the water and just kind of slide off.
But it was fun. It was really a lot of fun.
Andy: How do we do it?
Debbie: Well, first we take our clothes off.
For me, the most trying situation
about making this movie was that I was a kid
and this was the first movie I had ever done
without my parent on the set.
I was 18 and I had to do a shower scene
where there was some frontal nudity.
In the beginning, I might have been
a little uncomfortable with it but all these years later,
I think, 'Wow, I had a pretty nice body.' (laughs)
Jeffrey Rogers' part in the show
was he came walking down the hallway on his hands,
and he's basically wearing just a pair of jeans
and then Jason shows up with a machete
and basically splits him in half from the groin down
through his chest.
So he splits wide open.
I mean, that is horrifically gory
but it's classic Jason.
And we did a body cast of him in pieces.
They actually, in the house,
built a Plexiglas floor that the camera was mounted down inside
so we could do the shot through the floor,
up to the ceiling.
Then, of course, there's the next scene
where Tracie Savage sees Jeffrey stuffed up in the rafters.
Even actress Tracie Savage was unaware
of just how closely her on-screen death
resembled that of a certain famous, yet ill-fated, character
from the original "Friday the 13th."
I had no idea that Kevin Bacon and I have so much in common.
Another six degree separation from Kevin Bacon.
There you go.
We died the same way?
I was in makeup for 4 hours
so that they could glue this torso to my neck.
Then it was lighting for another 2-3 hours.
All for a S-second shot.
And you had to get it right
because then, if you don't, you gotta do it all over again.
So we were all kind of on pins and needles.
I think that line...
Chris: We would have been there already
if some people didn't have to go to the bathroom
every five minutes.
Debbie: That's what happens when you're pregnant.
Was put in there just to make the teenage kids go... ooh.
And then when I'm killed make it even more grisly and awful.
This is a pregnant woman.
There was never a death scene filmed for Shelly.
It was always... that's exactly how it was in the script.
I guess you're supposed to think, well,
maybe he's joking again?
Nice make-up job.
Although obviously the audience knows he's not joking
because they've seen Jason kill a bunch of people.
I think I did the first take,
and I think I heard some people chuckling.
They were like - they were like, 'That's bad.'
I was like... That all got into my head.
It's not the greatest death scene in the world.
Well, I don't know what's going on,
but I'm gonna go outside and take a look around.
I think my favorite kill was probably
Rick getting his eye popped out.
They did change the name of the character.
In the original script it was Derek,
and the reason why they changed it
was at the end of the film when I go outside,
and I get killed,
and she comes out and starts yelling the name out,
that they wanted a monosyllabic name for her to say.
Rick?!
You know, of course,
the death that my character experienced,
me getting my head crushed,
was I mean, this was, yeah, that's historic.
I just remember when Paul's eyeball popped out,
the whole audience just screamed at that one and it was like,
Oh, that's great.
Technically, it was very hard to do,
and it was one of those things
you only had one chance of doing it,
especially the 3D effect.
Well, in actuality we did the Paul Kratka head twice.
I was actually playing with a bunch of stuff
trying to figure out how to make and collapse the head properly.
Anytime they wanted to, we could just pull the string
and the eye would pop out of the socket
and come straight down the line toward camera.
The last part of the filming was basically Jason and Chris.
(Chris screams)
And a lot of night shooting.
She runs up the stairs, and I'm at the bottom of the stairs
and she tips the bookcase up on top of me.
And I have to say that hurt like hell.
It's Dana who finds me in the closet later on
with the knife sticking out of my neck
after I've already been killed.
It was an easy day. I didn't have to memorize any lines.
When he's breaking down that door,
and the whole thing where he gets stabbed in the hand
and stabbed in the leg, those are intense moments.
I mean, those grip you
because then it becomes him not so much a monster
as a human who has monstrous capabilities.
And then I chased her up the stairs,
and she went in through the bedroom window
and went out the window.
Then she tried to run away in the car,
and the car ran out of gas on the bridge.
No!!
I think I kept in shape doing that film.
There were... There was a time or two
where I was running through the woods
right after the scene where he grabs me in the van,
and, you know, breaks the window with his head,
and I bolt out the other side.
There's a place where I run and fall,
and actually when I did that, I didn't get hurt
but people in the cast... In the crew were just gasping
because they thought I had really fallen
and smacked my face.
So that was good.
When I went into the barn after her,
you know, it was... Steve and I had obviously spoken about it,
and Jason at this point is now really angry
because he hasn't managed to do what he wanted to do
and that was kill her.
And so, he just said, you know,
we don't need the barn anymore so just tear it up.
So I grabbed whatever I could and smashed whatever I could.
But then the scene in the barn on the beam,
I actually did that and shimmied out
and that was, you know, I don't know,
20 feet above the ground,
and I ended up with some bruises from that one,
but I turned out okay.
Jason gets pushed out of the barn,
and he's hanging and the mask has to come off,
and she sees his face for the first time
and recognizes who he is. - lt's you!
We had a mold of Richard Brooker's head,
and we wanted the axe to be able to stick,
so that's why we used the rigid polyfoam
so the axe had something to stick into.
There wasn't that much makeup until the dream sequence.
I used to have to go in and do about 6,
sometimes 7 hours of makeup.
And it was 11 different appliances
that they glued to my face,
with the one eye lower down,
you know, and certain teeth and the whole thing.
It was awfully painful.
I mean, he had to be in that make-up for like 6 hours,
and it was hot and sweaty.
And you could see that he was very uncomfortable.
The bad part about it was that as soon as they finished,
it was usually lunch time, and I couldn't eat.
So they used to give me Tiger's Milk through a straw
so I would get some nourishment for the day.
We shot the ending twice.
We actually did another ending.
Dana Kimmell comes up to the door of the house in a dream,
and Jason comes through the front door and decapitates her.
And that was just an alternate ending
that somewhere along the lines somebody came up with.
It was a very quick thing.
It wasn't something that, you know,
we knew was going to happen in advance.
It was just kind of one of those added scenes
that they said let's just do this real quick.
It was only when we did the infamous alternate ending
that you really started to see his face
and that's what they didn't like,
and that's why the alternate ending
was totally scrapped out of the movie.
So we made the mask. We sculpted it.
Then they came up with the new dream sequence
that Jason's at the house,
and she sees him at the top window
and then comes down and blasts through the door.
Steve Miner said that he wanted this creature
to come out of the lake as if it was Mrs. Voorhees
who had been down there for awhile.
I have no idea how she got her body back,
but it's a dream.
They gave us Marilyn Poucher and just said,
"She's your guinea pig. Use her."
Little did she know what she was in for.
Once we started doing the makeup,
it took about 6 hours,
and I remember just sort of like,
falling asleep at certain times.
It was just downright horrible
because the water was just full of mosquito larvae
and baby frogs and tadpoles.
It was just like... Oh, it was pretty nasty.
Covered her in river slime and vinyl worms,
and the rest is history.
[Chris screams]
So this is the actual mask that was done of my skin.
It's a little, a little... Oh, here's a worm. (laughs)
Luckily they were able to cut it off,
and we peeled it off
because then I had to do the shot three more times.
While not as deliberately ambiguous
as the ending of "Part 2,"
the film's conclusion suggests
that the door has again been left open
for the return of Jason.
But what of the fate of traumatized Chris Higgins
who was never seen or heard from again?
I would say Chris has recovered.
Even though she drove away looking like she was losing it
there in the back of the cop car,
I think that she was strong enough
to recover and move on.
And that's the way I wanted to portray that character,
as a survivor, and I think Chris did that.
(Screams)
A new dimension in terror.
It will scare you!
"Friday the 13th Part 3" was released on August 13, 1982
with Paramount spending millions of dollars
to equip theaters with the new technology
required to show the 3D film.
Their investment quickly paid off
when the film managed
to knock the year's reigning box office champion,
Steven Spielberg's "E.T.," from the ♪1 spot.
With a final U.S. take of $36.7 million,
"Friday the 13th Part 3"
ushered in a new wave of 3D films in the 1980s.
And remains one of the most profitable installments
of the franchise.
I believe the choice to do this in 3D
was really risky but, in retrospect,
it was brilliant.
"Friday the 13th Part 3" was the first big hit 3D movie
of the 80s and the audience was just screaming.
And we made our money back
before the first matinee show in Los Angeles.
And I find that very rewarding,
and it's been great being able to meet people
that appreciate and have enjoyed those films
from back then.
Actress Tracie Savage went on to a successful career
as a broadcast journalist.
Best known for her coverage
of the sensational OJ Simpson murder trial in 1995.
As a news reporter
in different markets all across the country,
people knew where to find me.
They'd see me on the air
and every newsroom I've ever worked in,
I've always gotten fan mail from "Friday the 13th" fans.
And I still do. I still do.
Part of the charm of the movies are, is that,
you know, it really invited people to engage.
It really invited people to go out, have fun.
And when we did that film, at the time
that was going to be the last "Friday the 13th."
At the wrap party, Frank Mancuso declared
that he was not going to produce another one.
This is the permanent death.
We're not going to do this again.
This is it. He's dead.
They really stressed the fact
that they wanted to make sure that I had killed Jason
because that was going to be it.
When Paramount announced a fourth “Friday the 13th"
at the end of 1983,
producer Frank Mancuso, Jr.
Was feeling the critical backlash
against slasher films.
And “Friday the 13th" in particular.
He decided it was time to kill off Jason
once and for all.
When we got done with 3,
I was like, "Okay,
what I want to do now is I really want to bring this thing
to an effective close."
With the departure of Steve Miner,
Mancuso and investor Phil Scuderi
set their sights on finding a new director.
Their search led them to Joseph Zito,
who had impressed Scuderi with his 1981 slasher film,
"The Prowler."
With an early draft of the script
written by the late Bruce Hidemi Sakow,
the filmmakers set out to make the best and "final" chapter.
The people at Paramount said this to me.
They weren't going to do any more films
and this was the last.
So I knew that it would be book ended
with a dead Jason and another dead Jason,
you know, at the end.
We'll do some things that refer to our past.
Jason's out there.
We'll bring this thing to its rightful conclusion.
Noooo!
And we'll be done.
So the idea for the last movie,
which we thought "The Final Chapter" was,
was just to resurrect Jason one more time
and then kill him in a way where the film grammar
said he's really dead.
I wanted to pick it up exactly where Friday 3 left off.
That he was on the ground just exactly where you had left him.
We crane down on a bunch of police cars arriving,
helicopter has a searchlight.
You know, gives you kind of a big-budget feel
and very dramatic opening.
I held off Jason coming to life for a long time
in the film.
The audience is continuously on edge through these kind
of languorous, elegant shots.
When is Jason going to re-awaken?
The audience certainly is not going to believe he's dead,
but they become co-conspirators in bringing him to life.
They start yelling at the screen for him to get up.
So instead of groaning that he gets up too soon,
and they say, aw, this is fake, they make him get up.
As Jason's put into the freezer,
we see a little puff of air so we get the first hint
that Jason is not dead.
Once again, the producers chose to recast the role of Jason.
This time turning to a rough trade Hollywood veteran
to don the hockey mask.
Regarding the actor to play Jason,
I wanted to go with a really experienced Hollywood stuntman
and Ted White was a very...
He had doubled famous, you know, Hollywood actors.
He was an older guy, way older,
twice the age, almost three times the age
of some of the kids he was killing.
I actually turned it down to begin with
and later on I did accept it.
After I accepted it, I did go down
and rent two of the Jasons,
and I watched Jason itself,
how he moved and so forth.
And I felt that I'd like to play him a little bit different.
I'd like for him to move a little bit different.
I didn't want that slow motion routine anymore,
and I thought that if this is the final chapter,
then that's the way I'd like to take it out.
He has a sense of dramatic timing
that other Jasons, you know, maybe didn't think about
in the same way because they didn't have 40 years experience
of being before the camera.
There was a nurse there that I'm supposed to strangle,
and when I shoved her up against the wall,
she had a button on the back of her cap,
and when her head hit the wall,
the button kind of penetrated her head just a little bit,
and she yelled out.
These are the times when you back up
and say you're not really Jason, you know.
You're just doing a thing here.
You're supposed to be making a few bucks and not hurt anybody.
You know, this is not a guy who was waiting his whole life,
he's not a fan of "Friday the 13th,"
and someone who was waiting for the opportunity
to be in “Friday the 13th."
lt's a guy who came to work and had to put a mask on
and had to put fake teeth in that made him drool
and was embarrassed by the entire thing,
was happy that you couldn't see his face.
The job of creating the film's bloody make-up effects
initially went to future Oscar winner Greg Cannom.
But when Cannom left the project
due to 'personality differences, '
director Joe Zito called upon the one man
who could rightfully be called Jason's father.
It's almost like I'm Dr. Frankenstein.
I created the monster.
Thank you for letting me kill the monster, which I did.
Tom Savini did a wonderful job, I thought, of makeup.
And that was a 4 1/2 hour makeup job every morning.
I actually replaced a makeup artist
on "The Final Chapter,"
and luckily, that's what they were doing.
They were designing the adult Jason
from my makeup design on the kid,
which is only logical I would think, you know,
so I was glad they were doing it,
but I had nothing to do with the design, you know.
They did a very good job.
It's funny that in all of our conversations
about Jason coming back to life,
nobody ever used the word zombie... ever.
We never heard it.
We knew you couldn't exactly kill him,
and he would always be coming back to life.
So it's sort of like he just wouldn't die.
You can't be alive!
After escaping from the morgue,
Jason returns to his familiar slayground at Crystal Lake
Where he quickly sets his sights on the Jarvis family.
A recently divorced mother,
a pretty-yet-reserved teenage daughter,
and a very special boy named Tommy.
I remember walking into the casting office
and going "'Friday the 13th?"
I thought this was for "Halloween."
and they were like, "No, no, no.
It's “Friday the 13th."
And I was like, "Oh, right, of course. I knew that."
Corey walked in there, and he was so alive,
and so friendly and he and I, just we clicked.
I went, I did my audition and then at the end of it,
I remember my mom telling me like, "Okay,
they really liked you a lot but they have some concerns."
And I said, "What are the concerns?"
And she said, 'Well, they just think you're too small,
and, you know, it's not very believable
that this little tiny kid
is going to pick up the machete and, you know,
whack the hell out of this 6 foot 5 bad guy.
And I went, "Give me a machete. Let's give it a shot." (Laughs)
And I think that was the end of it.
You could see with Corey. You really could.
This young man was going to skyrocket.
And I remember it was a very big deal
because "Gremlins" and "Friday" were both coming out
pretty much over the same summer,
within a couple weeks of each other
from what I remember,
so that was very exciting as a kid
to have these two giant blockbusters coming out.
I think Kimberly and Corey and I got along well
because they're just nice people.
A Jarvis Sandwich!
I did a lot of work about the parents being divorced
and then I was going to protect my brother,
that I would take care of him emotionally,
and that, you know, we were going to make it as a family
without my dad.
Trish: My parents are separated. You know, middle-aged crazies.
And I do remember her doing a lot of, kind of,
looking after me, making sure that I was taken care of.
She was kind of the person
that I think I could probably relate to most.
I at least felt that it was a real connection.
As much as I could bring to that role,
I wanted to bring to it.
There was thought about making
the surviving characters outsiders.
So Trish isn't really one of the guys.
She's an outsider.
She's not ready to become part of the party,
or the party doesn't want her.
Tommy's an outsider, like Jason.
Tommy's a kid that doesn't fit in.
I argue that one of the reasons Tommy Jarvis
has been as popular as he's been
is because that was a very relatable character
to the core audience in these movies
that they could very easily see themselves in
and ultimately sort of the challenges that he has,
the kind of outsider kid who's a little bit freaky.
He's got hobbies that maybe not everybody approves of per se.
At a roadside cemetery, the gravesite of Mrs. Voorhees,
and her first name, are revealed for the first time ever.
I found out her name was Pamela,
I guess about 10 years after I did the film.
I didn't know.
Of course we were aware putting a mother character in the film
that fans who knew "Part 1" would think about that.
That idea of Joe giving me a hint
that maybe I should look sinister
when I looked out the window
because of the mother being the one
that did the killing in one of the other movies.
Never occurred to me.
Never occurred to Joe, I don't think,
or he certainly didn't tell me that.
We didn't play it hard, and we didn't try to suggest
that she was going to be a villain,
but she does make a judgment on these kids,
and it feels like these kids are going to bring
trouble and bad stuff onto my kids.
And, of course, she's completely right.
With the events of "The Final Chapter"
picking up directly after PART 2 and 3,
fans have pointed out a number of holes
in the series' continuity and timeline.
My character, Rob, had a sister named Sandra
who was a counselor at Crystal Lake
in Part 2, I think.
ROB: My sister Sandra was just a really great kid.
TRISH: But the man that killed your sister is dead.
We butt up against Friday 3 in chronology,
yet Rob is doing some stuff that he hasn't been doing
since just a couple of days ago.
When I read it,
I did not connect that character
with someone who had died the same day
or the day before or a few days before.
So I assumed Rob had been searching
for a longer time than it turns out he was actually searching.
TRISH: What are you hunting for up here?
ROB: Bear. Anybody up at the lake today?
TOMMY: You can't be hunting for bear.
Zito said he didn't want to invent really cool new ways
to kill kids, although we eventually did.
He said, "All I want you to do
is make real kids that look like real kids
and whatever we do to them will be horrifying."
It would be nice to make them so likeable
that you were sorry when they got killed.
I wanted the kids to be a little more real,
and it took a lot of pain in casting for that.
It was not an easy piece to bring in "the names."
That's not what “Friday the 13th” was about.
I got lucky.
The people who were really the stars
were Peter Barton who had just come off a series
called "Powers of Matthew Star."
and the other one was Lawrence Monoson
who had starred in "The Last American Virgin."
I've been lucky in the sense
that I've had certain roles throughout my career,
part of these legacy franchises,
and this is certainly one of them,
and it's nice to be a little part of a big thing.
Arguably one of the most memorable victims
in the “Friday the 13th” series
was Crispin Glover's sex-starved,
yet hopelessly insecure, Jimmy.
The film marked the beginning of a long career
for the young artist,
who became known for his wildly eccentric behavior,
both on and off camera.
Crispin Glover and I had a love fest.
I adored him.
He was the most unique young man that...
he just really... you couldn't pigeonhole him at all.
On the set, he was always the oddball.
He was always the one that kept to himself.
He was always the one that was kind of like
in his own little world.
He's an eccentric. He's mysterious.
But he just walks to the beat of a different drum.
Crispin and I actually worked really hard on our characters
and the relationship.
And we both loved improv.
He thinks that's funny.
He thinks it's a funny thing he's doing.
And that stuff in the back of the van
when we're all driving, and I'm typing on the beer cans
and the "dead fuck" lines.
TED: It says you're a dead fuck.
JIMMY: A dead fuck?
Crispin and I made all that up, you know,
and they just let us have fun with it.
The two of them together really had a great thing going,
a really good rapport.
I think you should run that through your little computer.
And they were pretty good buddies on that set
and it did show.
It showed a relationship.
I think that's so important in these films
to have that.
In one of the film's more memorable sequences,
Jimmy decides to bust out his dance moves.
I don't remember what song Crispin was really dancing to.
I just know that he was dancing really crazy. (laughs)
In the way that only Crispin could be.
And it was just fun. It was just really fun and funny.
There's slightly the weirdest thing about our roles
which would first be the sexy girls
who were sort of coming, you know, from,
to join in with this other group of people,
and all the boys are madly attracted to us,
and we're dressed in these ghastly clothes!
Well, what about our hair as well.
Our hair put up in sort of little sort of librarian buns.
I mean, and the pants seemed to be too big.
Everything was just sort of big and bulky and very unsexy.
Yeah, I wouldn't bonk either of us.
The twins, you know, they were the Doublemint twins
and they were loads of fun.
The biggest thing for me was boobies!
You know, I was an 11-year-old boy.
I'm like, I get to do scenes with boobies.
Whoa.
Not much has changed.
I have to say the skinny dipping was very equal
because when we were shooting it,
we obviously as girls had to have no tops on,
but then the boys go,
'We'll do it with no bottoms on as well, '
and there they are swinging off ropes.
So, you know, it was a cute group
to work with, that's for sure.
At the time, I was the kid who was like
always wanting to get up in everybody's business.
I was like, "Hey, let's all go out.
Let's go do this.
What do you mean you're all going to town without me?
Why can't I come too?"
I mean, like, I really wanted to be a part of that group.
The first day was Halloween actually,
and I took him trick-or-treating.
And we went out on the street,
and this street was like a festival
of guys in Jason's masks.
So ironic that we were there actually creating this stuff
and then this group of people
were actually out there having a great time with it.
I think everybody was very sweet to Corey Feldman.
I remember getting along with everybody on that set.
The only person that I didn't get along with
or was afraid of was Ted White.
Mean little devil. I couldn't stand him.
I wanted to kill him desperately.
There were times when Corey got close to me
that it took all my reserve to not just reach out
and grab him and give him a good spanking.
Ted was very respectful when it came to the fact
that I was a kid, and he knew to keep his boundaries.
But at the same time
I don't think that he was really very aware
of how to deal with children.
Well, I was a child actor
so I had a lot in common with him.
It's a hard, a hard thing, a lot of your... l mean,
you miss a lot of your childhood.
You could see there was a dark side to Corey.
Not bad but wanting to stay with the actors
as opposed to getting in the car and going home
to the so-called "real life" that he was living.
Frank Mancuso, Jr. was quite helpful keeping him together
and “WW-
Even after the movies, you know, Frank,
we all stayed in touch with Corey.
As with Part 3, the filmmakers chose rural areas
of Southern California to stand in
for the fictional New Jersey enclave of Crystal Lake.
We shot in three different places,
Franklin Canyon in Beverly Hills,
north of Santa Barbara in a place called Zaca Lake,
and in Topanga Canyon.
The Jarvis house would later be featured
in such films as "Eraser," "My Girl 2,"
and episodes of the HBO series "Entourage."
But for the cast of "The Final Chapter,"
working on the set presented a number of physical challenges.
And we're at the house where we shot the movie.
Tommy's room was up there on the second floor.
And the kids' house is over here, right?
The kids' house was right over here.
We built the kids' house, the house where they have the party,
and the house where they get killed, right over here.
It was my idea, and I don't mind telling you
the studio objected a lot
to have the houses in real proximity.
See, the thing is when we built this other house,
it was an expensive thing to do,
building a house as opposed to finding two houses,
but we really loved the Jarvis house.
I really loved the Jarvis house, and I really pushed for it.
So the studio agreed to build this other house here.
But the thing is that we had a design for it
where it was a really good house to shoot in, a big house,
but as they started doing the numbers
and analyzing the numbers,
the house got smaller and smaller
so in the end it wasn't a great house to shoot in,
but it was a cool-looking house.
The young people we had in the cast
were some of the greatest kids that I've ever worked with,
and I've worked with a lot of young kids in the business.
But what they went through to make this movie
was unbelievable.
Shooting the movie was pretty horrible
because it was raining the whole time,
and it was freezing cold because it was dead winter.
I didn't read the script when I got the job,
and I didn't read the last 40 pages of the script
said night rain.
ROB: What the hell are you doing here?
TRISH: What are you trying to do, kill me?
What I remember the most about those steps right there
is that for continuity's sake
at the end of the movie, I had to be wet
because it was raining all the time,
so in 35-degree weather,
I was hosed down with water from a tank
that was sitting outside in 35-degree weather.
Just unbelievable what they went through
for the amount of money they were making.
It was, it was a trial in a good way.
I felt like a Marine after it was over.
Once again, the real stars of this “Friday the 13th"
were the elaborate death sequences
designed by effects wunderkind Tom Savini.
I had done a movie called "The Prowler."
It was mostly a lot of special effects,
really good Tom Savini special effects.
I think that's what audiences came to see.
How is the next guy going to get it?
So that's what it was about.
And it was almost like the latest exhibit
from your favorite makeup artist magician.
How is Jason going to kill these kids?
So we spent a lot of time talking about
how to kill people in interesting ways.
And that's the number one thing you do with Savini
because it's his favorite thing in the world to do,
is talk about how to kill things.
This just kind of crazy mind that was always creating.
It was a terrific honor to work with Tom
and especially to be a part
of one of his last great effects films.
The choice of name for the character of the kid Tommy
was a little homage to Tom Savini
who contributed so much to these pictures.
I was really kind of fascinated with the process
of how this was all going to be put together
at some point
and so I used to hang out in Tom's trailer all the time
and watch them do the rehearsals for the different effects.
(Laughter)
The kids would come up to us.
"How am I going to die? How am I going to die?"
The juicier and grosser it was,
the more they loved it, you know?
And even the kills that had conventional things.
Because we had seen in "Friday the 13th"
a blade coming through the throat before,
right, from the first one.
So we gave the girl a banana.
Mmm. I love bananas.
It's sort of a comedic kill in a way
and a comedic character, but it's awful anyway.
I mean, the blade comes through her neck,
but you're sort of watching her squish the banana.
I never really met Ted White who played Jason.
Tom Savini stood in for him
because you only see Jason from the waist down.
He's the one that grabbed my head.
He's the one that pulled the knife down.
And the direction he gave me was,
'Okay, now this is a real knife.
You're not going to get hurt.
Don't fight me, just let me move your head
where it needs to be.
That was the scariest thing of the whole shoot for me.
The way the thing worked,
I had a track around my neck with a flexible steel blade
that pushed from the back
and then a false neck over it,
which took hours to put on it.
And it also had a little tube for blood to squirt.
So there were like 3 people behind me um, um,
laying down behind the sleeping bags
and my gear to work the entire thing.
It was such a messy little death.
We did full-on special effects
that were extended and bloodletting
and actually terrific.
I mean, the one of Judie Aronson
when she's killed in the boat
with the knife coming through her body.
I mean, the original cut on that was really totally cool.
I mean, it was extended, it was horrible to watch
because you really believed she was dying in there
and in pain for an extended period of time.
Sam, Judie Arsonson, thank God I didn't get that role,
'cause what she had to go through but,
all naked on a raft, and then just, very vulnerable.
Kind of almost quasi-sexual.
Even now as I watch it, I just think, ew, God.
[screams]
Shooting my death scene was a bit of a challenge.
That's where the horror part came into the filming for me.
What they did was they made a fake body.
There was a raft with a hole cut in it,
and my body went through the hole.
I was upright in the water and from here up,
I was just leaning over.
I think this was in January, and it was around midnight
and it was either 22 or 23 degrees.
It was very, very cold.
And we were all sitting there bundled up, gloves, boots.
It was very, very cold, and the water was even colder.
It was hours and hours in the water.
And it became really difficult for me.
There were points where I just felt like
I couldn't go on any more.
I was shivering so badly.
She was freezing.
She was so cold her teeth were chattering,
and she asked to get out,
and they were reloading the camera
and the director said no.
They said, "No, we have to finish.
We have to finish."
I did everything to hold back from crying,
and I don't think I was successful.
This girl was actually turning blue,
and I went to Joe Zito and told him.
I said, "Joe, we gotta get her out of there
before she freezes up completely."
And he said, "Why don't you just do Jason
and I'll do the direct."
So that's when I got a little upset with him.
I said, "Well, either get her out, or I'll walk.
One or the other." So they pulled her out.
They took me into a trailer and heated me up
and got me back out there.
And it was great.
I warmed up, thawed out basically.
Joe, of course, was not trying to be mean.
He was trying to get a film made.
Whether he was going a little too far
with somebody else's feelings, I would say yes.
And it turns out that I had gotten hypothermia,
and I was quite sick for several days after that.
The other gruesome one really is, you know,
Sam being killed in the boat naked
and then her boyfriend coming
out and getting it in the crotch.
When you're looking, you know, for your girlfriend in a lake,
and you think she's probably naked,
you do not want to get speared in the crotch.
That is a bad thing to happen at that moment.
The guys certainly feel that one when they watch it.
Pretty much all the deaths were pretty graphic and grisly,
but you don't see the mother die.
In most of the Jason movies,
I think there is no parental supervision.
In ours there was
because we thought that made it scarier,
especially when the parents were made to disappear.
In filming that scene
where you see me come in from the rain,
and you see me turn around and the shock,
there was no other murder and mayhem
that you could put on the screen.
That was it. That one point.
Although Mrs. Jarvis's death was only implied,
a deleted scene
involving Trish's discovering her mother's corpse
was originally intended to be the film's final jump scare.
But I do remember that we shot a scene of her
in the bathtub all made up like a cadaver.
Kimberly comes in and she sees water dripping down,
and she goes upstairs and opens the bathroom door,
and you see me under the water, in the bathtub, dead.
It was really intense, that scene.
And I was surprised that they left it out,
but I guess it was just, it was disturbing,
and they didn't want it in there.
It was excised almost immediately.
I didn't want to dwell on it.
I didn't think it was good psychologically
to keep... to make more of that than we did.
The main thing about my death scene
was really the sort of atmosphere,
it was the flashing of the lightning,
and the thunder, and the feeling of it being
very scary out there.
They put a big light behind me
so that I'm silhouetted against the side of the house,
and at that moment... (Sound Effects)
you know the pitchfork goes through me,
and I get flung against the wall.
That is not me, you know. I'm just the shadow.
Crispin does a whole thing where he's so happy
about being successful with this girl in bed.
I think you were incredible.
You're incredible.
Which is what I say in bed to Crispin
when he's like uh-am-l-uh-uh.
Was I a dead fuck?
That was quite funny.
People talk a lot about the corkscrew
that gets Crispin Glover.
Hey, Ted, where the hell's the corkscrew?!
He's calling for a corkscrew and, Wham,
right through his hand. The corkscrew nails him.
Jason's clever. He nails him with the cork screw
and then machete to the face.
I thought that was really creative,
and it came out of left field.
I just had an idea that we shouldn't use a weapon at all
in one of the kills with one of the twins
and just have this prolonged thing
of her at the window
and the hands come through the glass,
grab her and throw her out.
It was a pretty big stunt.
I actually don't know when it's gonna happen,
but what I'm told is Jason's going to come,
grab me and at that point, the only thing I have to do
is get my neck out of the window as it shatters.
After I've done that,
the stunt girl has to propel herself
out of the window.
That's her first shot.
And she landed on a car top.
We blew the windows out at the same time.
I thought that was a really neat stunt
and was well done and well thought-out.
I didn't suffer as much as other people did, really,
in terms of coldness and wetness.
One of the first sequences to suffer the wrath of the MPAA
was the death of the cocky yet ultimately rejected Ted,
who was left alone to spend the night
with a blue movie, a teddy bear, and a joint.
I remember in mine watching that sort of old-fashioned,
semi soft-core porn movie.
So the film breaks, the screen goes white.
Lawrence stands in front of the screen
and a knife comes through the back,
stabs him in the back of the head.
We're not sure exactly what happens
until we see the blood on the screen as he slides down.
I remember at first I had to go visit Tom Savini,
and I went to get my head created.
Tom rigged up a knife that was cut away
with a little pump that was pumping blood,
and you just looked at the dailies,
and it was just horrifying to watch.
I was a very young actor when I did this movie.
I think I was 20 or something.
Really committed, you know. What are you doing?
Real. Everything had to be real,
and so my character in the movie had to be stoned,
(laughing)
and so I thought, hmmm, wouldn't that be interesting
to actually get stoned
and see what that's like to actually be stoned
on camera?
I go to my trailer, and I'm like [sucking sound].
I'm smoking this joint, and I get stoned,
and I'm a very paranoid stoned person.
So it was the worst, worst idea I could have ever done.
I was unable to comprehend what the director was saying,
and I just was too paranoid to do anything.
It was terrible.
Actor Peter Barton, who had previously starred
With Linda Blair in "Hell Night"
and "Part 2's Amy Steel in the short-lived series
"The Powers of Matthew Star."
suffered perhaps one of the most brutal deaths
in “Friday the 13th” history.
My hands were my weapon of choice.
Once I got my hands on 'em, the killing was easy then.
I mean, he smashes, you know, a pretty guy's face
through the shower with his bare hands.
Breaks his nose with his finger, blood comes out,
and then smashes the head against the tiles.
Tom said to me, 'Don't tear the head up.
This is the only one we've got. Be very careful with it.'
Yet the director was just the opposite.
He said, 'Ted, I want you
to really be physical with this thing.'
That was the whole reason for having a stuntman in there,
to be a little more physical.
To me, that probably was my favorite kill.
To truly immerse himself in the role of Jason,
Ted White took great pains
to keep his fellow cast members at bay.
I think his way of keeping the character
was kind of separating himself from everybody else.
I stayed away from the cast completely.
I sat by myself on the set.
I just stayed away from everybody,
and I tried to keep in character as much as possible.
I just felt that Jason should not be sitting there
laughing and cutting up and kidding,
and the next minute turn into this horrible killer.
As the night of murderous mayhem comes to a close,
Trish and Rob are drawn into the empty house
and Jason claims his last, though bloodless, kill.
He's killing me! He's killing me!
The 'he's killing me, he's killing me' thing,
that was something that I just reacted to viscerally
as it was happening.
That's sort of why it wasn't necessary
to do a big, bloody, gory kill
because it wasn't really about the kill.
It was about the horror of hearing someone being killed.
They had the rig for this effect.
They had the gardening tool with the blood spurting out.
They had all that stuff done, but it was never used.
And when Rob is getting killed,
Trish should get out of there,
and then she does get out of there,
and then she comes back.
Part of that was, I think, in the story making
was to get to the point where now you were left
with a 12-year-old kid and Kimberly Beck,
and that's all that was left alive.
The last part of it, we pretty much shot it in sequence.
The sequence involved Erich Anderson's character
being thrown through the window.
Jason comes and picks me up through the window
and scares the hell out of me
which still to this day was the most terrifying thing
I've ever shot in my life - ever.
Terror struck across my face, my heart,
my every nerve in my body was on end.
And I literally was shaking and crying in terror.
And I remember once we cut and that take was over,
everybody took me outside, "Are you okay? Are you okay?"
"No! No, I'm not okay."
I was not okay, and I was not okay for quite a while.
I enjoyed chasing the girl.
I love the screaming and all the hollering.
All it did was invigorate me.
It was just grueling physically.
Well, the stopping and the starting,
and the cat and mouse with the girl
was not my idea or her idea.
It was our director's idea,
and he felt that that little play between us
built up the suspense, and I think it did.
Later on when I saw the film,
I thought it added quite a bit to it.
You know, he wasn't brilliant and cunning,
but he was smart, or he figured some things out,
you know, in an animal plus way.
I never thought of her as being a heroine
until, you know, you actually watch the movie
and you go, "Wow! She's kicking some ass."
But how are we going to get him in the end?
Are we going to use silver bullets?
Are we going to use garlic?
Are we going to use a stake?
Are we going to use any of the typical cliché ways
to kill a bad man? No!
We're going to use intelligence to outsmart him.
And of course, of course, there's an obvious relationship
between Tommy and Jason
when Tommy takes on the persona and impersonates him
as a weapon to undo him.
Jason!
I remember when I first heard this I went,
"Really? They're going to make me look like Jason?
How's that going to work?"
The choice was made to not go the truthful, honest,
you know, dedicated actor way and actually go for it
and shave my head.
Instead we were going to use Tom Savini's
great, illustrious makeup effects once again
and put a bald cap on.
We talked about so many ways to kill Jason.
There were so many death proposals.
They came from everywhere.
Of course, the producers would dream them up every night,
but mostly Tom would come up with really cool ways to do it.
And we described this elaborate thing with Tommy,
the effects kid, was also an amateur inventor,
and he's taken a microwave oven apart, you know,
and put a reflector behind it with a variat
that goes from 1 to 10.
On 1 he melts a toy soldier.
We thought, why don't, you know,
at the end he jams this thing into Jason's head,
turns it up to 10, cooks his head from within,
and his head explodes.
And the producers took it very seriously for a while.
And there were others, there were other things,
but they were generally clever things
that special effects guys can sort of laugh about
and high-five each other for, you know, in the lab.
But in the end,
give the audience a distance from what really was happening.
I remember thinking, "Okay, I've really got to show
how mean I can be, how tough I can be.
You know, that I'm this little kid,
but I can kill this guy.
I can do this.
Jason is about using a very simple weapon
to do awful things,
and it would be sort of nice
if we just use a very simple weapon
to do an awful thing to him.
A change was suggested to us
that Jason's head be lopped off top down,
not across the neck.
In other words, cut open from the top to the chin
like an artichoke.
And they suggested we didn't do that.
And we thought, hmm.
I think there's going to be a sequel here.'
You maybe were expecting something quick.
Tommy hits him in the head with a blade and, you know,
the end. No. He slides down the blade.
I came into the set with 101 fever that day.
I was very sick.
And it's the middle of the night,
and you're already sick,
and now you're sitting there using all of your energy
to kill this giant man.
And the fact that I was sick,
and the fact that I was so under the weather,
and I was like really fighting just to be there at that moment,
I think comes across in the look in my eyes.
Tommy!
Die!
Because you can see the desperation in my eyes
as I'm trying to take him down.
What happened with "Friday 4"
is that the Motion Picture Association of America
was really on us.
And it was kind of a game
where you would trim them down a little bit,
send it back, trim them down a little bit,
and they would wear you down, and you would wear them down.
We would keep trading off frames of everybody else's kill scenes
so we could protect as much of Jason.
The kills are all there but they were very fast.
But when Jason finally got it, you dwelled on it.
It made Jason's death more powerful.
This is the one you've been screaming for.
“Friday the 13th The Final Chapter"
debuted on April 13, 1984.
Although it still didn't win over any critics,
the film went on to gross an impressive $32.9 million.
As far as the filmmakers were concerned,
they had done their job.
Jason had left the screen on a high note
and was gone for good.
Or was he?
It really was this kind of renegade little group
that was involved in major motion pictures,
that, you know, would knock off big movies.
Clint Eastwood would do 7, and we'd do 9.
I mean, it would be like you know the people at Warner Bros.
Were cursing us up and down.
It's like, you know, those bastards
with the million dollar movie beat us!
I remember in the New York Times,
I think it was Janet Maslin
wrote like an angry review about the film.
At least from this critic's point of view
it was actually kind of disturbing
to see people that you actually did create
some kind of relationship with,
you know meet their demise in the horrible ways
that we all did.
We had fun reading the reviews.
We know what they're going to be like
and especially if someone gets, you know,
particularly bitchy and clever. It's great.
I mean, in a way it's sort of like the “Friday the 13th"
movie itself. If they're clever in the way they're trying
to kill you, you cheer.
At the time I was not really overly proud
of making the film.
You know, I was offered the 5th one and 6th one.
I could have done either one of them, and I turned them down.
I'm sorry now that I did turn them down.
We all just wanted to make it as good as we could make it.
We didn't want it to be campy and stupid.
As much as we could make it real and scary
and that we would be feeling the real feelings.
Everybody had the same goals.
We were already at that time talking about ways
to further the franchise, elongate the franchise,
bring my character back.
And when we did the end scene in the hospital,
to Joe and I, that was the nod,
that was the way to kind of set up the next film.
But I thought what a big win this would be,
you know, as a new director,
if I could make this thing live
and become something that fans can appreciate again,
and the studio was surprised,
and they go ahead and take it out and make more.
What we decided to do was make a statement about horror.
That horror is contagious.
The horror that Jason dispenses has been passed on to Tommy.
And maybe I was the next Jason.
Maybe it was The Final Chapter of this Jason,
but maybe "Part 5" was going to be
Tommy comes to fruition,
Tommy comes into his own as the next great serial killer.
And that was really the set-up
for where the franchise was intended to go.
If somebody had pressed me at that time
and said how about six more movies,
it would have been not the running Tommy Jarvis character,
but this contagion of horror
going from one person to the next.
And the look of Tommy in the end was, you know,
it wasn't an accident.
I mean, that was something that was hoping to give birth
Few modern horror franchises
can commit cinematic suicide and return to tell the tale.
But the prospect of wringing a few more dollars
from one of their least expensive
and most profitable franchises
was hard for Paramount to ignore.
What else can you do with it?
We've just killed Jason.
We've just said that the series is ended.
You've gotta figure out something to do.
So everybody was trying to figure out
a way to break the "you look making the same movie
over and over again."
The title of "New Beginning," I think came from Frank.
I think it was how he was reaching around
for a way to let the audience know
that we were promising them something new
after having told them that it was done.
I had been an assistant editor for many years,
mostly for Michael Kahn who's Steven Spielberg's editor,
and I was an assistant editor on "Raiders of the Lost Ark,"
"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,"
the "Star Wars."
And Michael said to Frank, 'You should hire Bruce.
I can vouch for him,
and if he doesn't do a job that you like,
l'll come in, and l'll cut the film for free.'
After "Part 4," I felt like, okay,
I need to take a step back,
and I need to find people to just sort of have their,
you know, imprint go on these films.
L'll make sure they come in on budget,
and I'll make sure we get people
that are placed in the right positions
so that they're not going to get screwed with.
But, you know, that creatively this is really going to be
sort of other people's stuff now.
With Frank Mancuso, Jr.
Now taking on a more ceremonial role as an executive producer,
the job of finding a director for "Friday the 13th Part 5"
once again fell to the uncredited
yet always omnipresent Phil Scuderi.
This time, he chose a director
from the world of exploitation cinema and porn.
These guys from Boston
also did "Last House on the Left."
So before the film was finished,
they were going to Cannes to sell
"The Last House on the Left, Part 2."
And they offered me to write it and direct it.
And I said, Sure.
Then it turns out that they didn't have their full ownership
of the rights.
Phil Scuderi, he somehow knew Danny Steinmann.
And thought that he would be a good choice
to direct the film.
And so, again,
I wasn't going to be in a situation where I'm saying,
"I'm not going to drive the bus, I'm going to take a step back"
and then say, "Oh, no, you can't use this guy,
and you can't do this, and you can't do that.
I wanted to say, "Ok."
And I knew nothing about
his past filmmaking experiences at all.
He arrived pumped and full of energy
and ready to do another draft of the script,
which was what everybody had agreed needed to be done.
As far as the script was concerned,
after they discounted the fact
that Jason is going to be alive and kicking,
they thought that using Tommy as a new Jason
would be an interesting and fun thing to do.
Did Tommy do this? Did he not?
Was Tommy crazy?
These things were running through the script.
Unfortunately, Spielberg fucked up all our plans
because he decided he wanted me in a couple films.
I was forced, quite begrudgingly,
to participate in a little film called "Goonies"
and not participate, as I would have liked,
in the full version of "Friday the 13th Part 5."
So instead, a compromise was reached.
I would come do a cameo
to help buy myself out of the pre-made story
that we had all come up with years before.
To schedule to get him back was insane.
He was busier than anybody I'd ever met in my life.
So what we did, we went over to his house,
and in his backyard we put up bushes,
had the rain machine,
and did it all like in like an hour and a half, two hours,
and got him done that way.
And we used then a very small woman
to walk through the woods.
And I thought it was really actually brilliantly executed.
In casting Tommy, uh...
I wanted someone who was tall, of course,
had some weight on him,
and was good physically.
When I came in for the audition I again, I resolved
I'm not going to talk to anybody,
I'm not going to look them in the eye,
I'll answer yes or no questions.
And then when Danny called me in,
I just sat down and looked and stared,
and I started sweating. And it was great.
And he got it.
So it emboldened me to really become the character.
After being released from a mental asylum,
Tommy Jarvis is sent to live in a halfway house
populated by a group of at-risk teens.
Taking a cue from the plot of the original film,
the producers decided that the identity of the killer
would not be revealed until the final act.
"Friday the 13th Part 5 would be a whodunit.
In a sense the whole picture becomes one giant red herring
because we're going to pull the plug on it
right at the very end of the film.
The guys who started the series
ultimately signed off on that idea, you know.
I mean, that was... That came out of Boston
and that was okay, and everybody wanted
to sort of take this road and maybe thought it may be cool.
In 5, I actually played the imposter of Jason.
Dick Warlock, who is known for Michael Myers,
he was the stunt coordinator.
Part of that job was to bring in some guys
that could play Jason.
So I brought in three guys
and when I brought them in, I knew who I wanted.
I wanted Tom Morgan.
This guy's an exceptional stunt guy.
He's agile and, you know, and that's why I wanted him.
I knew that if Jason had to do anything at all
that Tom could carry it off.
My idea was that I was going to play the character
as Jason.
That's what they wanted.
And at the end they'd sort out what the answer was.
And I did have a couple moments
where I did play the apparition of Jason himself.
In the film, it was obvious they had to distinguish
in some way so they used the blue for the marks on the mask
for the imposter Jason,
where when I did the actual Jason,
I was wearing the real mask with the red marks on it.
There's a shot where the camera is looking out at Jason
right as he steps out from behind a tree.
I was just standing still.
I had nothing to do but to look up at the window.
I'm in the window upstairs.
And he was trying to make me laugh
standing there in the mask.
I turned around and mooned him,
and he's laughing underneath the mask
trying to not do this, you know.
And l'll never forget the day we shot that scene
where I look up and in the mirror,
there's a guy with a machete and a mask on,
and I look again, and he's gone.
And is he real? ls he there?
Is he monster or victim? Well, he's a little bit of both.
And I find that when I look at the man in the mirror
that there's a monster there and there's a victim
depending on which day it is.
Call me Reggie the Reckless.
Shavar Ross was... He was adorable.
Again, you know, a little, young talent.
Yes, Miss Osbourne.
There was many times on the set during "Friday the 13th Part 5"
where a lot of screaming,
and, "Hey, he's got to get off the set.
We ain't got too much time. He's got to go to school."
Solid.
In keeping with "Friday the 13th" tradition,
the services of a smart and resourceful leading lady
were required.
This time, however,
the film's final girl was anything but a happy camper.
John had a very heavy character
and mine was just dealing
with trying to do the best I could
under bad conditions because the conditions were bad.
Low-budget movie making is tough,
and it's tough on kind of everybody.
She was expecting to be picked up every day
and brought to the set
and, I think, in a limo or something to that effect,
and that's another world.
I don't think anybody gets above,
no matter where you are in the food chain,
nobody gets above the desire to do something good,
but the limitations of what you're dealing with.
Danny, you couldn't go to him.
And actors, especially when you're young and starting out,
you kind of look to the director as a father figure.
And I had a question, and he'd just say, "Just do it."
So from that moment on,
and that was about, I think,
the second or third day of filming.
So at that moment I said,
"Okay, you're really on your own here."
I'm sure that's an uncomfortable part to play,
you know, when you have a director
that isn't exactly gracious but you've got a role to play.
So I decided to just do what I set out to do,
to do the best job I could.
I understand to some people that Daniel was kind of coarse.
And kind of rough.
I can only say...
it wasn't that way when I was around,
but I wasn't really around that much.
In order to maintain the secrecy of the film's storyline,
the movie went into production with a befitting code title:
"Repetition."
No way did I know that this was a "Friday the 13th" movie.
So the first day we're sitting on the set.
There's this guy with a hockey mask and the blade.
He walks past us, stops and stares right at us.
We looked at each other,
and the whole energy just turned into excitement.
We're in "Friday the 13th!" We're in "Friday the 13th!"
I want this looney bin closed down.
You tell 'em, Ma!
I did a fair amount of ad-libbing as Ethel.
Horse shit.
Shut the fuck up.
You big dildo.
Lots of swear words came out.
Who the fuck are you? What the fuck do you want?
One of my favorite scenes
is in the kitchen with a chicken.
I'm gonna chop you
into itty bitty little pieces, my friend.
You know, the stew that Junior had to eat in the show,
it was foul only because it was cold Campbell's soup.
Best goddamn stew in the whole wide world, Momma.
I thought, you know, we're going to eat this for lunch.
Hey, Junior would eat anything!
[Stupid laughter]
I have a wig from a movie that I'd done with Burt Reynolds
called "Sharky's Machine" where I played a hooker.
You fuckin' low-life creep!
They loved it so much
that they wouldn't get me another one.
I had to use mine.
Eeeeee-yahhh!
Eeeee-yaw.!
"Part 5's" first turning point occurs when Joey,
a mentally-challenged ward of the state,
incites the wrath of the wood-chopping Vic Faden,
played by the late Mark Venturini.
Hi, Vic.
Get lost!
And then, like that, he flips,
and the axe is going, and there's blood flying.
The scene itself was pretty grisly,
and they did a lot of takes over and over and over.
Oh, god! [sobbing]
For the film's pivotal role
of soft-spoken ambulance driver Roy Burns,
director Danny Steinmann sought out an actor
who could project an aura of menace
without tipping his hand.
Roy is called an ambulance driver. He's not.
He's a paramedic.
He had seen an awful lot of death
because this had been going on for a little bit.
So when it ends up being his son,
I think that's what pushes him over.
My character was, you know, a wise-ass.
My thing was I blew a bubble and looked up at them and said
Bunch of pussies.
And then of course, the moral of the character,
of my character,
is be nice to your co-workers,
or you'll get your throat slit from ear to ear.
With nearly two dozen onscreen kills,
"Part 5" boasts one of the highest body counts
in "Friday the 13th" history.
The producers came up with the idea
that Tommy would be Jason and then every 8, 9 minutes,
there should be a kill or a jump, a big jump.
Come on, mother fucker, fix the fuckin' car!
The death scenes for Pete and Vinnie
were certainly gory.
I had the machete across the throat, of course.
And they also put most of their effort
into the gore and into the kills.
And most of that footage wound up on the floor.
I watched when they shot Vinnie's death scene.
They had made a cast of his face
and then made another face of his out of latex,
and then they took the road flare
and stuck it in his mouth.
You could see everything glowing.
It was horrific but at the same time, you know,
it was certainly an inventive way to bring about his death.
Crap my ass!
Just do it, man!
Some people have supposed that our characters
were the first gay characters
to be killed in the "Friday the 13th" series,
and I think it's an open-ended question.
I hadn't made that choice,
but who knows where it went with Pete,
and where it would have gone, you know,
if they could have lived a little longer.
Lana! Hey, Lana!
Sorry, buster, we're closed.
The original scene of Lana and Billy
were... I guess it was originally written for "Part 4,"
but for whatever reason, they didn't use it,
and they put it in "Part 5."
It just said, "Billy calls for Lana.
He's waiting in the car, and he starts doing cocaine."
(Coughing)
A couple weeks before that I had seen the film "All That Jazz"
about Bob Fosse,
and he would throughout the film say 'lt's showtime.'
lt's showtime, folks.
And so I came out of my trailer
and went up to Danny Steinmann, the director,
and I said, "You know, Danny,"
I said, "I'm changing in the dressing room,
getting ready for my boyfriend.
I said, What if I did something really cute and sexy
like lt'sshowtime!
He was like, "I love it!"
Using an axe on a guy's head
almost looks for real when you're there
because you're looking at the head,
which is just this guy's head.
It looks just like him.
The dummy had a full head of hair,
and they were panic stricken because I had a bald spot
and then Jason was going to crash this axe
into a guy with a full head of hair,
and they had to take the dummy away,
get another head and, you know,
cut the hole but try and make it look real.
So they got the bald spot all set, made that up,
put the squibs under there and then wham.
And that was his target, the bald spot on my head.
Because I'm killed with an axe,
they built the cast with the axe actually glued to it
and then they put my pink dress over it,
and I'm covered with blood.
I kind of played along with it,
and I started walking through the street going...
in front of the cars and people were just like,
"Oh, my God."
Because they didn't know a movie was being made up there.
So we had a lot of laughs with that.
I played along with that.
These kids, people were rooting for them to die.
Fuck you.
Exactly. Fuck me.
I don't know if they were degenerates,
but they were definitely...
not wholesome.
In my mind the movie was more like, you know, sort of
Fellini meets Hardcore.
I mean, it was just sort of bizarre.
I was certainly surprised by the sleazy quality
to the images.
Sleazy is a great word.
I mean, in terms of describing "Part 5."
Everybody was cast because of the size of their tits.
It was like a porn film in a lot of ways.
I did my first nude scene for Danny.
Sorry...(laughs) I didn't.
I just had to say that.
I think Danny Steinmann was bringing to it
what he thought would make it more urgent, you know.
More intense. Not as campy.
And some people found that sleazy,
Some people found that difficult to watch.
They obviously didn't appreciate not having Jason around.
Although the part of sex-starved Tina
was originally intended to be played by actress Darcy DeMoss,
who would later appear in "Friday the 13th Part 6,"
director Steinmann ultimately gave the role
to a former Playboy bunny with a familiar last name.
As soon as they saw my last name, Voorhees,
they said we absolutely have to interview this woman.
They told me I had the role and then they told me
I had to go meet with the producer
to audition three women.
Two of whom I remember, one of them was Darcy DeMoss,
who ultimately played in role VI
and was a long-time girlfriend of mine after we met.
The other girl was Gina Gershon,
you know, "Faceoff,", "Showgirls."
She's been in a lot of stuff.
She went on to do very well.
I went in for my audition and Danny Steinmann, the director,
asked me to lift my top up and show my breasts.
I wasn't prepared for that at all.
So I said "I have no problem with nudity,
but you need to contact my agent,
and have him okay it."
We made arrangements to get together
because obviously we had to shoot the woods scene,
the sex scene, like the following Monday.
The next day, I didn't have a part,
and the excuse was that I wasn't well enough endowed.
It was one of those things where the producer
had seen the one woman and then the director saw me,
and he decided he wanted me.
And if you look at the girl,
her breasts are absolutely enormous.
I did meet the guy, Eddie,
a couple days before we actually, you know,
shot the film, the love scene,
and I think probably one of the funny moments
was when we said goodbye and said,
"Okay, we'll have sex on Monday. Bye."
Okay, sugar.
And I get that all the time.
People will say, "Well, you know, you did this sex scene
with a Playboy bunny in the woods.
I mean, it must have been incredible.'
And, it's like, well, you know,
it's not really comfortable at all.
You got 50 people standing around.
In the background off-screen
is Danny Steinmann, the director, yelling,
"Come on. Fuck her. Fuck her. Fuck her harder.
Come on. Come on. Grab her tits. Grab her pussy.
Grab her ass."
And I'm sitting there like dying.
And I'm not a prudish guy.
And I turned to Frank,
who looked just as dumbstruck as I did, and I said,
"What do you want me to do with this stuff?"
And he put his arms around me and he said,
"Bruce, make it look like a Pepsi commercial."
I do remember seeing the final cut and thinking,
"God, it looks like I'm like Quick Draw McGraw, man,
I mean like, in and done. Bang, you know,
it's like, "Okay, I gotta go wash up."
lt's like, "Ah wait a minute."
Of course, I was the classic bad girl
so, you know, I had to die.
I think the garden shears through the eyes
was pretty bad when I went, you know.
And the way they did the little snap
where you could see the bone right there and stuff.
But at that point, once they put the mask on me,
they put the red blood in the eyes,
and I can't see at that point.
So I'm having to be led around in nothing but a robe.
And, you know, I have to admit that was a little intense.
Plus that stuff burned bad.
I mean, really burns the eyes.
In the end, you know, my death was very unique.
I mean, how many people have been impaled or hatcheted,
or, you know, meat cleaver in the head.
That's old hat.
You can't say another guy has ever had a horse strap
thrown across his face and crushed against a tree.
Some fans have pointed out that at one point
he's turning it clockwise and then at another point,
he's turning it counter-clockwise.
From my understanding,
my death scene was so gory
with the blood being pumped through the strap,
that they were able to use that as a bargaining tool
with the censors,
and they were able to get more nudity and less gore
based on my death.
There was a scene, there was Miguel Nunez,
who played my brother Demon
Damn enchiladas!
Died on the toilet.
I mean, that is not the way to go.
Just got killed in the bathroom
calling out his girlfriend's name and singing.
Ooh baby, ooh baby
ooh baby, ooh baby
Just spikes coming through the outhouse.
And his beautiful girlfriend got just jacked up.
My goodness. Terrible.
Shooting my death scene was pretty, pretty intense.
That's probably the only place where Danny
actually put a lot of pressure on me
because I'm riding a motorcycle through the woods.
And they have the camera mounted on the motorcycle.
(Screaming)
Danny said, "You dump this bike,
that's a $50,000 camera,
I'm going to kill ya.
So you will die before Jason gets ya."
Kept going around and around and the next thing you know
(Swoosh)
The MPAA sent a long note of changes
that we had to make,
and one of them was when Junior's riding the motorcycle
and gets decapitated,
His head can only bounce on the ground once.
At the time this really did look real, you know.
It's cracking and yellowing and falling apart,
but it was pretty intense.
My death scene,
there was a shot where they used my prosthetic head
and had put an axe in the forehead of it.
I don't think the prosthetic piece with the axe
made it in the movie.
I think it was cut.
Tiffany Helm did the robot
to one of the greatest songs, I think.
I had never heard that song until she brought...
She brought it in herself.
J” There's a man with no life in his eyes J”
J” There's a man no life in his eyes J”
It was cool because it was the 80s, you know?
The kill scene with Tiffany,
they had an idea that they were going to use
a little more graphic kill.
They were going to take the machete
and actually stab her straight up through the legs
and pick her up and pin her.
She was like this, and Jason was going straight for the gusto.
I remember hearing about it. I might have seen some stills.
I don't remember if they actually shot the footage.
It would have been pretty difficult to look at.
Couldn't show that. Couldn't show that back then.
That was cut. Rated X.
And they toned that down a little bit
and ended up sticking her in the stomach
and pinning her to the wall, which is probably as good.
You know, everybody was frustrated.
The editor, and Frank Mancuso.
The stuff that was taken out had a big, big impact
on the reaction to the kills.
You don't get to see the kills.
How they were set up, and how they were executed.
So that's what pissed me off the most.
From the point where I discover the bodies upstairs,
everything after that until the end of the film
was my best time.
I was just so excited to be doing it.
I just remember having a lot of fun,
running through the woods in the fake rain.
Where are you?
I just had fun.
And quite frankly, I think I only looked good
when they finally turned on the rain.
(Screaming)
So I was grateful for, as cold as it was,
I was so grateful because I said,
"Oh, God, at least I look good wet."
I didn't shoot a death scene.
It was shot up in the canyon.
I remember they had a rain machine.
It was cold that night. I nearly froze my ass off.
But what happened was every time they would open the door,
and my head would come back, the water would hit the blood
and so it didn't have as good of effect as it should.
You could tell it didn't slit,
but they could have done a better makeup job on that.
I lost my voice,
and I actually screamed like a girl.
I screamed like a girl,
and I still get people that email me
to remind me that that scream was so high.
The most shocking thing when I saw the film in the theatre
was my pink sweater.
She's running through the forest
and in some cuts, she's got this pink sweater
which she wore all the time,
and in other cuts, she doesn't have the pink sweater.
I can't even look at it anymore because I just, all I see
is that pink sweater reappearing and disappearing.
The attitude usually in an editing room
when there are continuity problems
is that if there are people in the audience
that are noticing that sweater,
they're not really engaged in the story.
The bane of my existence of that film
is that damn sweater.
And I didn't even like it.
Pink thing.
And I think the thing with Reggie the Reckless was that
it was that red suit.
It was the red suit.
It was the blood of Jesus over Reggie.
And I think that helped me some, you know, throughout the film,
you know, to be able to have fun running him over
with a tractor.
When that front loader hit me,
that was probably the most fun for me.
I helped set that up.
It wasn't in cuts. It was a full hit.
And the distance I flew through the air
and hit the ground was all real.
So for me that was the most enjoyable stunt.
And the shooting in the barn, the infamous chain saw scene
which did take a few takes
because the first three I couldn't get through.
I was laughing so hard.
Where am I going to do a scene with a chain saw ever,
you know, except this film?
The killing that was the most memorable to me in "Part 5"
was, of course, me taking the machete to Jason's arm,
and him falling back out of the barn
and landing down on some kind of farming instrument.
Tom Morga, he called me,
he wanted me to come out and take his place
one night on the show.
If you watch the movie,
you'll see that the first guy that does the fall
coming out the door, is Tom Morga,
and then you'll see a guy fall through frame.
That's me.
I love the part where he just goes
right through those (laughs) spikes.
I did the graveyard sequence.
When the two guys come up to the, and dig the grave open,
I was lying down in the coffin.
They actually dumped nightcrawlers on top of me.
They had like five gallon containers,
and they dumped them all over me.
This is dick head.
They used this when Roy falls out of the barn
onto the farm implement.
It's really freaky, really strange.
Well, you know, in "Part 5,"
we didn't have the quote-unquote real Jason.
Jason was an imposter, as it turned out,
which was a disappointment to some fans
to find out that it was a human.
We got to the end,
and I found out it was the ambulance driver.
That just threw me
because I didn't know that was going to happen.
Another piece of advice:
Don't allow the overweight, mentally handicapped son
of the local ambulance driver
to get hacked to shit over a candy bar.
(Screaming)
Because chances are
that driver's going to turn into a Jason clone
and try to take people out.
Remains one of the least satisfying endings
in the history of film as far as I'm concerned.
So the sheriff, played by Marco St. John,
we're in the hospital.
He's now explaining the whole thing to me,
who was chasing me, and the motive,
and who this person was.
I guess when he was called to the scene,
and he saw that it was his own Joey
all hacked to pieces
Jason was a good scapegoat for Roy
because he was in the papers. People knew who he was.
And he whips out these clippings
and shows me a mug shot of Jason,
like they got a mug shot of Jason?
And I ended up writing the last three pages of Tommy
in the hospital room...
And I brought it to Danny and I said, you know,
"Here's the ending."
And I remember him just x'ing out all the dialogue and going,
"John, you don't talk the whole movie
and all of a sudden you got like a S-page monologue."
But he said, you know, "This is good,"
and he came back the next day and said,
'We're going to use that.'
But at the very end,
that's when the metamorphosis takes place in his hospital bed.
He comes to see Jason there
and then Jason kind of disappears
and then he gets out of bed,
opens the drawer and sees the mask.
He's in there freaking out. You hear a crash.
I rush into the room
because I think he's jumped out of the window.
And he's behind me with the Jason mask.
I become Jason and so in that sense, to me,
he's the most fearsome, awesome, indestructible,
mysterious figure in movie history
because you see a side of yourself
that could become possessed, if you will,
by this larger-than-life character.
Despite the backlash to lmposter Jason,
"Part 5" proved that audiences still had a bloodlust
for "Friday the 13th."
As the film grossed $8 million in its opening weekend
on March 22, 1985.
Frank Mancuso called me late that night,
2, 3 o'clock in the morning.
He was so excited, you know, saying
these numbers are like the golden times.
I mean, this is unheard of.
Everyone is going to the next "Friday the 13th"
based on their experience of the last one,
and if they go from 4 and 5, and 5 lets them down,
it's already in profits before it has a chance to fall off.
I would say that the movie is a pretty substantive departure
from the rest of the series.
I think it's really interesting.
This film is either loved or absolutely despised.
Some people say, "You didn't even play Jason.
It didn't even count."
And they have no respect for that particular film,
and they think it was the worst in the series.
And I've had others that tell me the way it was done,
and they loved it and it was the best kills,
and it was the most exciting.
You know, it's personal opinion.
And I was kind of proud to be part of something
that they were taking a chance
of doing something different, you know.
Whether that worked out is another story.
It's like "Halloween 3."
Michael's not in the movie so it's not a "Halloween" movie.
I liked the fact that it wasn't Jason killing people.
I liked the fact that it was a bit of a whodunit
and nobody really knew what was going on.
What the hell's going on here?
The only mistake that they made
was giving the explanation that it wasn't Tommy.
I think that if they would have kept it elusive,
and you really didn't know for sure at the end of the movie,
I think they could have gone a great number
of really cool places with it after that point.
But really, no, lmposter Jason, it just doesn't work.
I mean, ultimately, "A New Beginning," not so much.
There's a reason why the next one's called "Jason Lives."
But, you know, in retrospect, you know, it's glorious.
I had a really good time and, you know,
some of it's not bad.
Everybody starts off trying to do good.
You know, they really do.
And he thought he was doing a really good job.
And he thought that...
He thought what he was bringing to this thing
was going to be a different element
that people might really appreciate.
After the disappointing response to “Part 5,”
producer Frank Mancuso, Jr.
Received a directive from the top brass at Paramount Pictures.
Get "Friday the 13th" back on track.
You know, well -intended people can make mistakes.
And I know I've certainly made them.
They realized in it, and the fan response,
that they were not happy with “Part 5”
because Jason their favorite character wasn't in it.
So they had to go back to the old formula.
Obviously, 5, where you have an imitation Jason,
angered the fans.
I mean, it was like, "Let's just ignore this.
Let's move on."
Clean house. Start all over.
Everybody, let's just start fresh.
5 was a bad dream.
So it was important to me that Jason come back
in a very spectacular, fun way.
You know, we needed somebody who would sort of embrace
that kind of theatricality
and infuse the rest of the movie with that.
Enter Tom McLoughlin,
who began his career in comedy and as a professional mime.
During an initial meeting with Mancuso,
the up-and-coming writer/director
pitched an idea that everyone hoped would breathe new life
and bring a bit of levity into "Friday the 13th."
I came to the attention of Frank Mancuso
because of the movie I made, “One Dark Night.”
I was not particularly interested
in doing a “Friday” sequel
because, as far as I was concerned,
it basically had kind of run out of steam.
Oooh, it's those damn enchiladas!
The idea was still kind of challenging to me
at the same time so I said,
"Well, let me see, you know, all the "Fridays,"
and I went to Paramount and sat in a screening room
and watched them all back-to-back.
And out of that I thought, okay, what hasn't been done?
And, because I've always had a great love of Gothic horror,
I thought if I could bring in that element.
It's alive! lt's alive!
Mancuso was smart hiring a young, hip director.
He didn't want somebody that was just going to phone it in
and take a check.
Being a huge fan of the old Universal horror movies,
and particularly “Frankenstein,” that was the first idea.
You know, let's bring Jason back to life.
Gotta be a lightning bolt.
Then I actually would go to these bizarre locations,
you know, cemeteries, and, I don't know,
somehow I just loved that whole process
of writing in unusual places for this
and just sort of see what the inspiration was.
Originally titled “Jason Has Risen,”
McLoughlin's script once again
focused on the Jason-obsessed Tommy Jarvis,
but virtually ignored the events from "Part 5."
After I did “Friday the 13th, Part V,”
I got hired by Frank Mancuso Jr.
To edit a movie called “April Fools' Day,”
which, coincidentally, had Amy Steel in it,
who had been in “Friday ll.”
After that was over,
Frank wanted me now to do the next Friday,
which was VI.
John and I were assigned to do “Part 6.”
Pretty soon after I got word from Paramount through my agent
that John wasn't going to do “Part 6.”
I was at a crossroads in my life
where I was trying to decide do I really want to pursue acting,
or, you know, is this the best use of my time and talents.
So I made a conscious decision on “Part 6.”,
that, you know what, I'm going to pass on this.
And they said we can't use you because you are intertwined.
They wanted to kill me off in "Part 6," but we said nope,
not doing that to us.
[high-pitched shriek]
One of the very few brothers that survived
the "Friday the 13th" series by the way.
6 begins and it's a different actor,
it's a different story.
And enter Thom Matthews.
I did do a movie, a horror movie before
called “Return of the Living Dead.”
[random screaming]
When Tommy shows up in 6,
Jason has not been cremated as you thought.
His body was cremated.
He's nothing but a handful of ash!
And beyond that, Tommy is no longer bat-shit crazy.
This is between me and Jason.
He has now apparently not only found his moral center,
he is a hero again.
And he's bringing Horshack with him no less.
Accompanying Tommy on his ghoulish quest
was fellow mental patient Allen Hawes,
played by the late Ron Palillo,
best known as "Horshack" from the cult 1970s sitcom,
“Welcome Back Kotter.”
Once Jason was dead and Tommy was still around,
and he had gotten out of this institution,
you know, his vow was to go and make sure, you know,
Jason was dead.
My character goes over and grabs a metal stake
from the rotting wrought iron fence,
and I stick it into his heart several times.
Oh, shit.
It starts to rain,
lightning bolt hits the rod
that's still stuck into his chest,
and it kind of revitalizes his body.
The Hawes character whacks him with the shovel
and all it does is, you know, get his attention.
He turns around and punches his heart out.
That was pretty interesting.
We made a foam rubber heart.
We had it so it could actually pump off camera,
and there were tubes running in that the guys on set
had the blood squirting out of it.
That also to me was important
because, you know, we've given him this power
with a lightning bolt.
He should be pretty damn, you know, unstoppable that way.
One of the exciting things for me
on "Friday the 13th Part 6” was the creation of Jason's mask.
And we wanted it to really look the same,
but we still had to customize it to our actor,
which was C. J. Graham in this.
Once he turns around after taking Horshack's heart out
and puts that hockey mask back on,
that was the last time you'll see me with my face exposed.
After that the inside of the prosthetics
became pretty simple.
But the people, Reel FX, they did a great job.
He had to be this unstoppable force.
And nobody was listening to Tommy
that he had brought him back to life.
You're gonna be sorry you didn't listen to me.
You're gonna be sorry if you don't shut up.
It did create a new rule which I thought was cool
only because, you know, how do you kill something
that is already dead?
From the opening moments of McLoughlin's gothic,
tongue-in-cheek horror film,
fans were aware that they were in
for a very different “Friday.”
I had nothing to do with the James Bond title sequence,
but when I saw it, I just absolutely loved it.
I thought it was, like, so cool.
And it was also a wink and a nod to the audience
saying "You're in store, this is something different.
We're having fun with this."
Does he think I'm a fart head?
YES!
It was fun because every time Frank Mancuso, Jr.
Came up with some bogus title
that we were making the “Fridays” under,
and he was a huge Bowie fan,
so every movie had some Bowie song as the title.
“Part 3” was Crystal Japan,
and “Part 5” was "Repetition,"
and we had the one, which I thought was the best,
Aladdin Sane.
To play Megan Garris, the spunky sheriff's daughter,
McLoughlin chose Jennifer Cooke,
who had recently starred
in the science-fiction television series
Jennifer Cooke was picked for two reasons.
One, the "Friday" girl always seemed to have to be blonde,
and I think that was Frank Mancuso's desire
to kind of carry on
the Hitchcock tradition of the blonde.
In my particular choice,
I wanted her to have a very kind of '30s, '40s snappy attitude.
Sheriff: Tommy Jarvis is a very sick boy.
Megan: How do you know, dad? What did you do?
Take his temperature?
Like a... you know, like Barbara Stanwyck was,
or Jean Arthur back in the day.
Playing Megan was terrific, and she really was a feisty girl.
I would say like most girls her age,
she was figuring a few things out in life,
like how to fall in love, and how to say no to your dad.
You keep forgetting, little Megan,
I'm the parent, and you're the child!
That's right.
When are you gonna stop treating me like one?
When you stop acting like one!
I've been an acting coach for a long time
and actually Jennifer studied with me.
And so we knew each other.
David Kagan was also...
His character name was Sheriff Garris,
and he was cleverly named after a horror director
named Mick Garris.
And Tom inserted a lot of those references
throughout the movie.
One was the town of Carpenter,
you know, after John Carpenter and "Halloween."
The best I can do is call the station in Carpenter
and have them keep a look out for them.
And then the other was Cunningham Road.
Drive out to Cunningham Road and look for him.
Megan!
If you watch the movie there's are a lot of little references
to Frankenstein, you know, in there.
The Karloff, you know, market.
Where are you?
Uh, Karloff's General something
There was stuff all over that picture,
just signs on walls.
He had really done a great job in pulling all that together.
Harry did such an amazing job with the score
because you know, he kept the "Friday' score
but he had, you know, this whole Gregorian, gothic feeling to it
with what he added.
The score was different because the movie was different.
It was probably the first one that really, to me,
felt like, "WOW!
This has turned into an actual movie.
Over the years, it's come up that, you know, I was doing,
both a horror movie of "Friday the 13th,"
and also sort of doing a satirization
of, not so much the "Friday,"
but the kind of slasher movies in general.
The fact that the characters reference Jason,
make jokes about it,
I enjoyed, I thought it was a lot of fun.
Because I've seen enough horror movies
to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly.
Happy Friday the 13th.
The object of the game is to find out
which cabin Jason is in!
What if it's that guy, Jason?
I don't wanna know.
It was real. Just like on TV!
I think we're dead meat.
Sowhat were you gonna be when you grew up?
Some folks have a strange idea of entertainment.
It was a way of really kind of having fun
and involving the fans.
Tommy's very bizarre sense of humor
really shines through, I think.
But, yet, a fondness.
You know I found out years later,
meeting Kevin Williamson,
that that did have an influence on him for "Scream."
Killer: Name the killer in "Friday the 13th."
Casey: Jason! Jason! Jason!
Everyone was, you know, very fun and wholesome kids,
you know, innocent.
For the roles of likeable camp leaders Darren and Lizbeth,
McLoughlin cast his wife Nancy
and a young actor who would find out-of-this-world success
after his brief encounter with Jason.
The big discovery of the movie was Tony Goldwyn.
"Ghost."
He became famous for the movie "Ghost."
The thing that Tommy brought him back to life with
is this spear that he yanked off of a fence.
So once Jason had that,
he had something to spear both Tony Goldwyn and Nancy with.
(Screams)
My wife Nancy had a pretty close call in the movie,
and it was completely unintended.
She actually almost got impaled because of the windshield.
It changed the trajectory of the spear
that Jason was lunging through the windshield.
I would have been speared, and it missed me by a speck.
I mean they could only do it once.
It was really scary.
And then there was obviously the times
where somebody tries to reason with him.
Please! Take anything!
You know, as Nancy does in her scene,
tries to offer him,
money and credit cards and stuff.
My head was submerged, literally in the mud,
literally with a vice.
And they gave me a regulator
thinking that would keep me well.
Well, apparently regulators don't work in the mud,
so the mud's creeping down my throat.
The American Express card
was another thing that I knew
the way audiences responded in those days,
that when that card floated,
there would always be some joker in the back of the theatre
that would go, "Don't leave home without it!"
And everybody would laugh.
They say that there's always a reason
that Jason kills someone.
What did I do?
I mean, I was driving. I wasn't having sex.
I mean, I was with a guy but we were doing nothing,
so it's curious as to why we were killed.
I've never figured that one out.
Jason has no bias.
If you were in his territory, fair game.
To establish a new look for Crystal Lake...
Now rechristened Forest Green...
McLoughlin took his cast and crew to rural Georgia,
where they soon discovered some interesting local pastimes.
The big thing for the kids to do on Friday nights
was a big parking lot,
and they would just drive around in this circle
and drive this loop,
and that was the big thing to do at night.
But it was kind of remote and sort of out of it,
kind of not cozy, for lack of a better word.
The camp we shot at, Daniel Morgan,
actually was the site also of the movies
"Little Darlings," and "Poiison lvy."
6 was a lot more fun to do than 5.
I think everybody else was happy.
You had Tom McLoughlin, who I think is a real director.
It really was like a family.
When you film something on location,
you tend to get to know the cast and crew a lot better
than you would if you were filming at a movie studio
where you get to go home every night.
It's not love, it's location because everybody...
I was the den mother, and they'd come with these huge crushes.
She was great. She took care of everybody.
She was mothering everyone from the beginning.
Absolutely. I'm glad she survived the movie.
Because that spear could have gone right through her.
By a Speck!
I just had such fun.
I mean, it's like a big improvisation.
With Tom's words.
He was filming a film that took place in a camp,
and it was like he was running a camp for wayward actors.
Despite the congenial, family-like atmosphere,
not everyone supported the director's artistic aspirations
for the film.
There was a man who, Don Behrns,
who was a little on the cheap side.
The first horror film I ever worked on
was "Halloween 1
which nobody ever knew was going to be
the big success that it was.
He, you know, certainly had a past with doing, you know,
horror movies and things so he seemed like the right candidate.
And, at the time, you know, he made me very angry
because as the writer/director, you know, you had a vision.
Everything was nickel and diming, nickel and diming.
If I wanted a crane shot for this,
or I wanted this for this,
and many times I showed up on the set,
and it's like, "Where is it?"
lt's like, "Oh, yeah. I forgot to tell you."
You know I wanted to kill him.
He said, "By any chance, you got a deal with Frank,
do you get a bonus for getting this picture done on time?"
I said, "Yes, I do."
At the end of the day, you know,
every time you have a restriction,
you have to come up with something else.
And lots of times you come up with something better.
By the time cameras rolled in January 1986,
McLoughlin had surrounded himself with a loyal crew
and a likeable ensemble cast,
several of whom were recruited from his comedy and mime days.
Tom McLoughlin wanted to cast experienced actors
in the first scene that he shot in this movie
because he wanted to be ahead of schedule.
It was a fairly complicated scene.
We were all being beheaded.
I knew Tom from the LA Mime Company.
He was the director of the LA Mime Company,
and I was a mime in there.
And when he was going to do this film,
he talked to me.
"Well, I have a part I'd like you to do."
And I said, "Oh, great. Do I get killed?"
He said, "Yes."
We actually were playing paintball, and it really hurts.
After I got off a great shot,
I made the men put on headbands that said "Dead."
Don't be spoilsports. Put on your headbands.
(whispering) A foreshadowing of things to come.
One of my favorite kills in 6
was the sort of misogynist guy with the machete
who has the machete, and he's hacking the branches
and complaining about women should, you know,
stay in the kitchen.
She should've stayed in the kitchen where she belongs!
A woman shouldn't even be allowed in these games!
And then Jason grabs his arm and throws him against the tree,
and he winds up hitting the tree
and his head goes back,
and there's like a bloody smiley face on the tree,
and you see Jason holding his arm that's been severed
from the rest of his body.
And then it was a question of going,
Okay, you know, we've seen decapitations,
you know, how do we take it one more step?
Okay, let's do three in one.
You know, so that three heads went at the same time.
Jim Gill, who now runs Reel Effects,
did this really cool gag where
as the idea was as we passed the machete
across the three artificial dummies,
a trip mechanism would perfectly send the heads off
at the right time.
It was really authentic, really excellent.
Then we made the legs so they would buckle at the knees
and collapse out of frame.
A lot of work went into that.
And the rating system made them cut that back.
The head was so realistic.
The eyes, I had more hair at the time.
It wasn't until the first screening
about two minutes before that scene came on
and someone on the crew leaned forward
and tapped me on the shoulder and said,
"By the way, the triple decapitation has been edited out
because of the ratings."
And I'm like, "What?"
Just as I turned back to watch the machete go up,
and I think you see the bodies crumple by frame,
and I remember thinking, "Wow. What a shame."
When he fires the paintball thing to Jason,
and Jason looks down,
I thought that was like really, really funny.
You see me running away,
and Jason following me with the machete, and I'm going,
"Help, help, help."
He's gonna kill me!
And then they cut away,
and nothing is ever said about Roy until later.
"Did you find Roy?" And the went, "Yeah."
And they pull out an arm, and my glasses and parts of Roy.
L'll order up some body bags.
There were the kids
and then there was the Sheriff's assistant... me,
Deputy Rick Cologne.
And my mail order laser scope
which, you know, as you see where the movie takes place,
it had to be mail order.
There was not a whole lot of places to go
and buy that kind of thing.
Wherever the red dot goes... ya bang!
Trying to find a cemetery that would allow us to shoot,
even though we were calling the movie Aladdin Sane.
'Cause that was the whole thing,
we did not want to say we were "Friday the 13th."
Old Madison Cemetery, where we finally got permission,
and we had one area where we could drive the truck in there
90 miles an hour over the train tracks
and into there.
There was an entrance made
so it looked like the front of the cemetery.
And then the rest of it was staying on the paths
until the point where he gets tackled
and then that was kind of a bare area.
But like anything else in movies,
you're given permission to do something,
and you try to make the best out of what you're given.
Echoing the behind-the-scenes controversies of "Part 2,"
the original stuntman hired to play Jason
was replaced during the early days of production.
Originally we had a stunt coordinator
who was also playing Jason, which is Dan Bradley.
We started the movie doing all the daytime sequences,
all the things with the paintballers and stuff,
and so all that was Dan as Jason.
And Paramount, when they got the dailies,
somehow - and I don't even know whose decision it was
because I was busy shooting,
said that we're making a change.
"What do you mean?"
"We're getting a different Jason."
"Why?" "Just trust us, we need to do this."
I remember that Dan didn't, apparently,
didn't look that good on screen.
Apparently had put on a few pounds.
For a person who had been dead for a long time,
he had been eating pretty well.
It was devastating to me.
It was certainly devastating to Dan,
and I, you know,
as I said I just was really leery
about who was going to walk in that door.
And, you know, 'm comes (I)
who had really little or no experience.
He was large and imposing, and that's what they wanted.
Cd was huge.
He looked the part, but he was a gentle giant.
So, frankly, when he was grabbing people
and chasing us through the woods,
we had to do a lot of acting
because he just wasn't that scary in person.
He didn't want too much of a zombie,
but he wanted that fear, that anger,
and the projection had to be through the body,
100% through the body.
Just a simplistic little movement would create fear.
I pray the lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake
Many of those small, little physical nuances
definitely helped add, you know,
that sense that, you know, there was a machine in there,
like Terminator.
But at the same time you had to give a little bit of that
human thought process so you didn't become robotic.
Ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma
I remember my first scene, my very, very first scene.
It was a back shot. Me walking towards the trailer.
Where Jason sees the Winnebago moving,
and he kind of tilts his head in a humorous sort of way.
You know, he wants to understand
what the noise is about, why the mobile home is rocking.
You're the best!
During my love scene,
they had a little powwow and said,
"We don't have any nudity in this."
so they asked me if I'd be interested in doing it topless.
The contracts had been signed,
so that just didn't seem to pan out.
The best part about working with all the actors and actresses
that I worked for is we had a great camaraderie.
They trusted me which was a great feeling.
I'm walking by the bathroom of the Winnebago,
and Jason comes out of the bathroom,
grabs me from behind, slams the door
and there I have this amazing fight with him.
And I'm this little tiny person,
and I really gave it my all and fought with him.
I mean, I had to take a young lady's face
and slam it into a camera lens with force.
Slammed it through the wall of the Winnebago
where the imprint of my face came out.
And how they actually did that is they filmed it underwater,
and they shot it in slow mo,
getting... pushing through this piece of plastic underwater.
John Travolta's nephew,
who's driving the RV, Jason comes behind him.
And the way the guy's rocking out, and listening to music
and looks up and all that.
Hey, Nikki what are you doing back there, taking a dump?
And we're driving along and up until
the slamming of the knife into the side of his head,
it's a real knife.
I mean, and he's trusting me,
and I'm wearing a hockey mask,
and I'm not just taking a cheap shot of force.
I'm throwing that knife towards his head.
Stein-stein-stein-stein-stein
But then that iconic thing with that big crash
and then Jason on top of the RV
with the fire in the background.
Literally the last shot of the film.
The sun was coming up.
I was on my knees praying
that this guy wasn't going to get killed doing this
because nobody had ever flipped an RV like that before.
And I guess, what I heard later
is that our production manager, Don,
wanted the swamp cooler that was up on top of that.
He had little special deals for himself,
and one of the special deals, my understanding is,
he had this swamp cooler that he pulled aside...
$5,000 swamp cooler.
Well, apparently some people got wind of that
and got a little excited.
And they all marched over there,
and they tied it to the top of the RV.
And when the thing flew and hit,
the first thing to fly off was that swamp cooler, you know.
And as it exploded,
the cheers that went up, and the excitement over
"We got him. We got him."
It was worth every penny-pinching moment.
[Sigh]
The car chase scenes were really fun,
and I was pretty comfortable doing those
because, I must admit, my first car when I was 16 years old
was a 1970 Firebird
that looked a lot like Megan's car.
This is gonna be a hairy turn.
They were just looking for a guy to play a cop.
Officer Pappas was a little vain.
Come on, handsome.
And I got to say one of my favorite lines...
You got a description of the plates?
I got the whole enchilada.
"I've got the whole enchilada."
Megan, step out of the car.
End of the line.
As Tommy is locked up by Sheriff Garris,
Jason's primal instincts lead him back to Camp Forest Green.
One of the other sort of notorious aspects
of my "Friday,"
it's the only one that actually has kids at the camp.
And I don't think there was anybody in fandom
that wanted Jason to kill children.
It just gave it, to me, another level of "Oh my God.
Are they going to actually show kids getting killed?"
Tom spent more time shooting the kids
and working on their performances
in a lot of ways than he did on the kills
that were going on in the movie.
One of the little girls in the bed,
she's laying there and all of a sudden
Jason's walking down the aisle
and leans down to the bed
and looks closely and tilts his head looking at her.
And she just starts praying that he's going to go away.
I named the little girl Nancy, actually after my wife Nancy
because she sort of represented to me
the sweet, innocent child
who believes that if you're good,
God's going to protect you.
And there's been the other rumor
which is it was named after Nancy
from "Nightmare on Elm Street"
who also had nightmares, but that's not true.
I mean... but again, if that works, we'll take it.
Jason can just about do anything as far as strength.
There's a scene where he takes one of the girls,
the camp girl's head, and twists it off.
You know, some of that stuff unfortunately
had to be cut way, way down from the way we had shot it.
But everything I tried to do in the movie
also was something that you couldn't do
as a normal human being.
Kerry's character was hopefully shocking
how badly she got it
and most of that was your imagination
because you didn't actually see it.
But you certainly saw the bloody aftermath.
I remember the little girl that runs out,
and she's in the woods,
and she's scared and, myself as the policeman,
goes to calm her down and tell her everything's okay.
What scary man?
Of course, everything's not okay.
That's just before Jason crushes my head.
[screaming]
They did build a great head where the brains popped out.
I guess the fans were a little bit disappointed
that some of my death was cut by the MPAA.
And then I come into the scene, and I'm looking for Jason,
and I trip over something, and I fall down,
and my face goes right up against his face.
And that's where the sheriff takes a shot with the shotgun.
Blows me back.
Takes another shot, blows me back.
You can blast him a number of times and knock him down.
He's laying there,
and, as far as I was concerned, he's playing possum
you know, just to mess with you.
One of the things that turned out wildly effective
was the back cracking of the sheriff character.
They dug a hole and those weren't my legs.
They had a guy head down in the thing,
in the hole, with his legs behind me.
And when I bent him up, all he did was lift himself up
from a box in the ground.
And the idea is the actor gets cracked backed by Jason.
Just that whole idea of bending somebody all the way back,
and, you know, hearing all this [cracks knuckles]
A little sound design, a little screaming.
It all turned out great.
Interestingly, that scene probably had more issues
with the MPAA than anything else.
And it's a bloodless kill.
They felt that it was too intense
so they sort of quick cut.
And we to just keep taking frame after frame after frame
out of that thing.
So that had a huge, you know, reaction in the audience too
because, again, it wasn't something you had seen before.
With his undead Jason on the loose,
McLoughin injected his film with a new set of rules.
The thing I found the "Fridays" lacked
in my form of storytelling
was the sense of some kind of mythology,
some sense of rules.
And if you could somehow maybe follow those rules,
maybe you can, you know, save the day.
And it is just like in ghost legends, you know,
is that, Jason was never going to be at peace
until he was back where he drowned as a boy.
And my idea is to somehow manipulate him
so I can put this noose around his neck
and drown him with a big rock.
I think he called me a pussy if I remember correctly.
Jason, come on!
Come on, ya pussy!
And then I give my attention to Tommy in the water,
and I just go after him.
It's very visual and beautiful.
You've got this fire. It's really well shot.
Cinematically, it's one of the more interesting sequences
in any of the "Friday" films.
The scene where Megan kills Jason
with the outboard motor was shot in two different places.
All of the underwater scenes
were shot in a temperature-controlled tank
in Los Angeles
well after we'd filmed the rest of the movie.
And when I say they chained me down,
they did chain me down.
I was, I was at the mercy of the safety divers.
If I needed air, I would signal, give a hand signal.
The divers would swim in.
They'd lift my mask and put a regulator right in my mouth.
All of the above-the-water scenes
were shot in this murky, eerie lake
in the middle-of-nowhere Georgia,
in the middle of the night.
So, that was terrible.
I believe we shot in Tom McLoughlin's
father's swimming pool after the fact,
of the motor, the blade from the motor,
cutting Jason's mask, and the blood coming out.
Jason has, you know, obviously lived
far beyond anybody's expectations
because even when I was doing the film,
it was pretty much,
"Well, I think this is probably going to be the last one,
and so just have fun with him,
but don't kill him kill him"
which is why I had him, you know,
hanging there in the bottom.
I mean, you can see at the end of the movie,
the eye opens up,
and the man behind the mask is still alive,
and it just sets it up for the next phase.
As with all of the previous "Fridays,"
a number of different endings were suggested,
though none were ever quite so daring
as Tom McLoughlin's scripted though never filmed
cliffhanger.
Tom McLoughlin had written a different ending
where you met Jason's father.
We'd seen Jason's mother.
We understand how messed up Pamela is.
Well, who marries that woman?
And, really, what did he have to do with this ultimately?
We don't know who he was, what he was, or anything.
So I thought it would be
really interesting at the end of mine to, you know,
have him show up.
In my original script, the caretaker had not died.
He was still around.
So he was, you know, it had a kind of an epilogue
with him in the cemetery and in walks this guy,
kind of an almost Rasputin, you know,
type character you didn't get to see too much of,
and you realize that he's the one
who's been paying the caretaker
to take care of Jason's grave all these years.
And you now kind of understand that whatever Jason came from,
you know, the truly wicked side of him,
was his father.
What I got worried about with Tom's idea about Jason's father
is that if you sort of dangle like something like that
at the end of the movie,
all of a sudden we're trying to tell the story
of a 60-year-old guy,
and how that would sort of circle back around
into a movie that we could actually sort of make work.
Frank Mancuso felt that, no,
we don't want to split, you know,
the attention of the franchise off on something like that
as cool as it, you know, the idea might be.
You know, stay with Jason
and probably he's ultimately right.
The Elias Voorhees character I think
really would have been very interesting to visit.
That I think was a bit of a missed opportunity.
Maybe the people who didn't like "Part 7"
would have thought that would have been a better movie.
I don't know. But I was happy that they actually released
a Signet Pocketbook version of the movie,
which has, you know, that aspect in it at the end of it.
In a further attempt to broaden the film's appeal,
Paramount recruited legendary shock rocker Alice Cooper
to contribute three songs to the film.
You don't have to be a genius to take a look at me
and realize I'm an old rocker that refuses to die
and so when, all the movies I always try to put
as much rock music in as I can.
The music score done by Alice Cooper
was done after the fact, but it was a very cool thing.
We didn't mind a little blood on stage,
and a little, you know, slash here and there.
And so when the slasher movies came along in the '80s,
all of a sudden we were right there.
So when it came to writing for Jason, you know,
Jason's like a member of the band.
They came to us and they said,
could you write 2 or 3 songs for the movie,
a couple of incidentals and a theme.
And I went, "Yeah, absolutely."
Alice was incredible
to just kind of let us use whatever songs we wanted.
And the song that he came up with was just huge.
Yeah cuz he's back
He's the man behind the mask
And he's out of control
"The Man Behind the Mask" was written 3 or 4 different ways.
We wrote a heavy metal version of it.
And then we wrote sort of a hard rock version.
And then we realized at that time
that they were looking for something
a little more...
a little more bounce to it.
And so we got together with Kelly
who wrote, I think "Material Girl" for Madonna,
and he was the one that came in with that [hums bass]
Early test screenings of "Jason Lives"
did not fully satisfy Paramount executives.
So they decided to enhance the film's thrill quotient
by increasing its body count.
And I do remember being in meetings
talking about who can we kill, how will they get killed.
And that's where I came in.
Oh Steven, it's beautiful.
I am friends with Tom McLoughlin, the director.
So I knew him beforehand.
He had directed my husband Vinnie Guasterferro,
who is the deputy,
and so he hired me to shoot the scene we did.
We shot that at Griffith Park here in LA.
And he shish-ke-bobs them
where it puts it right through the front
and right through the back.
I know we weren't the first shish-ke-bob
to occur in "Friday the 13th"
but I think we were the first on a motor scooter.
That is probably our claim to fame.
Optimistic about the film's chances
of playing to a summer audience,
Paramount Pictures bumped up its release date
to August 1, 1986.
Despite being the only "Friday the 13th"
to receive the occasional positive notice,
the film failed to capture the ♪1 spot at the box office,
falling behind another high-profile horror sequel,
James Cameron's "Aliens."
With a final tally of $19.5 million
"Jason Lives" became the lowest-grossing
"Friday the 13th" to date.
And I really think the reason 6 didn't do well
is not because 6 is not as good, if not better,
but the fans didn't really come back
because they felt so ripped off by 5.
And then when they began to see 6 on video,
that got them back into the series
because they saw that Tom McLoughlin, more than anybody,
brought the series back to life.
I was really happy with the movie, the way it came out.
I'm still happy with it. I think it holds up really well.
And I sure had fun filming it.
I never got to go to summer camp
so it was the closest I ever got.
And I thought Tom did a really good job on that movie.
I thought that he brought a lightness to it,
a fun-ness to it.
He had a great sensibility.
He had a real appreciation of the movies.
And as a result, we had a lot of very good reviews on the film
because they said,
"Well, you can't really hate a movie
that is making fun of itself."
Yet, you know, for most of the fans,
it still delivered, you know, what a "Friday" should deliver.
By the late 1980s, Paramount was looking for new ways
to exploit their most lucrative franchises.
To the dismay of its critics,
"Friday the 13th" would soon be coming
to television.
Mel Harris, who was at the time head of Paramount Television,
came to me and he said,
you know, "We're having a very successful syndication run
with "Star Trek."
We want to try to identify some other titles
that we control that we think will bring an audience.
Just by virtue of the title."
It was essential that we found a way to tell stories
that would have a kind of "Friday the 13th" theme
without being directly associated
with "Friday the 13th."
And he said, "Look, this has nothing to do with the movies.
It could be anything that you want.
It just has to be "Friday the 13th,"
and you have to be involved."
I remember when I was a kid going...
Doing like the 11:00 monster movies, and it's like,
you know, kind of freaks you out
and then you gotta go to sleep.
What I need is a Vampira cocktail
to settle my nerves.
It will not only settle them,
it will petrify them.
And that's kind of the dynamic that I was looking for.
With only a title to work with,
Mancuso and co-creator Larry B. Williams
began brainstorming a premise
that could sustain itself in the world
of late-night syndicated television.
Like the films themselves,
"Friday the 13th: The Series" had to be made cheap.
And it had to be scary.
And I was kind of intent on doing an anthology
with continuing characters,
so we started talking about the notion of a curio shop
and what that would be like.
And then the idea of it being cursed
and then we started saying, "Well, you know,
if we had all these cursed objects,
then we can go ahead and have a great time with that."
So that really became the sort of the core of the show.
Frank's plan with "The Series"
is that all these antiques were cursed,
but they all could actually service you
in something really good,
but there's always a price to pay.
The allure of the object that is cursed
and the things that happen to people
with that object in their possession
is really a terrific idea.
And it was a terrific launching pad
for really some... some really fascinating storytelling.
Lewis Vendredi made a deal with the devil
to sell cursed antiques.
But he broke the pact, and it cost him his soul...
Distributed by Paramount Domestic Syndication,
"Friday the 13th: The Series" debuted on September 28, 1987.
It told the story of cousins Ryan Dallion and Micki Foster
who inherit an antique store from a distant uncle
who sold his soul to the devil.
Aided by antiquities expert Jack Marshak,
their quest was to retrieve the cursed objects
before obsession and death came to those who acquired them.
I'd been out in Los Angeles for three years
and got an audition for this television series.
It all just happened very fast.
Went in for a wardrobe fitting and was on a plane to Toronto.
Robey, John LeMay and Chris Wiggins were a dream cast.
Chris is a senior emeritus honored Canadian actor,
and it surprised us when we asked him to join the cast
and he said yes.
So they wanted to shoot like
this little pilot kind of thing, which I directed,
and, you know, it was very contained,
very small, and, you know, we probably did it for $85.
I have no time for you!
But it communicated what we were meant to communicate
which is that, you know,
it's going to be scary, it's going to be spooky,
it's going to be tense.
With not a single episode
featuring an appearance by Jason,
or even his cursed hockey mask,
many "Friday the 13th" fans felt alienated.
And even cheated by its television counterpart.
The only thing that the television series
"Friday the 13th" and the movies "Friday the 13th" had in common
was the title and Frank Mancuso, Jr.
While "Friday the 13th" as a title was a come-on,
we really felt that there was something there.
There is no concept
that could have sustained itself on television
with a slasher killer on the loose
anywhere for the 76 episodes that were subsequently made.
I really wish they would have called it "Friday's Curse."
Which was the original intention.
In Europe it was called "Friday's Curse,"
and in Canada it was called "Friday's Curse" as well.
It was set up in Canada and I was producing the show.
And it was a fascinating experience.
And we got like Atom Egoyan to do one.
David Cronenberg did one.
David Cronenberg brought that terrific kind of
laser-like focus on a theme
which so totally fit into the storytelling notions
of "Friday the 13th."
And it was wonderful.
It was also great to work with David
who's a fabulous director.
Frank asked me about being story editor
because they had a story editor up in Toronto
where they were doing the show, and, you know,
wanted me to write and direct, you know,
some episodes as well.
"Master of Disguise," I thought was a great idea
basically having, you know, a makeup case that, you know,
could take somebody who was really deformed
and, you know, you'd kill
and then you would sop up the blood of the victim
and then he was as handsome as like a James Bond.
And because it was syndication,
we literally never got a note from anybody about anything.
I mean, I don't know that anybody
even looked at the shows.
I mean, it was like literally they just went out.
So if I wanted to do it in black and white,
it was black and white.
If I wanted to do a two-parter, you did a two-parter.
I mean, it was like literally whatever we decided to do.
"Friday the 13th," the new television series
that has put real fright into late night.
"Friday The 13th: The Series" was a bona fide ratings hit.
Often ranking just behind Paramount's
top-rated "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
After two successful seasons,
actor John LeMay decided to leave the show
to pursue other opportunities.
The thing that was the most interesting of a challenge
was the third season,
Frank asked me if I would write and direct
for the season premiere.
And he said, "You know, we need to kill the Ryan character
because he wants to get off the show,
and but don't kill him in a way
that we can't bring him back if he changes his mind.
And I got turned back into a child
at the end of my two-year stint on the show.
It was a grand and glorious two hour episode.
It was a way of basically taking him off the show
and, if you wanted to bring him back, you could.
When LeMay was replaced in the third season opener
by actor Steven Monarque
as streetwise Johnny Ventura
"The Series" lost not only its leading man,
but its luster.
Once Ryan got turned into a little boy,
Johnny Ventura had to take over that spot.
Johnny“.
Johnny was the cousin of Ryan.
He was a little bit more of a blue-collar kid.
I don't think he was afraid of fighting
and physically getting involved with saving the day.
[monster growling sounds]
"Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street"
were head-to-head in terms of their television experience.
"Freddy's Nightmares" was always a somewhat more lighthearted,
tongue-in-cheek kind of a television series.
I think the makers of "Friday the 13th"
always wanted it to be dark,
always wanted it serious quality.
Because the show got good reviews,
and the show was successful,
the people at Paramount said,
"If we can get X dollars at 11:00,
if we move it to 10:00 we can even get more."
So they moved it to 10:00 in year two.
And all of a sudden it's like even more successful.
They said, "You know what?
Let's start putting it on at 7:00, 8:00, you know,
whatever it is.
They start moving it.
So now, all of a sudden,
different kinds of people are watching.
No longer is it the last thing that you see
before you go to bed at night.
Now it's like, it's on at 7:00.
They stopped the clock, Lewis!
[screams]
Here you are, sitting at home, eating dinner
and all of a sudden this, you know,
splat thriller comes on the tube.
I think, you know, as a parent
it would catch me by surprise, too.
And with Paramount boldly pushing the show
into primetime slots, "Friday the 13th: The Series"
soon came under fire from right-wing religious groups
who were less than enthused about a show
involving black magic and pacts with the devil.
I think when I came in at the time,
people were already not liking he show.
There was already this force trying to get it off the air.
So this guy, Donald Wildmon,
who had like this kind of Christian Coalition group
started squawking about "Friday the 13th"
because it started to get recognized.
He's talking about Jason.
He's talking about, you know, all this stuff.
I'm saying, this guy's never even seen one of the shows.
What's at stake here?
Western civilization as we've known it
for two thousand years.
We kind of all laughed him off in the beginning.
But, you know, you get somebody like that who calls and says,
"Yeah, I got 555,000 constituents,
and they're not going to buy Proctor & Gamble products
if you continue to put your ads on this show."
All of a sudden it's not so funny anymore.
I was sad that it ended that quickly.
You know I really wanted to do at least another year or two
because I was just finally getting my feet wet.
It's amazing how our culture has changed in 20 years
and how permissive and pervasive violence, in particular,
is on TV,
and how much it's just taken for granted,
that it's just going to be there.
So, yeah, it was sad because we did, what, 73 hours
and, you know, there were some clunkers,
but there were a lot of really good shows in there.
And, in point of fact,
when I talk to people about the television series,
you know, people do remember it fondly.
But I think a lot of people
who were really big fans of the series
didn't like the fact that they stole the name
and tried to sneak a fast one past everybody
and get them to watch this hour serial on TV.
But it was fun. I liked it.