ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - May 9th
"FRIDAY THE 13TH" released in 1980
In 1957, a young boy named Jason tragically drowns in a lake near Camp Crystal Lake. In 1958, two counselors are brutally murdered, forcing the camp to close. Then, in 1979, a group of counselors reopen Camp Crystal Lake. During that time, the counselors are getting killed one-by-one by an unknown assailant, in Sean S. Cunningham's cult 80's slasher film, Friday the 13th!
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Newly hired counselor Annie Phillips (Robbi Morgan) enters a small diner and asks for directions to the reopened Camp Crystal Lake. A friendly truck driver named Enos (Rex Everhart) agrees to drive Annie halfway, while an elderly man, Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney), warns Annie against going, believing the camp has a "death curse". During the drive, Enos tells Annie about a young boy that drowned at Crystal Lake in 1957 and about the two murders the following year. After Enos drops her off, Annie hitches another ride from an unseen second driver, who later chases her into the woods and slashes her throat. Meanwhile at the camp, counselors Ned, Jack, Bill, Marcie, Brenda and Alice (Mark Nelson, Kevin Bacon, Harry Crosby, Jeannine Taylor, Laurie Bartram, and Adrienne King), along with the owner Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer), refurbish the cabins and facilities. As night falls, Steve leaves to pick up supplies in town, while the counsellors remain behind in the path of an approaching thunderstorm. During the night, Jack and Marcie have sex in one of the cabin's bunk beds - but they are unaware of Ned's body with his throat slit above them! Shortly, Jack is murdered from his throat pierced with an arrow from underneath the bed, and the killer murders Marcie by smashing an axe into her face. Later, Brenda hears a child's voice seeking for help and she ventures outside her cabin to the archery range, only for the range lights to turn on and she is shot by an arrow, and killed. Eventually, Steve returns to the camp and the killer shines a flashlight at him; he appears to recognize the killer before he is also murdered. Alice and Bill, meanwhile, are worried by their friends' disappearances, and they leave the main cabin to investigate, only to discover a bloody axe in Brenda's bed, the phones disconnected and the cars inoperable. When the power goes out, Bill goes to check on the generator and himself murdered. Now alone, Alice leaves the cabin to search for Bill, only to encounter the unlikely murderer herself - Mrs Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer)! A brutal cat-and-mouse chase ensues throughout the entire camp, with Alice left to rely on her wits and nerve to survive this bloody Friday the 13th!
[Watching Alice run away]
Mrs. Voorhees: [to herself in a high voice] Kill her, Mommy! Kill her! Don't let her get away, Mommy! Don't let her live!
[normal voice]
Mrs. Voorhees: I won't, Jason. I won't!
Top and Above: Alice (Adrienne King) heads the new camp counselors; Brenda, Ned, Marcie, Jack and Bill (Laurie Bartram, Mark Nelson, Jeannine Taylor, Kevin Bacon, and Harry Crosby).
Having mostly directed family films and sexploitation comedies, mainstream success still eluded producer/director Sean S. Cunningham. Then in 1977, Cunningham produced Wes Craven's 1972 directorial debut The Last House on the Left and began to see the box office potential of horror movies. Later in 1978, John carpenter's Halloween was released to huge popularity, and Cunningham was determined to capitalize on the films success with his own horror film. Cunningham approached former novelist/playwright Victor Miller (the writer of one of his earlier films, the low-budget rip-off of The Bad News Bears titled Here Come the Tigers) to write the screenplay. Initially Miller delighted in inventing a serial killer who turned out to be somebody's mother, a murderer whose only motivation was her love for her child. "I took motherhood and turned it on its head and I think that was great fun. Mrs. Voorhees was the mother I'd always wanted—a mother who would have killed for her kids." Miller wrote the script, then titled Long Night at Camp Blood, in two weeks, before turning the screenplay over to Cunningham who had his own ideas for a new title - Friday the 13th.
Casting was done by Julie Hughes and Barry Moss of TNI Casting, a New York-based casting agency well-known and respected in the theater community in New York, with Friday the 13th being their first horror film. With Cunningham looking for "good-looking kids who you might see in a Pepsi commercial" , many of the actors were stage brats drawn to the auditions based upon the stellar reputations of the casting directors (the most famous of these actors was Kevin Bacon, who had been in his first film, Animal House, six months prior, but had, to his surprise, returned right back to the life of a work-a-day actor - but he was the only one they auditioned for the part of Jack Burrell). The leading role of Alice was set up as an open casting call as a publicity stunt used to attract more attention to the film. Among those auditioned was actress Adrienne King, who heard about the auditions from her friend who worked as an assistant to Hughes and Moss. King actually auditioned for the roles of Brenda, Marcie, and Annie before being cast in the lead as Alice Hardy. Surprisingly, King at first did not want to be in the film, because of the graphic violence in it, but she soon changed her mind. With King cast in the role of lead heroine, Laurie Bartram was hired to play Brenda, with Kevin Bacon, Mark Nelson and Jeannine Taylor, who had known each other prior to the film, were cast as Jack, Ned, and Marcie respectively.
Worried that someone else owned the rights to the title and wanting to avoid potential lawsuits, Cunningham thought it would be best to find out immediately. He commissioned a New York advertising agency to develop his concept of the Friday the 13th logo, which consisted of big block letters bursting through a pane of glass, and paid to have a full page ad placed in Variety over the Fourth of July Weekend of 1979. The publicity worked, as the financiers behind Together (1971) and The Last House on the Left (1972) contacted Cunningham and offered to cover the entire cost of the proposed $500,000 dollar budget!
Casting was done by Julie Hughes and Barry Moss of TNI Casting, a New York-based casting agency well-known and respected in the theater community in New York, with Friday the 13th being their first horror film. With Cunningham looking for "good-looking kids who you might see in a Pepsi commercial" , many of the actors were stage brats drawn to the auditions based upon the stellar reputations of the casting directors (the most famous of these actors was Kevin Bacon, who had been in his first film, Animal House, six months prior, but had, to his surprise, returned right back to the life of a work-a-day actor - but he was the only one they auditioned for the part of Jack Burrell). The leading role of Alice was set up as an open casting call as a publicity stunt used to attract more attention to the film. Among those auditioned was actress Adrienne King, who heard about the auditions from her friend who worked as an assistant to Hughes and Moss. King actually auditioned for the roles of Brenda, Marcie, and Annie before being cast in the lead as Alice Hardy. Surprisingly, King at first did not want to be in the film, because of the graphic violence in it, but she soon changed her mind. With King cast in the role of lead heroine, Laurie Bartram was hired to play Brenda, with Kevin Bacon, Mark Nelson and Jeannine Taylor, who had known each other prior to the film, were cast as Jack, Ned, and Marcie respectively.
TRIVIA: Composer Harry Manfredini has said that contrary to popular belief, the famous "Chi, chi, chi; ha, ha, ha" in the film's score is actually "Ki, ki, ki; ma, ma, ma". It is meant to resemble Jason's voice saying "Kill, kill, kill; mom, mom, mom" in Mrs. Voorhees's mind. It was inspired by the scene in which Pamela Voorhees suffers from schizophrenia and chants, "Get her, mommy! Kill her!" Manfredini created the effect by speaking the syllables "ki" and "ma" into a microphone running through a delay effect.
Top: The vengeful - and psychotic - Mrs Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer);
Above: The infamous finale scene where Alice is attacked on the lake by the risen Jason (Ari Lehman).
Academy Award winning actress Estelle Parsons was initially asked to portray the film's killer, Mrs. Voorhees, but eventually declined, with her agent citing that the film was too violent, and did not know what kind of actress would play such a part. After also considering Louise Lasser, Dorothy Malone, and Shelly Winters, Hughes and Moss sent a copy of the script to Betsy Palmer, in hopes that she would accept the part. Eventually Palmer agreed to star in the film, with a 10-day schedule and recieving one thousand dollars per day. Even though Friday the 13th would be her first film since starring in The Last Angry Man in 1959, Palmer would later state that if it were not for the fact that she was in desperate need of a new car, she would never have appeared in "[this] piece of shit". Nevertheless, Palmer, a method actress gave Mrs. Voorhees a detailed backstory. "Being an actress who uses the Stanislavsky method, I always try to find details about my character. With Pamela... I began with a class ring that I remember reading in the script that she'd worn. Starting with that, I traced Pamela back to my own high school days in the early 1940s. So it's 1944, a very conservative time, and Pamela has a steady boyfriend. They have sex—which is very bad of course—and Pamela soon gets pregnant with Jason. The father takes off and when Pamela tells her parents, they disown her because having... babies out of wedlock isn't something that good girls do. I think she took Jason and raised him the best she could, but he turned out to be a very strange boy. [She took] lots of odd jobs and one of those jobs was as a cook at a summer camp. Then Jason drowns and her whole world collapses. What were the counselors doing instead of watching Jason? They were having sex, which is the way that she got into trouble. From that point on, Pamela became very psychotic and puritanical in her attitudes as she was determined to kill all of the immoral camp counselors."
Production began on 4 September 1979 on location at a working Boy Scout camp, Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, near Hardwick, New Jersey - the filmmakers eventually gaining approval to film at the camp after giving a "sizeable" donation to the Boy Scouts of America. Interestingly, Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco is still in use today, and the camp has a wall of Friday the 13th paraphernalia to honor that the movie was set there. Because the camp was closed during filming, and situated in the deep New Jersey woods, the cast and crew didn't see much outside interference. While most of the cast and crew stayed at local hotels during the filming, some of the most loyal cast and crew members, including special make-up effects artists Tom Savini and Taso N. Stavrakis, stayed at the actual camp site. During the evenings, they had Savini's Betamax VCR and only a couple of movies (Barbarella (1968) and Marathon Man (1976)) on videotape to keep themselves entertained, so each night they would watch one of these movies (to this day, Savini says he can recite those movies by heart!). In fact, the scene with the snake in the cabin was not in the original script, and was an idea from Savini after an experience in his own cabin during filming. Even the snake in the scene was real - including its on-screen death.
Production began on 4 September 1979 on location at a working Boy Scout camp, Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, near Hardwick, New Jersey - the filmmakers eventually gaining approval to film at the camp after giving a "sizeable" donation to the Boy Scouts of America. Interestingly, Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco is still in use today, and the camp has a wall of Friday the 13th paraphernalia to honor that the movie was set there. Because the camp was closed during filming, and situated in the deep New Jersey woods, the cast and crew didn't see much outside interference. While most of the cast and crew stayed at local hotels during the filming, some of the most loyal cast and crew members, including special make-up effects artists Tom Savini and Taso N. Stavrakis, stayed at the actual camp site. During the evenings, they had Savini's Betamax VCR and only a couple of movies (Barbarella (1968) and Marathon Man (1976)) on videotape to keep themselves entertained, so each night they would watch one of these movies (to this day, Savini says he can recite those movies by heart!). In fact, the scene with the snake in the cabin was not in the original script, and was an idea from Savini after an experience in his own cabin during filming. Even the snake in the scene was real - including its on-screen death.
[last lines]
Alice: The boy. Is he dead, too?
Tierney: Who?
Alice: The boy. Jason.
Tierney: Jason?
Alice: In the lake, the one... the one who attacked me. The one who pulled me underneath the water.
Tierney: Ma'am, we didn't find any boy.
[Alice is bewildered]
Alice: Then... he's still there.
Top and Above: Special make-up effects designer Tom Savini adds the finishing touches to Ari Lehman's Jason make-up for his scene with actress Adrienne King.
King and Palmer reportedly got extremely physical during their fight scenes. Having worked on-stage for years, Palmer was used to really striking her co-stars with a cupped hand along the jawline to achieve the scene, and actually slapped King hard across the face during one of their on-screen fights. King was initally shocked at being struck, and Cunningham had to quickly tell Palmer about faking the blows and cheating with camera angles. Harry Crosby was also injured during filming when the bloody eye make-up used for his scene where his character Bill is discovered impaled to the door with arrows, got into his eye, burning his corneas and causing him excruciating pain. For one of the opening death scenes, Palmer had just arrived into town when those scenes were about to be filmed, but was not in the physical shape necessary to chase Robbi Morgan around the woods - unlike Morgan, whose training as an acrobat assisted her in these scenes, as her character was required to leap out of a moving Jeep when she discovers that Mrs. Voorhees does not intend to take her to the camp. For that scene, Palmer was subbed by Taso N. Stavrakis. Stavrakis also stood in for Palmer for the final decapitation scene. In the slow motion shot, Stavrakis had his head under Mrs Voorhees jumper (appearing headless) and raised his hands. Palmer later laughingly recalled the scene, stating "I don't have hairy knuckles!". The idea of Jason appearing at the end of the film was initially not used in the original script; however Miller, Savini, and uncredited screenwriter Ron Kurz all claim credit for thinking of it. for his part, Savini stated that "The whole reason for the cliffhanger at the end was I had just seen Carrie, so we thought that we need a 'chair jumper' like that, and I said, 'let's bring in Jason'". Cunningham originally wanted to cast his son Noel Cunningham as Jason, but his wife Susan E. Cunningham wouldn't let him do this. Ultimately, 14-year old actor Ari Lehman - who had previously worked with Cunningham on Manny's Orphans - was cast as the young Jason, making him the first actor to portray the soon-to-be-legendary mass murderer. Miller initially wrote Jason as a normal-looking child, but the crew behind the film decided he needed to be deformed. Miller explained Jason was not meant to be a creature from the "Black Lagoon" in his script, and scripted Jason as a mentally disabled young boy; it was Savini who made Jason deformed. At one point, Palmer was so taken aback by Jason's appearance, she asked savini who he was supposed to be. Savini proudly responded, "That's your son, jason - he's a mongaloid!"
Paramount Pictures later bought Friday the 13th's distribution rights for $1.5 million, after seeing a screening of the film, and subsequently spent another $500,000 in advertisements. Friday the 13th opened theatrically on 9 May 1980 across the United States, ultimately expanding its release to 1,100 theaters after taking almost $6 million at box office in it's opening weekend. Earning nearly $40 million at the domestic market, Friday the 13th was the 18th highest-grossing film that year, facing stiff horror film competition from such high-profile releases as The Shining, Dressed To Kill, The Fog and Prom Night. The film also received moderate to favorable reviews from critics - with one very big exception; Gene Siskel. In his review, Siskel wrote that producer/director Cunningham was "one of the most despicable creatures ever to infest the movie business" and published the address for Charles Bluhdorn, the chairman of the board of Gulf+Western, which owned Paramount, as well as Betsy Palmer's home city and encouraged fellow detractors to write to them and express their contempt for the film. Siskel went even further and spent an entire episode Sneak Previews - which he co-hosted with fellow famed movie critic Roger Ebert - berating the film (and other slasher films of the time) because they felt it would make audiences root for the killer. Amazingly enough, Siskel's constant rants towards movie only encouraged hard-core horror fans around the country to see the movie (!) and Friday the 13th has since become a cult slasher classic, spawning a hugely successful horror franchise that has spanned 38-years, 12 films, multiple spin-offs (including comics, graphic novels, and one television series), and introduced one of horrors most iconic villains - Jason Voorhees!
For his death scene, Kevin Bacon had to crouch under the bed and insert his head through a hole in the mattress. Then, a latex neck and chest appliance were attached to give the appearance that he was actually lying down. Getting the set-up right took several hours, and Bacon had to stay in that uncomfortable position the entire time. For the bloody final moment, Tom Savini - also under the bed - would plunge the arrow up and through the fake neck, while his assistant-also under the bed-operated a pump that would make the fake blood flow up through the appliance. To further complicate things, the crew needed someone to stand in for the killer's hand as it held Bacon's head down, and they settled on still photographer Richard Feury. So, after several hours of set-up, and latex building and planning, it was finally time to shoot the scene, and when the moment of truth came, the hose for the blood pump disconnected. Knowing that he basically only had one take (otherwise they'd have to build a new latex appliance and set everything up again), Taso N. Stavrakis grabbed the hose and blew into it until blood flowed out, saving the scene. "I had to think quickly, so I just grabbed the hose and blew like crazy which, thankfully, caused a serendipitous arterial blood spray," Stavrakis said. "The blood didn't taste that bad either."
Paramount Pictures later bought Friday the 13th's distribution rights for $1.5 million, after seeing a screening of the film, and subsequently spent another $500,000 in advertisements. Friday the 13th opened theatrically on 9 May 1980 across the United States, ultimately expanding its release to 1,100 theaters after taking almost $6 million at box office in it's opening weekend. Earning nearly $40 million at the domestic market, Friday the 13th was the 18th highest-grossing film that year, facing stiff horror film competition from such high-profile releases as The Shining, Dressed To Kill, The Fog and Prom Night. The film also received moderate to favorable reviews from critics - with one very big exception; Gene Siskel. In his review, Siskel wrote that producer/director Cunningham was "one of the most despicable creatures ever to infest the movie business" and published the address for Charles Bluhdorn, the chairman of the board of Gulf+Western, which owned Paramount, as well as Betsy Palmer's home city and encouraged fellow detractors to write to them and express their contempt for the film. Siskel went even further and spent an entire episode Sneak Previews - which he co-hosted with fellow famed movie critic Roger Ebert - berating the film (and other slasher films of the time) because they felt it would make audiences root for the killer. Amazingly enough, Siskel's constant rants towards movie only encouraged hard-core horror fans around the country to see the movie (!) and Friday the 13th has since become a cult slasher classic, spawning a hugely successful horror franchise that has spanned 38-years, 12 films, multiple spin-offs (including comics, graphic novels, and one television series), and introduced one of horrors most iconic villains - Jason Voorhees!
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 59%
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