Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition)
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Robbi, Tom and I hung out a lot. We even had shirts made up for each of us. Robbi's read "Mini Maniac," Tom's read "Major Maniac," and mine read "Minor Maniac." We were three maniacs, and we had a great time.
ADRIENNE KING:
Sean had a lot to do with the effectiveness of the murder sequences. He didn't want anyone going over the top. He also made it into a real situation. It wasn't like this was a phony camp with big lights and stuff. It got spooky. Sean allowed that it didn't take all that much for you to put yourself in a position where you can create a whole mental scenario, that makes it possible that these things are really happening to you. For instance, after I wake up, and I go off looking for Bill in the woods, I knew that Harry Crosby was going to be on the back of the door, but I didn't know what he was doing there or how he was going to look. Sean purposely did not let me see him beforehand. So when I close the door to the generator shed and see poor Bill, with the arrow through his eye, that was a real scream. From the gut. And it was the one and only take. Sean was able to keep it pure.
It was the same for the scene when Brenda flies through the window—or, rather, Tom Savini draped in her nightgown and wrapped up in ropes. I was so freaked because Sean had set it up so well. I didn't know exactly when she was going to come flying through the window. Sean said to me during that scene, "Think of Laurie as your best friend." He talked me through it. He also let me take that whole entire scene myself, as I'm crawling across the floor to get to the other side of the room and get out the door. It was one shot, one take. I remember filming that scene more than most others in the film because I really felt like I was there—I just totally got into the fact that this was my friend. And you'll notice that I'm so into it that I didn't realize that as I'm crawling across the floor, I caught my slicker on the oven handle. I sort of did myself in there, because at that point it was established that I would be running the rest of the night, in the rain, without the slicker on. But we weren't gonna do it over because Sean got what he wanted, and I didn't want to do it over, either, because it felt so real.
Marcie gets the ax.
TOM SAVINI:
Brenda's death was another that wasn't shown. I don't know if I suggested it, or if Taso suggested it, or somebody else came up with the idea of Brenda's body being thrown through the window as a scare. It was supposed to be a "chair jumper"—one of those sudden scares when someone is walking around the cabin and suddenly something comes flying through from out of frame. I also felt there should be some kind of a payoff involving Brenda, because we didn't see her killed. So when she is thrown through the window, that is actually me in her costume and a wig—they didn't even have any stunt people, but I had just come off Dawn of the Dead where I did stunts. I just jumped through the window—it was breakaway glass—and landed on the floor, and then Sean just cut to a shot of the real Laurie Bartram.
VICTOR MILLER:
I remember in an early draft, I had Alice find all of the victim's bodies hanging from the trees. It was sort of like Czechoslovakian Easter eggs. But that eventually got cut down, for various reasons, and now she just finds one body, of Steve Christy.
ROBBI MORGAN:
I only worked on the film a couple of days. Then I got called back to "play dead" for the scene when Adrienne King finds me in the jeep. So I got another night out of it. And it was freaky, because you could hear people screaming and stuff across the lake while you were shooting.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
The signature creative death of Friday the 13th is, I suppose, the murder with Kevin Bacon and the arrow. And the best example of something that could not have been done or even remotely considered without Tom Savini being there, telling us how to do it. Now everybody knows how to do it, but at the time we had no idea how we were gonna pull it off.
TOM SAVINI:
We cast Kevin, and did a fake body. He's actually under the bed with his head coming up through and the fake body was lying in the bed. We put the same shirt on the fake body, and we had him wear a chain that we also put on the fake body. As long as the real head is in there, you kind of accept the fake neck. I always try to do that—keep the real person in it as much as possible. So cutting from the real Kevin with the shirt and the necklace, to the fake body with the shirt and the necklace, you believed that was Kevin. And whatever I did to the neck is not going hurt the actor because his body's not there. So we just drove the arrow in and pumped blood out of it. And it looked great.
RICHARD FEURY:
They were shooting it in a cabin one door down from mine. The bed had to be raised up on apple boxes. It was taking a long time to get ready, and because Tom had to do his thing, he needed somebody to push the arrow up from below and through the neck appliance. There was some sort of channel for it. So Sean said to me, "You mind getting under the bed?" So it's my hand on Kevin's forehead, and me pushing the arrow through his fake neck.
TOM SAVINI:
The arrow was attached to an ice bag that was glued to the plastic support of the neck. It was a sealed compartment that we pumped blood into, so the action of me pushing the arrow through Kevin's neck was also pushing against the ice bag and forcing the blood to come out And right off-camera, Sean Cunningham was screaming, "More blood!" Only there was none.
MARK NELSON:
I remember watching them shoot Kevin's death scene, and it was so funny. There was a pump that was supposed to spray blood as the arrow came up through his chest, and they could only shoot it once because the arrow would break the skin on the mold of his chest and that was it. Only the suction pump that was going to spray the blood stopped after the camera started. But Taso saw it and jumped in, and saved the day.
TASO STAVRAKIS:
So there we are, all cramped under the bed. And my knees were getting wet because the tube came off by mistake and I was pumping blood all over us. So I grabbed the tube and started blowing with all my might. And that's why, in the finished film, what you see coming out of Kevin's neck are two or three spurts of arterial spray. It was terrific. Then, after we got the shot, I spit out all the blood and ran down to the lake and jumped in, still hacking, trying to get that shit out of my mouth.
KEVIN BACON:
It was absolutely awful. I was crouching under the bed for hours, with my head sticking out through a hole. But, I did have a classic horror movie death, which is: you fuck the girl, you smoke the joint, you're dead. So that was good.
VICTOR MILLER:
Over the years, there has been some criticism of the plausibility of the murder methods in Friday the 13th. To tell you the truth, I do not know if it is possible to get a hunting arrow up through a mattress, through the springs, and up through the neck of a person, all without any ability to have any sort of back swing from underneath the bed. But if I had to take time out and show the killer getting out their block and tackle and a wrench, I mean god, yes, it is all impossible!
"The special effects were fascinating," says Jeannine Taylor of filming the death scene of her character Marcie. "I had a lot of fun watching the special effects being created. But oddly enough, I had no sense of how gory the end product would be. I didn't even think about it—the process was just so interesting!"
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I think the reason that gag worked so well is because of that misdirection. Your whole focus was somewhere else. Two people, in what you think is a loving, sexually charged environment. But what the people in bed don't know is that there is a dead body above them, and we don't know what's going to happen. All our focus is up. She leaves, and we're saying, "Oh my goodness, he is going to discover that the body is above!" The last thing we expect is that something is going to happen from below.
TOM SAVINI:
It's a very primitive thing, but it's all about a mindset. It's the same mindset that I teach the students here at my school: "What do I need to see to make me believe that what I'm seeing is really happening?" Then you create the pieces. And in the case of a movie, the pieces are the shots. I ne
ed a shot of the actor clean. Then, a shot of the threat of the knife or the threat of the ax. Show that first, because then the audience knows there's going to be a meeting of that weapon and the actor. And finally a shot of the impact, of that meeting. That's what the audience can't wait for. It's almost like an exhibit from your favorite artist.
So that's what we did in Friday the 13th, we created the pieces—the fake head with the real axe, the fake knife to the real neck. And it really is a magic trick. A magician makes you look here while he's pulling flowers out of his butt there. He's misdirected you, and he has mechanical devices that you're not aware of. It's the same thing we do in the movies. To fool you. That's really what Friday the 13th was about, not just gore—magic tricks that are fooling you into believing that what your seeing is really happening.
As production on Friday the 13th neared completion through long days and even longer nights, relations became increasingly strained between Sean Cunningham, Victor Miller and Steve Miner on one side, and Phil Scuderi, Steve Minasian and Robert Barsamian, the film's Boston-based financial backers, on the other. A situation that had grown even more contentious after Scuderi brought in screenwriter Ron Kurz to incorporate additional "comic relief" into Miller's shooting script. The creative and financial tensions that had started to simmer during production of Last House on the Left some eight years earlier were about to reach a boiling point.
RICHARD FEURY:
Sean and Steve got everyone together one day not far into the shoot and said they were having money problems, asking would the crew consider, in lieu of salary, having a fraction of a point in the film? We all said "No." Because we all thought this movie was going to go absolutely nowhere. But to be fair to Sean and Steve, they had to deal with this throughout the picture. And I had worked on some really skanky low-budget things in New York, where we'd all run to the bank to cash our checks and there would be no funds. It was never like that on this—I would mail the check home, and after the first one or two cleared I stopped worrying about it. Of course, after the movie came out and was a big hit, I'd run into people who worked on it and we'd say, "Oh, shit, maybe we should have taken the points!"
ADRIENNE KING:
Everyone else was complaining about the money situation. But Sean was very organized and kept everyone calm. No matter what was going on, the actors didn't know about it. I'm sure they were having money problems left and right, but Sean would just say, "It's going to be a big hit!" For us, we knew going in that everyone was on minimum scale, so that was the deal. I was just thrilled to be there.
Not that money was never a factor. At the beginning of the shoot, the wardrobe person had bought me a pair of boots and they were too small. So being that we were on a tight budget, she started walking around in my boots with three pairs of socks on, trying to get my boot to fit my foot. I put them on and I did my first scene with my tight boots, and afterwards I said to Sean, "I have to do a lot of running in this film and I really need boots that fit." He goes, "Jeez, okay, when you go back to New York this weekend go find a pair of boots. Just make sure they're on sale."
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Georgetown Productions was just another name for Hallmark. It sounds so low-rent, but they'd tell me, "I'll give you $25,000 on Friday." They would say they would write a check and then they wouldn't, and then it wouldn't arrive, and then you can't make payrolls and you're trying to pay the laboratories and stuff like that. They were theater owners, and cash would come in on the weekends, and they would have a limited number of places where they could spend the money. It was the squeaky wheel thing—there was a lot of that going on. Every week it was always a battle. You had to fight so hard just to pay the bills, which is a fight that was completely separate from how hard it is to make any movie, even when you have the money.
What poor Steve Miner had to go through—I couldn't have done it without him. And Steve didn't even want to do this picture at all. I had to beg him to do it. He said that he would work as the Line Producer and the Unit Production Manager and make all that stuff happen. He had to keep dealing with these people day after day until we finally got to the end of it.
GEORGE MANSOUR:
Sean Cunningham got a better deal on Together than he would ever have gotten from anybody else. And he would never have had the opportunity to make Last House on the Left and Friday the 13th if Hallmark hadn't bought Together. Sure, we paid him very little money, and we made a lot of money on those films. But no one else would have invested that kind of publicity and prints and attention. If Sean had made Friday the 13th for Sony Pictures now, he would have been fucked—the majors would have written off everything and he would have had nothing. He got a substantial amount of money out of Friday the 13th. And after that Sean never made a decent movie, or one that made any money.
However, I will say this about Phil and Steve and Bob—I won't characterize them anything as more than shady, without mentioning any other kind of word. They would lie about things they didn't need to lie about, and they liked to portray themselves as worse than they were. There was a certain frisson for them about being outlaws. But they were nice people underneath it all. All movie companies are tough—just try dealing with Harvey Weinstein. At least Phil and Steve and Robert, after everything was said and done, they were okay. Maybe they'd fuck Universal, but if you were a little guy, they'd be less inclined to fuck you. They'd only fuck you halfway.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I don't resent all the money that Scuderi and Minasian made. Nobody else had that kind of faith in me and wrote those kinds of checks. They took an enormous risk. And as a result, they made an enormous amount of money. Okay, fair enough. The problems that they caused me are problems that some people would love to have. But it was always a push-pull relationship. It was always an incredible ordeal to extract the money to make the movies. It was never, ever easy. But to give them full credit, they were people who, when I said I was going to go do something, they'd believe me and I'd go do it. Phil trusted me—I think Phil trusted me. But I can't complain. If it hadn't been for them, I would have never made Friday the 13th.
"The 'Strip Monopoly' scene came out of nowhere. We totally laughed about it," says Adrienne King. " And it became the unwritten rule of the movie—because my clothes don't come off, I got to live!"
Sean Cunningham wanted a surprise for Friday the 13th's third act revelation of its heretofore unseen villain, Mrs. Voorhees. It was highly unlikely that the production could land an A-list actress such as a Meryl Streep or Shirley MacLaine, let alone afford her on such a low-budget film. In his search for the soon-to-be-crowned "Queen of the Slashers," casting director Barry Moss would look to the past, finding an unlikely match in Betsy Palmer, a veteran of wholesome 1960s network television. Palmer's arrival on set during its final 10 days of shooting added a touch of class to the film. Fully in command of her Method stage training, Palmer would invigorate the production with her witty and worldly style, battle to the death with its plucky leading lady and provide the film with its most memorably gruesome piece de resistance.
VICTOR MILLER:
I learned from Halloween that you had to start with some evil that had happened before the movie begins, so there is kind of that Gothic sense, a historical evil lurking around that had never quite been avenged. The idea for Mrs. Voorhees came to me about the first or second week that I was working, because we had the summer camp and I needed that prior evil. Once I had that her kid had drowned, it all sort of came together fairly quickly. We were also using the Donald Pleasence formula, which means that you have a maximum of a few shooting days with whoever your name player is. But I think we made a more interesting choice by saying that our Donald Pleasence is actually going to be the killer. That made it much more fun, and it saved us an incredible amount of money.
BARRY MOSS:
Originally, Sean wanted Estelle Parsons, who had won an Oscar for Bonnie & Clyde. But Estelle was smart enough to want several points in the film. So I thought, "H
ow great would it be if, when we look out the window at who we think is the killer, and then here comes the wonderful, sweet Betsy Palmer." To have it totally be someone you would never, ever suspect.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Betsy Palmer had worked in television on the morning talk shows. And she was squeaky clean, like a completely scrubbed up Katie Couric. As a person, and certainly as a personality, Betsy was perceived to be somebody that would never get her hands dirty, who would never do a thing wrong. I was hoping to fool a few people, and I think we did fool a few people, initially. Although that kind of reverse casting is, I think, a little self-conscious.
BETSY PALMER, "Mrs. Voorhees":
At the time of Friday the 13th, I was on Broadway doing Same Time Next Year and living in Connecticut. One night I was driving home from the theatre and my dear old Mercedes broke down. So I said to the universe, "I need a new car." This was on a Tuesday or something, and then my agent called on Friday. He said, "How would you like to do a movie?" And I said "Great! I haven't done a movie since the 1960s." And he said, "Well, it's 10 days' work and they'll give you $1,000 a day." And I had already picked out the car I wanted, and it was a little VW Sirocco, and it was going to be about $9,999.50. Really, it was that close. So I thought, great, I have myself a car. Then he said, "Now, I have to tell you... it's a horror film." I asked my agent to send me the script anyway. I read it and thought, "What a piece of shit." Just dumb, dumb, dumb. I just could not envision this thing.
Then I thought about the car again. And that nobody is going to see this movie, ever. It's going to come, it's going to go, I will have my little Sirocco, and everything will be fine. So I called him back and I said, "Great, I'll do it!"
BILL FREDA:
Betsy was beautiful and when she came in I was surprised, because she had aged. I remember her when I was a kid and she was really good-looking. She always created this society act—she was from the upper-crust of New York City, and all the stuff she did on TV reflected that. It was weird. It's like having Rosie O'Donnell be in your horror movie. She was a little out of place for me. But I think she really wanted to do it, although I don't know if she knew what she was getting into.