RON KURZ:
Everyone will, of course, have their own version of events, but here's mine. In Victor Miller's script Jason was merely a normal kid who had drowned one year, followed by two camp counselors being killed the next year. Everything centered on the unseen Mrs. Voorhees and her revenge when the camp is about to reopen. In rewriting, I came up with the idea of making Jason "different"—a mongoloid—and having him appear out of the lake in the shocker scene at the end, still in the form in which he drowned. A scene that, I've been told more than once, made the movie.
TOM SAVINI:
I can't say, in all honestly, that I completely remember. Jason wasn't deformed in the screenplay. Maybe it was my idea that instead of a boy, why not a deformed kid? There's a little more pathos in that. If he's mentally challenged then obviously he can't take care of himself. That is why he died, because he wasn't being taken care of. And it seems to me that would provide the motivation for the mother to wipe everybody out.
When I designed the look of Jason, I kept thinking of this guy that I saw in my neighborhood when I was a kid. His name was Bill Bailey—a derelict and a drunk. And he was misshapen. He had one eye and one ear that were lower than the other, like Quasimodo. Originally we were thinking Jason was gonna have hair, but it just didn't look quite right. So we just left him bald as if he was like a hydrocephalic, mongoloid pinhead or something. I also gave him more of a dome head for the final make-up. And we just went with that—we didn't do any tests or mockups at all. And that's been the look of Jason ever since.
STEVE MINER:
I remember there was some controversy after the movie came out in Fangoria magazine about the use of the term "mongoloid." That word was used to describe Jason to the press, but not to belittle or make fun of handicapped people—only to describe someone who might be horribly deformed and at the same time might be mentally incapable of taking care of himself. Tom Savini might have just latched onto the word mongoloid and made him look that way. But I'm not going to pass the buck.
BETSY PALMER:
Taso said to me, "Why don't you look at these Polaroids that we've been taking of the special effects that we've been doing?" And I come upon this one little photograph. I didn't have my glasses on because I usually wear contact lenses, but I said, "Wait a minute! Who's this?" Taso said, "That's your son." I say, "Why does he look so strange?" And he says, "Well, we figured that he looked too normal, so we made him a mongoloid." And I said, "What!? That wasn't in the script!"
The staging of Alice's discovery of Mrs. Voorhees many victims was originally conceptualized to be a more elaborate series of reveals by screenwriter Victor Miller. "I remember in an early draft, I had Alice find all of the victim's bodies hanging from the trees," recalls Miller. "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."
VICTOR MILLER:
Betsy is absolutely correct. Time plays tricks on me, but I think it would be fair to say that I may have intimated that Jason was not a normal kid, that maybe he was slow. But I think it was when Tom and Sean got together that they cooked up this grotesque mask for the character, which was fine, because Tom's ideas are very seductive. If you think about it, the only time Jason actually appears in the movie, when you actually see his face, it is a fantasy, so he could be anything you wanted him to be. But certainly when I let go of the screenplay, Jason was just a slow kid who probably needed more help than your average camper.
RON KURZ:
I remember being out to dinner in Boston with Phil and his secretary and I told him of my idea to change the Jason character. He then got up without a word and left the table, going into the lobby where we saw him pacing around. His secretary looked at me and said, "Wow, you got him good with that one." After that, the ending lake scene became Phil's obsession. From what I understood, he was all over Sean to do it right, Phil all but directing it himself by some accounts I've heard. But let me make one thing crystal clear—the idea of making Jason "different" was mine, the scene of him leaping out of the lake at the end was mine. The ending was mine. I conceived it, I wrote it. Phil, having the power over Sean, carried it through onto film.
Yet despite my contribution to the original film I've never gotten any formal credit, although I'm told some sequels state "based upon characters created by Victor Miller and Ron Kurz." It's not something I'm particularly proud of, nor something I have ever trumpeted, but Jason, as we know him, is my creation.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
There was no particular reason that Jason looked the way he did. It was just something that Tom Savini and Steve Miner and I came up with. Make him look weird and not normal. Whether it was Victor Miller or Phil Scuderi's original idea, I really don't remember. Anyway, what scenes would you like credit for? You can have it. Who gives a shit? It was really Victor Miller, Steve Miner, Tom Savini and me. We were the four people who, for all intents and purposes, were sitting around the table every day trying to figure out how to make the movie.
ARI LEHMAN, "Jason Voorhees":
When I walked into the casting room they handed me sides for a different character, Jack. I was 13 years old. I remember they said the character goes off to make out with another counselor, and I was like, "Wow, this is great! I really want to be in this movie!" But then Sean walked in and said, "No, no, no! We want Ari to play this role." I ended up not even having to say a word for the part. Sean just took one look at me and said, "You're the right size, you've got it!"
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Jason was originally meant to be played by my eleven year-old son, Noel. He thought it would be fun, but when my wife found out she was having no part of it. Forget about missing school, there was damn near ice on the lake and he would have had to get in and stay under the water. So we wound up hiring Ari Lehman, who had been in Manny's Orphans.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
I went through a lot of therapy after that. I think about it now, and man, I could have been Jason! I would have gotten on the cover of Fangoria. Chick magnet! Can you imagine all the tail I could get with that story?
ARI LEHMAN:
I had the idea that I would psych myself up to become Jason. You could tell Sean was getting a kick out of this kid wanting to know how he should be playing Jason. Everybody else on the set just laughed. I was probably taking the role of Jason much more seriously than anybody else on the film was.
ADRIENNE KING:
The first time we shot the final scene, it wasn't winter yet and the water was still warm. I don't think they had more than one camera shooting and they didn't get what they needed. Then the second time was about three weeks later, and the water was colder. And they had two cameras going. It still didn't work. And the last time we did it, it was three weeks after the end of the shoot. This is November in upstate New Jersey. You'll notice the leaves have changed color and are actually starting to fall off the trees. And this time they had three cameras, and one was in slow motion. Finally, Sean finally got everything he needed.
It was tough. I remember that morning, before we started, there was a little snow falling and—I'll never forget this—over the radio a weatherman says, "...And it's twenty-eight degrees." Everybody stopped. "Twenty-eight degrees! Are you sure the lake isn't frozen?" It was a good-sized lake, but still!
ARI LEHMAN:
By the third time we shot the ending, we just had this energy. We were like, "Yeah, we're going to knock it out of the park with this one!" Every time we had to shoot the scene, I would have to reach down into the lake and rub mud all over myself. All I had on was a jockstrap. In the shot, it looks like Adrienne is out there in the middle of the lake in 30 feet of water. Barry Abrams framed it in such a way where all you can see is the water. We had to wait for it to calm so I could come up and out and the illusion of great force would created. And there could be no bubbles on the surface. So I would have to go under and count to 10. And there was buoyancy to the prosthet
ics. It was like holding a beach ball underwater. So that is why I came up with the momentum I did.
A game of cat and mouse. "We spent two nights doing stuff that I thought we were going to get done in two hours," says director Sean Cunningham. "It was hard, but Betsy and Adrienne were both such good sports and they never complained once."
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I was never sure the ending was going to work and I didn't quite know how to do it. Phil thought that the disgusting creature from the lake was going to be great. But his emphasis was on how much seaweed you could put on the monster. My belief was that if you were going to make the gag work, it wasn't about the seaweed or whatever, but getting the surprise right.
We accomplished it in three ways. It had to be idyllically staged, with Adrienne in the canoe. Second, there is a shot where you see the police coming to the rescue, just to create that sense of safety. And third, Harry Manfredini figured out a piece of music that just mellowed you out, so when Jason comes up out of the bottom of the lake, he comes up at a point musically where it's so unexpected. Then all hell breaks loose.
HARRY MANFREDINI:
If you listen closely at the beginning of the movie when the girl who's on her way to the camp, Annie, goes into the local convenience store, there's a country and western song playing on the radio. Originally, when the film was being edited, they had a Dolly Parton song on the soundtrack called "Fly Away Little Bluebird." Well, we couldn't afford Dolly Parton, obviously, so I sat down and wrote this song called "Sail Away Tiny Sparrow." A typical country song, about a girl who got married when she was in high school and her husband's an asshole. We also used it in the diner scene later on in the film, too. Then again at the end. That gentle music before Jason comes out of the water, that's Mrs. Voorhees' theme song. It literally becomes the musical catalyst that drives him up.
ADRIENNE KING:
After we wrapped, two weeks later we did the final scene up in Connecticut in some kind of little hospital set. Sean said, "Let's wrap it up somehow." That was the last scene we shot, and the last time I saw anybody before the screening.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I insisted that we couldn't end the film on that scene with Jason coming out of the water. Everybody thinks the movie ended there. But there's an epilogue, and without it, the movie doesn't make any sense. And in writing the epilogue I went through the hammers of hell. As it turns out it was like four sentences, but that was four out of 400 that we tried. How do you explain Alice's dream? I think those two scenes back to back, in terms of the overall presentation of Friday the 13th, were the most important.
RONN CARROLL:
When we shot the final scene, and I say, "Ma'am, we didn't find any boy," to me, even at the time, that meant here comes number two. I'm thinking, "Mmm-hmm!" I asked Sean how to play it, and he said, "Draw yourself over to the camera here." And you know that when a director moves his camera in close, it's an obvious setup. I almost said the line tongue-in-cheek. Because I had a feeling that they didn't want it to end here. I would laugh about it with my friends after the film came out: "I knew there was going to be a sequel!"
BETSY PALMER:
A few weeks after we wrapped, Sean called me up and said, "Betsy, we need you back to do some insert shots. You're going to be Jason's voice." So we went over to a university in Bridgeport, Connecticut, because there was a big campus with a lawn. It was already wintertime, so when they were shooting the close-ups of my mouth, my breath was coming out like steam. I said, "Get me some ice cubes." So there I stood, with ice cubes in my mouth, talking in a high voice to my dead son, Jason. And that's the last thing that we shot for the film.
With production on Friday the 13th wrapped by the end of November of 1979, Sean Cunningham and Bill Freda would spend the remaining months leading up to the film's planned Spring 1980 theatrical release ensconced in an editing studio—leaving little time to complete one of the most crucial aspects of any horror film: its score. Yet, despite cripplingly meager resources and a scant few weeks to write and record almost 90 minutes worth of music, Harry Manfredini would exceed all of Sean Cunningham's expectations. Unusual for a low-budget film of its period, much less a slasher movie, Manfredini eschewed the era's trendy (and now dated) synthesizers in favor of real instruments, including a full string section, and incorporated a variety of eerie motifs that recalled—but not copied—the sublime simplicity of such seminal scores as JAWS and Psycho. But most memorably, Manfredini created a thematic identity for the character of Jason Voorhees that remains, to this day, six of the most iconic and well-known sonic syllables in cinematic history.
"We jokingly called it the 'Ballet du Machete,'" says Adrienne King of her climactic fight scene with Betsy Palmer. "We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. And then when we shot it, it was like gangbusters!"
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Harry Manfredini had worked on the two kids films with me. I don't even remember how I met him, but Steve Miner and I both always loved him. He's just a good guy. Energetic and funny, a very strong creative collaborator and a very accomplished musician. And at the time of Friday the 13th he was still trying to earn a living in New Jersey, making music in his basement. I just thought he would be a terrific asset for the movie—and I was right. I was very fortunate to have worked with him.
Harry really knows timing. His Friday score is very mathematical. From here to here, this point to that point, there's a certain amount of time. And if you break that down into a rhythm pattern, like a metronome, then there are a certain amount of beats. He didn't write music that merely worked—it was measured so it happened in time. That's what scoring is all about.
HARRY MANFREDINI:
I wrote the entire score in a couple of weeks, maybe three. The recording took much longer, because there were so few players—oddly enough, 13—and so little room, as it was recorded in a friend's basement studio in New Jersey. The original budget was five or six thousand dollars, and I could only do the strings for two sessions, and then the brass later. All the rest of the instruments were played one at a time by me. So I would have to go through the whole score numerous times to add each part. I was also was not a big fan of electronic instruments at the time. I wanted to stay orchestral. So things that you might think were synthesized were me just making sounds. I spent a lot of time scraping and hammering on the piano of the poor studio owner, and playing screeching sounds on an Irish tin whistle.
When I do a film, I always try to create a world where the score lives. And that's what I tried to do with Friday the 13th. I learned about being limited but really concise, and using the material in many different ways. And sometimes you write your best when you don't know what you're doing. You just let it happen—when you're more in control of it, it doesn't come through. In Friday the 13th there are just two chords in the whole picture, colors that relate to various parts of the story. It's very intense in the sense that it all comes out of itself. Every single note can be explained from these two chords. And there are three cues in Friday the 13th—there's stalk, there's tension and there's attack. And then there's the one red herring, where you always fake it. That's always bigger. If you're really watching the picture, you'll notice that if the score is really rabble-rousing you and pushing you, chances are the visual payoff is not going to be there. And when we really want to scare you, the music will stop.
BETSY PALMER:
I first saw Friday the 13th at a screening at the Paramount Theater. The other kids from the film were there, everybody brought their families and we were all eager to see it. And I remember that Sean was a good 45 minutes late bringing the print, because he was putting in that "Ch-ch-ch, ha-ha-ha" sound effect in at the last minute. That was a brilliant move—I really think that's one of the main things that sold the picture.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
The "Jason sound," I remember the first time I heard it. Harry is an equipment junkie, and he had something called an echo reverb machine. I don't know what Harry was saying,
but it is like guttural sounds, hard sounds. The two words that he used were "kill" and "mother." "Ki, ki, ki. Ma, ma, ma." If he had tried "dog" and "peach" it wouldn't have had the same flair. But I still don't know exactly why it works. The peculiarity of this kind of stuff is that you don't know until you put it up with the movie and see how it actually plays in context. I think there was something about the repetition of it.
HARRY MANFREDINI:
In most other horror films the music is all over the place, just to try and manipulate the audience, and for any reason. Sean and I made a direct choice on Friday The 13th to make the music represent the stalker. I was looking for a sound, a signature for a killer who does not appear in the movie until reel eight or something. That's a long time, so it was essential to establish something that brought the villain into the movie from the beginning without ever showing him—or her. You didn't see the shark in JAWS, but when you heard that motif, it was the shark. It's the same thing with old Jason, or in this case, actually, Mrs. Voorhees. The audience has to be aware of what's going on, and the music was the thing that said, "Uh-oh, the killer's there."
In his wisdom, Sean asked if we could have a chorus. I told him we couldn't afford one—we could barely afford what we were doing! This was shoestring, crazy filmmaking. So I was listening to a piece by Krzysztof Penderecki, who's a very famous contemporary Polish composer. I study a lot of classical music, because you get a lot of great ideas. And the piece had a huge chorus that was singing very striking pronunciations. Consequently, all of the consonant sounds were quite sharp, almost like a "ki ki ki!" And in the movie, there's a scene towards the end where there's a close-up on Mrs Voorhees' mouth. It goes between the sound of Jason saying, "Kill her mommy!," then the mother's voice, and back and forth. So I got the idea of taking the "ki" from "kill" and the "ma" from "mommy," but spoke them very harshly, distinctly and rhythmically into a microphone and run them through this echo thing. So every time there was the perspective of the stalker, I put that into the score. And that is how it came to be, and how we hear it today.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 11
