ADRIENNE KING:
We did have a proper premiere, a very small opening at the Loews on Broadway. But it was a huge theater, and packed. And before the showing was over there was a line around the corner for the next showing. I was amazed at how successful it became the very first night. I know it opened up at number one for the weekend. It was a love fest for Friday the 13th. The fans just adored it and they kept on coming back. I remember opening Backstage and it showed Friday the 13th above Kramer vs. Kramer on the charts.
After that it was overwhelming. I would get stopped all the time on the subway. It was just the most amazing thing that could have happened to me. It has been the highlight of my career, since it was the only time it has happened so far.
RON KURZ:
Everyone with their name on it was becoming rich overnight. Sean, down in Westport, traded his station wagon for a new Mercedes. I was at lunch with Phil Scuderi after the first weekend grosses were in and I've never seen a happier man in my life.
RONN CARROLL:
I remember going with a friend of mine and his wife to see an early screening of Friday the 13th. I remarked after it to my friend who was sitting next to me, "At least nobody will ever see this thing!" Then after it came out, everybody in New York would ask me, "Hey, man, I saw you in Friday the 13th, what did you think?" And I would just say, "Well, you know, it is what it is." Maybe it was naïve on my part. I thought it was just a week's work, and was going to be one of those movies that opens on Friday and closes Sunday.
The most famous promotional photograph taken from Friday the 13th was actually a fluke. "We were eating in the dining hall at this Boy Scout camp," remembers unit photographer Richard Feury. "It was basically open-air, so it got very cold, and they set up sheets of plastic with space heaters inside. I said to Betsy Palmer, 'Why don't you just lean into that plastic and scream?' She did, and the photo wound up in Time Magazine. And it's really funny, because it's not from any scene in the movie."
MARK NELSON:
I think none of us thought anything would happen with it. We thought it was a low-budget shocker that would probably go straight to video. We were completely stunned, at least I was, to see the commercial campaign that Paramount built for it, which probably cost more than the entire production.
I saw it on opening night. I went to the Plaza on 44th Street in New York City, which is probably a 1,500 seat theater, and it was packed. I remember Barry Moss was coming up the escalator as we were going down, and he said, "There was a heart attack at the first show where it hit." It was huge.
ROBBI MORGAN:
I'm such a scaredy-cat. Shooting the movie was fine, but then I went to see the movie in a theatre. I hadn't been a part of any of the scenes other than mine, and I didn't even get the whole script. So with music and not knowing what was going to happen—I was scared to death. I had nightmares after it.
I must admit that the success of the movie was really fantastic. Oh, man! My brother, who lived in L.A., called me and said, "Robbie, it's in Variety! The numbers it's doing are amazing. It's a big hit!" There I was doing Barnum & Bailey, and across the street on 44th Street, Friday the 13th is sold out.
KEVIN BACON:
Whatever steps forward I have taken, I was always able to take a few back and sabotage it. I've been through so many ups and downs. But I feel pretty good from a career standpoint. I was never the fresh new face, and I'm happy about that. Friday the 13th—I think that success gave me the confidence I needed at that time, after the lull following Animal House. And it was a great conversation piece. For a while I was known as "the guy that got it with an arrow through the neck, making love to a girl in a camp bunk."
RON MILLKIE:
The first time I saw the film was at the first cast and crew screening. And when my scene came up, nobody laughed. I was really worried. Then I saw it again after it opened, with my wife on 42nd Street, which in those days was all grindhouses and cheap theatres. And it was a very ethnic audience—mostly black people—and they were roaring. They thought it was hilarious.
I thought the movie itself was quite well done. It scared the crap out of me and, of course, we all jumped out of our seats during the famous closing scene. I guess that was the draw—that's why people went to see it, because they were so scared by that point and it was a total shock and a surprise.
TOM SAVINI:
I've done a lot of stage work where the reward is immediate—the applause, the laughter, the screaming. But a movie, you don't get your reward until a year later when the movie comes out. So I always go to the theater but I hardly watch the movie. I pick somebody in the audience and watch the evolution of their heart attack. And Friday the 13th was a great one to watch, I mean, my god—when Kevin Bacon's death scene came up, the reaction—the audience screamed at the top of their lungs. I remember staying in the lobby waiting to watch the people leave. Friday the 13th was a very rewarding film.
VICTOR MILLER:
I saw it with an audience in Milford, Connecticut, and it was absolutely terrifying. But the most interesting moment was the end. Half the audience got up and headed toward the exit. When Jason came out of the water, the half that were still seated were trying to see over the people who were leaving. Everyone screamed. It was absolutely the most wonderfully chilling sound I have ever heard in my life.
HARRY MANFREDINI:
One of my favorite things to do with Sean Cunningham was to sit in the front row of the theater, and we'd slide down in our chairs, turn around, face the audience and watch them react. People would fly out of their seats, and Sean would scream, "I got 'em! I got 'em all!"
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
The dynamics of that ending scene have been copied any number of times and consequently, everybody says, "Oh, yeah, I know what you guys are up to. You can't fool me with that stuff anymore." But it was so much fun back then. I think that was probably the biggest scare I've ever seen in a movie theater. The only one that got me in a similar way is when Ridley Scott had the alien come out of John Hurt's stomach in ALIEN. Ours was great, but that was spectacular!
Composer Harry Manfredini. After three decades of requests and anticipation, fans of Friday the 13th and Manfredini were at last rewarded for their patience with La-La Land Records' Friday the 13th Parts I-VI limited edition soundtrack collection (right). For the first time, Manfredini's original scores for the first six Friday the 13th films were presented uncut and remastered from newly-recovered audio elements. Spread across six CDs and including a 40-page full-color booklet with extensive liner notes, the box—limited, appropriately enough, to 1,300 copies—quickly sold out.
BETSY PALMER:
When I first went to see Friday the 13th in a theater, I went in Connecticut where I lived and I brought my daughter. And it was Mother's Day, so I said, "Well, let's go see this damn thing." And there's nobody in this movie house except for six young boys. No audience. Well, the film finishes, nobody screams, nobody yells, nobody's frightened, nobody laughed. And I said to Melissa, "I told you it was going to be a turkey. Nobody's ever going to see this movie."
Then after it began to become such a big hit, we went over to the Paramount on Hollywood Boulevard and it's just filled with kids. They were crazy for it! They had found it by then. And there were three black girls sitting in front of me. A friend that was with me leans over and whispers, "You've got to tap them on the shoulder!" So the lights came up, we were all getting ready to leave, and as the girl stands up I poke her on the shoulder, and she turns around and says, "Oh my God! It's her! It's her!" And they all started screaming and running out of the theater.
ADRIENNE KING:
I was living in a little studio apartment in New York on 56th Street. The man who owned the building, his son-in-law was a theatre and movie nut. And once I got wind that the son had power in the system, I said, "I'd really, really like to get a one-bedroom apartment in the building you own up on 82nd Street and Madison Avenue." And he goes, "Yeah, right. You're an actress.
Forget about it." Still, whenever a show of mine would open, I'd send him something. Then a year and a half or so went by and I said to him, "I'm really serious. How do I get on the list for that apartment?" And he says, "You don't. Someone has to die—there's a waiting list for years." But then he stopped, and said. "But when you star in a movie, I'll get you an apartment at 1100 Madison."
Then I did Friday the 13th. I invited him to the screening—the one where Paramount first bought the film. And after, he came out to me in the lobby and just said, "8L." I couldn't believe it! A rent-controlled building, 1,200 square feet and it looked out over Central Park! It's an actor's dream in New York. A Cinderella story. I still dream about that apartment. It was my dowry. That's my Friday the 13th bonus.
The critics hated Friday the 13th. It was not merely reviewed, it was eviscerated. But while poor notices were nothing new for low-budget exploitation films, what came as a surprise was the virulent and personal nature of the attacks.
The most vocal of the film's detractors was the late Gene Siskel, then still a local critic for the Chicago Tribune who, in his May 8th, 1980 review, took the unprecedented step of not only revealing the identity of the film's killer to potential moviegoers, but also calling Sean Cunningham "one of the most despicable creatures ever to infest the movie business." Siskel's review went on to urge those just as outraged as he was by Friday the 13th to write letters to both Paramount Pictures and Betsy Palmer to express their contempt and disgust for them and their film. Perhaps as further incentive to get his readers on his anti-Friday bandwagon, Siskel even went so far as to publish Ms. Palmer's home address. Siskel, along with his co-critic Roger Ebert, then devoted the entire October 23, 1980 episode of the pair's weekly, nationally syndicated television program Sneak Previews to what they called the "gruesome and despicable" new genre of the "splatter" film. During the show's 24 minutes, a disgusted and disgruntled Ebert accused Friday the 13th and its ilk of "expressing a hatred of women," and decried the phenomenon of "audiences cheering the killers on." The pair concluded the program with an outright call for censorship, with a smug Siskel remarking, "After all, bullfights were outlawed, too!"
Joining in the fray were the vast majority of national critics, among them The Hollywood Reporter's Ron Pennington, who lambasted the film as "a sick and sickening low-budget feature that's blatant exploitation of the lowest order." Archer Winsten complained in The New York Times that while "the performers are a good-looking set of youngsters, the dialogue and continuity are barely up to the level of competence." And echoing those who felt cheated by the out-of-the-blue third-act reveal of the film's killer, Linda Gross lamented in the Los Angeles Times that "Cunningham has evidently no respect for a good murder mystery...the villain is as much a surprise as a sunburn after a July 4th beach party." The few critics who did bestow any virtues to Friday the 13th did so begrudgingly. Janet Maslin admitted that "...Cunningham's brand of horror is reasonably suspenseful, though none too new," while Rob Edelman in Films in Review at least acknowledged that "Friday the 13th is almost unbearably scary," and was made for an audience "who like to be terrified out of their wits as they munch popcorn and convince themselves that they are only watching a movie."
But critical brickbats did little to quell audience interest. By the time the Catholic League of Decency officially added Friday the 13th to its list of condemned motion pictures on June 12, 1980, such publicity only guaranteed its status as the sleeper hit of the year. The film that had been proclaimed the most dangerous of the summer by moral watchdogs was now the one every kid in America wanted to see.
TONY TIMPONE, Editor, Fangoria Magazine:
When Friday the 13th first came out in 1980, I was 17 years old and it was the same summer as The Shining. All my friends were arguing about which horror movie we should see that weekend, and I was kind of taking the highbrow approach and saying Stanley Kubrick. The other group was like, "No, let's go see Friday the 13th." So I dragged some of the group to see The Shining, and the others went to see Friday the 13th. We came out of The Shining bored stiff, but the people who went to see Friday the 13th couldn't stop talking about it. And that's all they talked about in the schoolyard the next day—they got off on all of the horrible murders and the cast getting knocked off one by one. But the box office was the true test. Friday the 13th was the big hit, not The Shining. I think the public ruled on that one.
STEVE MINER:
The enjoyment with this kind of film is audience participation. The audience didn't even mind the dumb stuff, because they could talk back to it. They really stayed with the story. What does happen with a lot of these movies is that they have terrific ad campaigns but then don't deliver. I don't think that that was the case with Friday the 13th, because business continued strong for weeks and weeks. Practically all of the advertising money was spent during its first week of release, which means that its continued success was based on good word of mouth. I think a film like Friday the 13th is pure entertainment, like a rollercoaster ride is pure entertainment.
Adrienne King's photo album #1.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
It wasn't like I was creatively invested in Friday the 13th and then misunderstood. My personal delights lie with stories that are well told. Friday the 13th is just not a story. It seems like a story, but it's not—it doesn't have the integrity that good stories have. I was just trying to create a fun horror film, and people called me names because of it. Horror films don't get good reviews. Horror films, like several other genres but more than any of them, speak to your subconscious. And they are meant to be manipulative—if they aren't, they don't work. And people who write critical evaluations of movies characteristically resist anything that is not cerebral. They want the information to come in through the brain—more often than not, verbally—and they want to be able to filter it, and only then maybe it feels good. But if it comes through the eyes and goes to the guts and then bubbles up to the brain, then it's dangerous.
I knew that then, so I didn't need vindication. I was amused. When critics said the film was manipulative, it was a pejorative word, and one I considered a huge compliment.
ADRIENNE KING:
They called us "young and nubile." Do you think anyone my age read those things? It wasn't like I had this thing about being a serious actress, even though I did end up trying to train to be one after Friday the 13th. I had been doing this since I was a kid. I'd put in my time and I just felt like this was probably the best thing that could happen to me, fame-wise. I can't control what happens outside of that. I learned that. And it didn't matter anyway. The thing was huge.
BETSY PALMER:
There was that one critic, Ebert or Siskel, whatever his name was—I don't even know which one did it. He wrote in his review, "You write Betsy and tell her how awful it is that she should let us down this way, after being our girl next door all these years." It's so funny how they cannot delineate that you're not really who you are when you're playing these roles. Anyway, it was too late. It was out. What was I going to do?
VICTOR MILLER:
I had to be reminded of that Gene Siskel review because I had totally forgotten it. That was just unconscionable, the idea of printing somebody's address. Although at that point, I was just thinking, "Boy, the more publicity, the better!" And as a graduated Yaley, I was already used to people talking about how trashy I was. I was never fooling myself about what Friday the 13th was. It is a good show and we were building a rollercoaster—the best damn rollercoaster that we could. We just seemed to be the most visible one at that moment and we caught all of the flack.
STEVE MINER:
To be honest, my feeling is that the audience can usually imagine something much worse than you can show them if you lead them in the right direction. But critics don't understand this kind of movie. I think, at the time, you had to show some realistic violence in order to make the setup frightening. You can't scare people nowadays without showing some kind of gore. You don't necessarily have to dwell on
violence, however, to satisfy an audience. Still, I'm sure there will be people, especially critics, who still think we went overboard. But we couldn't worry about what the critics were going to say. If we made a movie to please the critics, we probably wouldn't have been doing justice to our audience.
Part of the backlash was also that less people were doing it. It was at the beginning of independent horror films like Halloween and Friday the 13th. They were much cheaper to make, much easier to get going. And there weren't that many film schools back then like there are now, filled with kids who are very smart and sophisticated.
Adrienne King's photo album #1.
TOM SAVINI:
Friday the 13th was the beginning of the splatter craze. But it was not that we were getting pleasure out of creating gore. We were getting pleasure out of fooling and scaring people. When I see something gory and I say, "Wow! That's beautiful!" it's because it was a magic trick that worked. I will look at the stuff exactly for what it is. It's a rubber head with glass eyes on remote control mechanisms. And the blood is Karo syrup.
When I'm in the movie theater, I realize that I'm springing this on objective, unaware people. And sometimes their reaction really surprises me. But that's why they're there, right? They pay their money to get scared, the same reason they go to an amusement park to get strapped into a machine that catapults them into the air and turns them upside down and makes them fly in loops.
WES CRAVEN:
I see Last House on the Left, in a way, as a protest film. There was an initial stage in horror cinema, during which Last House was made, where gore stood for everything that was hidden in society. Guts stood for issues that were being repressed, so the sight of a body being eviscerated was exhilarating to an audience, because they felt, "Thank God, it's finally out in the open and slopping around on the floor." But that gets very old very fast. I don't think Last House on the Left was really the progenitor of slasher movies. I was more interested in psychological underpinnings and irony, and I think Sean discovered after Last House that he was much more interested in being entertaining rather than assaultive. The violence in Friday the 13th was bizarre, but it wasn't real; it was goofy.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 13
