AMY STEEL:
I remember one night Tom McBride had his face all made up for his death scene. He had all these wires on his head, and he couldn't eat dinner—he had to eat out of a straw. And others would have slashes in their heads. Seeing your friends hung upside down with gaping wounds... it got creepy. I was always sort of living in this zone of fear.
RUSSELL TODD:
The only scary part was going home at night from the actual lake location to the cabins. There was a long road with bushes on both sides, and the crew would be in the bushes going, "Kill, kill, kill!"
DENNIS MURPHY:
We rented production vans for the shoot from local car dealerships, and we would bring the trucks back just soaked in dirt. They were trashed. They even tried to arrest one of the P.A.s for damaging the vehicles. Then, one of the camera P.A.s drove a truck right into the lake. I just thought, "Well, there go $250,000 worth of Panavision cameras." Luckily the cameras and film were fine and nothing actually got wet. But it was close.
Cliff Cudney also lived in New Jersey at the time, and he had come up to the set with these trailers that were towing motorcycles. One day, after we finished shooting one night, he and Kirstin Baker and I went out to breakfast and back, and rode the bikes. I yelled to Cliff, "Hey, Cliff, I want to see a $500 stunt!" So he looks at Kirsten and says, "Can you drive a motorcycle?" She says, "Yeah." And we had just gotten on a straight part of the road after a bunch of hills. So Cliff stands up on the bike, climbs over her, then pushes her forward—going 50 miles an hour—and realizes that she can't drive a motorcycle. I still can't believe no one got hurt! But it was indicative of the whole shoot.
CLIFF CUDNEY:
To this day, every time I see Dennis, he says to me, "I owe you $500."
PETER STEIN:
It was all fun for a while, but eventually there was a crew revolt. They put us up in these cabins that didn't have heat, and it was October in Connecticut. So everybody got together and said, "This is not acceptable anymore. We want heat!" And they finally put us up in hotels.
CLIFF CUDNEY:
We actually shot Part 2 at an all-girls' camp, and these cabins were basically wide open—they all had cathedral-ceiling things with open eaves. So Steve Daskawicz and I went to the grip trucks and got a whole roll of that heavy-duty plastic and made tents inside the house. Then we went down and bought electric heaters. We had a living room and a bar and a little kitchenette. Then it caught on, and everyone started putting plastic inside their shacks—we turned the camp into giant cabins made of Saran Wrap.
STEVE DASKAWICZ:
One day Cliff and I went into town to get a toaster oven and a hot plate, because we had decided to turn our cabin into a house. We even sealed off the whole cabin with plastic to shield ourselves from the cold. So we go into town to K-Mart, and I say to Cliff, as a joke, "You buy the stuff and I'll get the toaster oven. And I bet you I could walk right out of here with it and not get caught." So as I'm walking out, one of the girls who worked there—a very attractive girl—says, "You neglected to do one thing—pay for that." So I say to her, "I'm the guy playing Jason in Friday the 13th Part 2 up at the camp. If you come up there tonight, I'll let you watch. And then I'll get you laid. What do you think?" She did. She let me steal the toaster oven. Then she came up that night and I had sex with her.
CARL FULLERTON:
When you're a kid, summer camps are great. For an adult, they're awful. It was battlefield conditions. It is amazing that there is still a nice sense of fun in the picture, because everyone went through hell during the shooting. It was very physically demanding on both sides of the camera. The kicker was that I started the film in late July, and they gave me six weeks to do the whole thing—and that includes shooting. I had some preliminary conversations with Steve Miner in his office, figuring out how we would do the various murder effects. Often in the script it would just say, "so-and-so gets a hammer through their head." Steve kept telling me that it was imperative that the effects be good enough to shoot tight close-ups on them, including Jason's makeup—things they couldn't do on the first film, despite Tom Savini's marvelous work. I was also speaking constantly with Dick Smith. Being my mentor at that time—and I'd like to say friend—if I had a concern or an insecurity, I felt free to call him and discuss things with him. It was a race to beat the clock, and we were making a pittance. I had very dedicated people, all very young men who were willing to work ungodly hours and come back the next day and do it again. It was very much a hurry-up-let's-get-it-done project.
Part 2's famed "shish-ke-bob" murder of Jeff (Bill Randolph) and Sandra (Marta Kober) required the film's most complicated effect. "We used a false-bottomed bed," explains makeup effects designer Carl Fullerton. "Marta laid underneath with her head coming up through a hole, then Bill laid on top with his neck, head and arms exposed. The mid-portion of his back was a dummy. And in would go the spear."
LAUREN-MARIE TAYLOR:
Carl Fullerton was great. All you had to do was ask him one question, and he would show you his whole collection of fake heads.
STEVE MINER:
On Friday the 13th, Tom Savini had taken over the editing studio in my house in Connecticut to build all of his stuff. I was with him all of the time, so I got a pretty good working knowledge of how all the various tricks work. With my background as an editor, I was able to easily visualize the effects sequences. In fact, I storyboarded very carefully how the effects scenes would work and how one shot would cover another. That enabled me to tell Carl to build only exactly what we needed. It was very enjoyable, like putting all the pieces together of a giant puzzle.
RON KURZ:
Credit where credit is due—although his name is nowhere on it, Part 2 was a true collaboration between Phil Scuderi and myself. We worked extremely close together on it, meeting in his office, or at lunch or dinner three or four times a week. Phil was a creative force in his own right, often coming up with wild scenes, usually acted out in fancy Boston restaurants to the mortification of his secretary-cum-mistress, who would accompany us. All the dialogue, the character development, the pacing and shaping that any screenplay requires was mine, but Phil would come up with the most outrageous sequences, and from where I haven't a clue.
A film has been mentioned as an inspiration for Part 2 called Twitch of the Death Nerve. I'd never seen it nor heard of it. Perhaps Phil had. He was not above lifting anything from anywhere. In Part 2, the scene of Ginny urinating under the bed is his, as is the "shish-ke-bob" scene where Sandra and Jeff get speared, as well as the Mark character being disabled and in a wheelchair and meeting his end tumbling down the stairs. In those cases I merely had to finesse them into my screenplay, usually with some character development and thought-out dialogue to make them work. Then portions of the completed script were sent out to Frank Mancuso, Sr. from time to time. I never received any complaints.
JACK MARKS:
This may sound odd, but the contrast of the taking of human life that was the subject matter of the film, and the absolutely bucolic setting— it was the epitome of an Indian summer, the trees and the lake were beautiful—made a great impression on me. Obviously the film was fictitious and overblown. And it was a pretty solitary experience for me. It's going too far to say it made me appreciate life more, but the contrast was very stark, and it certainly resonated with me.
PETER STEIN:
The subject matter was difficult for me. I couldn't believe Russell Todd's throat cutting scene—it was amazingly gory! But every film has its own aesthetic and artistic rewards, so in that way it was a wonderful experience. I tried to make it look as scary as possible. We had to get the glint off the machete just right, and get the actor to move his head precisely to get the effect. I think for horror fans, it was fabulous.
CARL FULLERTON:
In the script, Scott gets caught in an animal trap and is then hung upside-down and gets his throat out, and it had to be done in extreme closeup. The normal way to do this type of e
ffect with a pre-slit appliance, lightly tacked together, that the actor rips open by jerking his head back in conjunction with the passing of the knife, and then pumping blood. The complicated part here was that we couldn't do it that way since the actor was hanging upside-down. So we shot it with the knife already on his neck, pulled the blade across, then pumped the blood. It's an editing trick Hitchcock used; you swear you see the knife cut in, but you don't.
"People still say to me that, because my death is so prolonged and that she sees it coming, it's just incredibly creepy and sad," says Lauren-Marie Taylor.
RUSSELL TODD:
My last day on set was to shoot my death scene. The day before, I called my mother, and she said, "Russell, don't you think that's a little odd? Are you sure this is legitimate?" She thought it was a snuff film. I said, "Mom, this is Paramount. They're not going to kill me!"
It was very hard effect to shoot. They lit it for a long time first then brought me in as late as possible to hang me upside down. They tied my legs together with rope and had this little support thing that would lift me up. And what's funny is that if you really look at the scene, the machete is backwards—it's the dull side of the blade that slits my throat. They had cast my neck and did a foam latex appliance with tubing, running down my chest and up my legs to a guy in the tree pumping the blood above me. I was told, as the blade came to me, to look down and lean my head back—the slit was already there as he went across it, so I would just open it up by leaning back and the blood would start flowing. Then I remember feeling it on my face, and Steve Miner yelling: "Move more! More flail!" And they kept rolling and rolling and rolling until the blood was literally seeping into my eyes. I was trying to keep going because I wasn't sure how much they were going to use—it stung. I was just worried, am I over-reacting? Underreacting? I could only base it on what I had seen on TV and in movies before. I guess this must be what it's like to die?
RICHARD FEURY:
I never heard Steve yell at the actors. I thought Sean Cunningham was first class that way on the first one, and so was Steve on Part 2. But the one time I ever remember Steve getting stressed out was when Russell was hanging upside down and gets his throat slashed. I'll never forget that. The blood wasn't flowing, and Steve's yelling, "We need more blood! More blood! More blood! More blood!" And I was just standing there thinking, "Man, I can't do many more of these things..."
JACK MARKS:
In my climactic death scene, where I'm hit on the head with a rubber hammer, I was wondering if I'd ever survive. They made a mask of my face and put some blood bags in the back of my head, hidden in my hair. The hammer was supposed to have shattered my skull, and all this stuff would pour out. But while the hammer was rubber, it was still painful. And then, in the end it didn't even make its way into the film. I kept telling people that my ex-wife probably wrote that scene.
STEVE MINER:
The murder of Tom McBride is probably the best in Part 2, and my favorite. I had a special styrofoam mask built to cover Tom's face and catch the machete, which we constructed out of balsa wood. Then, with a quick reverse cut, it seems like the murder actually happens onscreen. Part of the thrill of the Friday films is that the audience knows that the guy or gal is going to get it, but the tension builds up as they're trying to guess when and from where it's going to come. So the build to the machete killing is nice because it really throws the audience off. I still think it's really cleverly conceived and executed.
CARL FULLERTON:
Steve and I really wanted the audience to see the logical, physical impact of such a blow without using a dummy head. It is my opinion that a dummy never looks right because you need to see some movement. And there just wasn't enough time to do a really nice articulated head.
Steve did a marvelous job developing that idea and staging it. Once you see the machete in Tom's head, it's an old trick of making the audience think that they're watching more than they are. It worked because we cut to the reverse angle, which is a tight shot of a prop machete, imbedded in his face and contoured to his face, with an appliance over top and rigged for blood. But it looked so terrific we didn't even need to pump any.
It was very tense to shoot, because when we were trying to finish it, the sun was beginning to come up. There were some undertones among the crew that they wouldn't get the shot done before dawn. Plus I was complaining, because Tom McBride's eyebrows had to be made by hand—there was no way that I wanted to do that again if I could avoid it. As it turned out, we were able to get the take right before dawn.
CLIFF CUDNEY:
The wheelchair stunt was the greatest accomplishment for me on the film. You had to have a shot of a guy in the chair who needs to go downhill on a long flight of stairs, and outdoors. And he has to be backwards. And, of course, it was raining, too. We couldn't afford an articulated dummy or a remote-control dummy, so we used a real live dummy instead—a stuntman named Tony Farantino doubled Tom McBride and did the stunt. It took me a couple of weeks to design a custom wheelchair to go down those steps, and it was a hell of a challenge. Tony had to be able to lean back in the wheelchair with his whole upper torso and then go down the steps, but if you lean down too far, the chair would flip by itself. So the wheelchair was attached to a cable that was attached to a pulley system I developed, to run it all the way down the steps. We also had to put boards down both sides of the stairway so there was a solid platform for the wheelchair's wheels to roll on.
We did it once and it was perfect, beautiful. Then Steve Miner wanted to know if it could be done a little faster. So Tony's like, "Hell, yes! No problem!" But man, Tony didn't realize—and it was my fault for not explaining it to him—that when the wheelchair got to the end of the cable there was going to be a hell of a sudden stop. And the lake was right there! So me and another guy on my crew were in the bushes down at the bottom, and here comes Tony blazing down these steps. And just as Tony got to the end of the cable, we both jumped out and body slammed him to drive him off into the bushes. Because if he had hit the end of that cable, it would have flipped him and broken his neck. It worked out great!
"Being scared is a relatively easy emotion to reach for," laughs actress Amy Steel. " It's not that hard to imagine somebody coming after you with a knife!"
DENNIS MURPHY:
I actually think the best kill we came up with was the spear in the back. It was the epitome of a horror film. Pretty sick shit!
RON KURZ:
For the shish kabob scene, there was no dark conscious effort that I was ever aware of, or discussed between Phil Scuderi and myself, to link sex with death. It just simply worked.
CARL FULLERTON:
The most complicated effect I did in the film was the scene in which two naked lovers are skewered with a spear. As far as I know, there is no other film in which this was done as we did it, with the camera looking down from above. Tom Savini did a similar effect in the first film, a really marvelous piece of work with Kevin Bacon, but that was with a blade coming up from below, which is a bit easier to engineer. Steve Miner also wanted the spear to come down into the bodies, then pull back out. Everyone thought I'd have to use at least one dummy, but again my response to that is that a dummy always looks like a dummy. And we're talking about naked bodies here. We beat our brains out on this one, and wound up using a real bed and cut a hole in it. The girl lies under the bed, with her neck and head coming up through the hole. The guy is also lying under the bed, right on top of her, with his neck, head and arms coming up through the hole. Then from his shoulder blades all the way down to beyond his buttocks, is a dummy portion, a huge body appliance made out of several materials. And in would go the spear. Or so it was supposed to...
PETER STEIN:
So, we were all lit and ready to shoot, and the spear had to be put through that hole, which was about a three-inch circle. And Carl didn't want an actor or a stuntman to do that, because he might mess it up. So they run through it to get the timing, and then they go, "Okay! One, two,
three..." And Carl takes the spear and he jams it and... he missed the hole. It took about six hours to clean it up before we could try again. That was a very tense moment for a low-budget shoot.
BILL RANDOLPH:
It was painful. It took close to six hours to set the first fake back, and I couldn't get out of position. No bathroom breaks, no food, no nothing. The sound guy was great, he gave me some kind of muscle relaxer. We had a good crew and it was a lot of fun. And Carl Fullerton had some great ideas—it was fun to watch all the technical stuff. Though iIt becomes so antiseptic, it doesn't scare you at all.
LAUREN-MARIE TAYLOR:
People still say to me that, because my death is so prolonged, and that Vickie sees it coming, it's just incredibly creepy and sad. I had to act to nothing. Steve Miner was off-camera, silently counting the beats. Telling me, "OK, Jason's sliced your leg. Now, blood is gushing out through the leg. Now, he's stabbing you in the stomach." Then I bite into that thing with the cherry cough syrup in it, and then I die. But strangely enough, that was the one scene in the entire film where I didn't feel stupid shooting it. Because I can scream. I grew up in the Bronx—I've had a knife held at my neck just for a bicycle. I remember thinking, "This is what I was hired for, to scream." And sure enough, after that scene was done, Steve Miner and all the crew turned to each other and said, "Yep, she can scream!"
CARL FULLERTON:
I originally saw Vickie's death scene as a progression. Jason has her trapped and is teasing her, waving his knife around before he kills her. What we see in the finished film is that he cuts into her thigh through her pants. Dick Smith taught me the technique, which is an appliance in the shape of a knife cut glued onto her leg and lined up with a pre-determined cut line in the fabric—then, as the knife passes over, you rip the fabric and pull open the appliance with a monofilament and pump blood. This was to be followed by a cut on her bare arm, a direct hit—done in the same way, and which I prepared—but we just did not have enough time to shoot it. We had to get so much in the can each day, constantly battling for the light, and Steve Miner chose to sacrifice it.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 18
