Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition)

by Peter M. Bracke

  TED WHITE:

  Mean little bastard! I swear, Corey was the meanest goddamn little kid I ever dealt with. That kid irritated the hell out of me. I wanted to just grab him and kick his ass so many times. I didn't like his mother either… she was way too spacey, didn't seem to give a shit.

  The first assistant director came to me and said, "You know what? That little shit is gonna be expecting you. You've gotta scare the hell out of him." So that's what I did. I waited a little longer than I was supposed to, and just when he thought I wasn't coming, I burst through, and grabbed him and shook him as hard as I could. Scared the living hell out of him!

  ERICH ANDERSON:

  Kimberly was such a trooper. If anyone had a right to complain, it was her. But she never really did. She never really lost it. Adrenaline keeps you going. For me, it was my first movie—I wasn't going to give up. And I don't know if it was because I didn't know enough to ask, or I was too dumb to remember to, but I didn't read the script cover to cover until after I got the job. It was only then that I realized that like the last 40 scenes take place in "Night—Rain." And this is in December! Plus, to maintain continuity, you have to be wet all the time. Kimberly and I were drenched through the entire thing. I remember a sprayer on me constantly, just hosing me down all the time.

  BARNEY COHEN:

  I think the scariest movie I ever saw was JAWS, but the creepiest movie I ever saw was ALIEN. Because when you left you just wanted to go home and take a bath or something. That's the kind of atmosphere that we tried to create with The Final Chapter. So we used the same device—we used water. And water is horrible for low-budget filmmaking. Not only do you have to pay for the rain machine, but after every take you've got to blow-dry the actors and give them fresh outfits, only to go back out in the rain and do it all over again. It's very, very time-consuming.

  I had written in the original script that it would start raining about halfway through the movie, and stay wet until the very end. Everybody said, "Oh, it's going to cost another million dollars to make it wet!" But Joe really fought for it, to his credit. His argument was that in the same way that the Nostromo in ALIEN drips water constantly, so should our Friday.

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  Particularly with the first Friday the 13th, it had a certain visual reality to it. The natural way the actors played their roles, and the way Adrienne King played the lead—you really felt for her and cared for her—you felt as if you were almost watching a quasi-documentary. And it was very unusual for a film like Friday the 13th to be in movie theatres. You saw slick Hollywood movies in movie theatres, you didn't see anything that looked like that, except maybe in the B-movie days of the 1950s. It made you lean forward and pay attention, because you were seeing something special, something more real and that defied a convention.

  I knew with The Final Chapter that it was too late to go back to that. I could only try to at least protect the moments that felt like the first film, to strive to protect that feeling, even though I couldn't retain that visual look. But we still wanted to show you something that you wouldn't normally see in your local theater. In other movies, you don't see a death scene like Jason's. You don't see a naked girl in a raft with a machete coming out of her back. You just didn't see the stuff that we did.

  ERICH ANDERSON:

  When I got the part, I didn't know anything about the mythology of the series. Culturally I wasn't in tune with what was going on. Casting director Pamela Basker said to me, "This is what happens. You won't know this until you see the movie with an audience, but it's all these dumb kids who are obsessed with sex, getting killed one by one. And when they die, the audience cheers. So you know what would be a good task for you, Erich? If when you die, nobody cheers." So that was how I approached the role from the beginning.

  Consequently, in my death scene, I thought it was the stupidest thing you could ever say in that situation: "He's killing me!" Come on! But it just seemed natural in the moment, and it also seemed horrible. Suddenly, it didn't make Jason such an iconic figure. If he's just slaughtering dumb kids that's one thing, but killing a guy who's trying to avenge the death of his sister and two other completely innocent people? I think Joe knew that, too, and it raised the rest of the film to an entirely new level of terror, because all that's left is Kimberly and the little kid.

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  Erich was an actor I didn't know before. I discovered him in casting. His was a very important character for me, mostly because of that one scene. I've read fan reviews that have attacked the moment where Rob is in the basement, and he's saying, "He's killing me! He's killing me!" They say it's silly. But it actually came out of something I read in the newspaper. A horrible story about a guy being stabbed repeatedly in a street in New York City. The guy was screaming, "Please stop hurting me, please stop killing me." And people could hear the attack, yet no one called the police. The story was about how tragic that was, and it is. But I focused on a different aspect, that he was speaking to the assailant as he was being murdered. That there they were in conversation—this horrible, shrill conversation.

  "It was really miserable conditions," says actress Kimberly Beck. "They'd wet me down before every take, and I'd have to run forever in the bitter cold. So it wasn't hard to use that anger to whack Jason over the head with a hammer."

  BARNEY COHEN:

  Kids having fun with these movies—that was a phenomenon that I hadn't seen before. Joe said to me, "I'd like to ratchet up the intelligence of this talking to the screen business. People usually talk to the screen because someone is doing something stupid, but here, let's give the audience two reasonable choices on the screen." That was typified by the scene after Rob is killed, where Trish can either run outside or back down into the basement. Both choices make sense, and both of them don't make sense, so what you have is a situation where some kids in the audience are yelling for one choice, and some kids are yelling for the other choice, and you have a debate going. Scenes like that were a lot of fun to construct. And I've always remembered that elsewhere in my career—to try to give the audience choices.

  JOEL GOODMAN:

  In a way, it's funny how, even back then, there was a conscious, self-referential thing going on. Which of course, with Scream, has become increasingly overt. But with the early Friday the 13th movies, there is just a little bit of it—they played out a formula and referenced other horror pictures of the time, and it is a little tongue-in-cheek, because at a certain point and on an intellectual level, it's silly. Yet on a visceral level, somehow there's a reason why it works

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  An extraordinary and rare thing had to happen in that scene, too. Trish knows, and we know, that Jason is in the house. In spite of this Rob goes down to get whatever it is he's dropped, and Jason attacks him. The horrible moment is that we've been setting Rob up as Trish's love interest, and now she's at the top of the stairs, and he's at the bottom. He's screaming, "He's killing me! He's killing me!" And she wants to assist but what can she do? It is a moment that is so scary—you'd want to save your boyfriend or your girlfriend, but you also want to save your own ass. Then we had her do an unusual thing. In most movies and even in real life, people run away. And she does run away, but she also feels guilty so then she comes back. For me, that was a really interesting moment dramatically, and for the characters. It manipulated the audience. They start screaming at her, "Don't go down there!" This is something I suggested had to be constructed at the initial screenplay stage, that we had to intentionally create this moment.

  ERICH ANDERSON:

  There's a shot in that scene where I have to pull my knife out of my boot. So every time we'd do another take, I had to put the knife back in my boot too. And I don't know what kind of idiot thing I was thinking, but I wanted it to look real, so I had a real knife. And because my hand was shaking so much from the cold, the last take we shot, I missed my boot and it went right into my ankle. But I didn't tell anybody until after we finished shooting, and I end
ed up with nine stitches in my ankle from the knife wound.

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  The hardest thing about that whole sequence was getting the shot where the dog jumps out the window—that was a nearly impossible thing to accomplish! And it had been a big issue. There was a giant struggle when the script was being written as to whether Jason just sort of grabbed the dog and tossed him out the window, or the dog saw something and jumped out the window on his own. As it is now in the film, it is ambiguous. There was also the question about whether we should have added a shot of the dog running off, that he's safe. But I wasn't afraid, in a movie where a bunch of teenagers are getting killed, to have a scene where a dog gets killed, too. I thought that was OK, while other people thought it wasn't a good thing to do. Eventually, we had a movie stunt dog—if there is such a thing—that could jump through a pane of glass. So the shot is in there.

  BARNEY COHEN:

  Fans have always asked me about the ending of The Final Chapter, when Tommy wears the bald cap and is telling Jason, "Remember, Jason, remember!" Well, what he is supposed to remember is the image of the actual Jason, in the water, from the first movie. I don't know why, it just seemed like the right thing to do. If you go back to the moment of death, it comes for Jason, too.

  One of the things I argued with Joe about was that it's no fun to kill a monster unless the monster understands his mortality. And so, at the end, one of the things that I wanted to do, that we couldn't do, was that Jason reaches out for Trish's breast. He doesn't actually touch it, but he's at a calm moment, and you can read that Jason is getting another idea here, that finally there's something better than killing. Jason has a thought in his head that isn't murderous, it's actually amorous. And it's at that moment that he can be killed. It was a softening of Jason, like that scene in Frankenstein with the little girl at the well. In that moment Jason is no longer a monster—he's almost human—and where his killing almost becomes sympathetic.

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  I originally wanted Corey Feldman to really shave his head for the climax, but his guardians were worried because the television pilot season was coming up and he wouldn't be able to get any roles in television if he was bald. I even said to Corey, "I'll shave my head if you shave your head, how's that?" He thought that was cool, but they still wouldn't let him do it.

  COREY FELDMAN:

  The most horrifying experience for me on the film was when we were doing the climactic scene. I was wearing this bald cap every day for like two weeks. And because of that, I got very, very ill—your body temperature rises when you cut off the circulation to your brain. I got sicker and sicker, temperature rising to a 101 or 102 degree fever. I remember dreading having to complete that final scene because it was so much work. I was so tired. I had black circles around my eyes from the makeup, but a lot of that was real. That shot where you see me killing Jason—that is really me thinking of Joe Zito, "Die! Die!"

  Top right: Makeup effects artist John Vulich (left) applies a touch-up to actor Erich Anderson during the filming of his character Rob's death scene. The grisly results provided an unexpectedly humorous antecedent for Anderson. "It was so cold and wet the night we filmed the scene where Jason kills me in the cellar. I had this old Air Force parka that my father gave me to wear, and I just put it on over my wet clothes because I was so tired and just wanted to get home. Then, here it is, six o'clock in the morning and my car starts behaving badly, and I get pulled over—with blood all over me. The look on that cop's face was priceless."

  TOM SAVINI:

  The script had Tommy Jarvis splitting Jason's head open with a machete. I didn't particularly want to do that for Jason's death, so I was trying to think of something better. I thought that Tommy, being an inventor and a special effects kid, perhaps he took a microwave oven apart. He got the shooter and put a reflector behind it, with a variable control on the voltage that goes from one to 10. Then, early in the film, when he's showing off his roomful of effects for Rob, he puts it on one and melts a toy soldier. Then, at the end, he could grab this thing and point it at Jason's head. He turns it up to 10 and cooks Jason's head from the inside, and it explodes. I had to sell this on the phone to the money guys. They said it was logical, but they wanted to stick to the Friday the 13th formula, which is killing naked teenagers in the woods with household implements. And I'm thinking, "Well, a microwave is a household implement!" But I guess it was too sci-fi for them.

  Then one day, one of my assistants, John Vulich, was goofing around in the shop and took a machete we had put in a zombie's head in Dawn of the Dead. He said, "Why don't we kill Jason with this?" So I thought, "Yeah, that's what we'll do. We'll have Tommy smack Jason in the head with a machete, do a reverse shot of the blade going in, and then go a step further—let's have Jason fall to his knees and slide down the blade." That's what we subsequently pitched to the producers, and that's what they decided to go with. And that, really, is the ultimate death now for Jason.

  Principal photography on Friday the 13th – The Final Chapter was completed in January 1984. Paramount Pictures had originally intended to open the film in October of that year, but after early footage was screened by an enthusiastic Frank Mancuso, Sr. and a window of opportunity presented itself in the studio's spring lineup, The Final Chapter suddenly had a new release date—a full six months ahead of schedule. Post-production would become a madcap marathon. During the process, the film would see a number of scenes hit the cutting room (which, much to the chagrin of its director, still show up regularly in television airings) and a retooled ending. There was also the matter of getting the film past the MPAA ratings board. As had become the norm for the series, Hollywood's watchdogs were only too happy to make the filmmakers' job as difficult as they could.

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  I was basically going into The Final Chapter with the studio telling me in advance, "We're just making another one and we don't quite believe in this, and we're going to throw it out there." It ended up being a very different experience than what the studio started out thinking. Frank Mancuso, Sr. came out and said, "Look, I believe you cannot hit this date, but we have a window of availability in April"—which is like six weeks away! "Now, you have to tell me whether you can get the film ready by that date or not. There can be no mistakes, because we're going to release this in a 1,000-plus theaters and we cannot have 1,600 dark screens." I said, "I think I can hit it." Frank said, "No, you cannot think you can hit it—you have to tell me that you absolutely can." I said, "I had an editorial service on The Prowler. If you let me bring my editors, I can construct something with teams of editors and we can meet that date." Frank agreed, but then he said, "We're going to do it in the following way: forget where you live—we're going to rent a house in Malibu for you, and you're going to move into that house. And Frank, Jr. will move into that house, and all your editors and their assistants and their apprentices will move into that house. Food will be brought in for you. You will never leave until the film is ready to be screened." So I said, "Malibu? This really is Hollywood!" Of course, being Hollywood, it was a slight lie. It wasn't Malibu, it was Zuma Beach. But it was still pretty cool.

  JOEL GOODMAN:

  It was Animal House. It became like basic training. The theory was that we were going to make a maximum effort to get it done on schedule. I always got into the machismo of "work 'til you drop," and Joe has this inexhaustible supply of energy. So then you get a couple guys together in a house and it becomes kind of a macho thing of who can work faster, and who can stay up later.

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  We literally had apprentices sleeping in the garage. We were editing around the clock. You heard screams coming out of that house all day and all night. And there was no digital. This was all editing machines, all film. The house was just full of film.

  JOEL GOODMAN:

  It was liberating like a horrible schedule can be liberating—you're simply forced to do it in a certain time frame. Each scene would get massaged so it would have
maximum impact. Editing is an instinctive thing—you're feeling your way through the material, as if you're the audience. These types of films are made from the gut. And the style of any movie is the product of the period you're in. I did look at the other three Friday the 13ths, the Halloween movies, and similar pictures. But I don't think ours moved as slow as the previous ones. If anything, I learned when to be slow and when to be fast—which parts need to be drawn out for suspense, and which need to be tighter. And looking back at it today, some of the scenes I think really have held up well—there's a contrast of pace to ours more than the earlier Fridays.

  HARRY MANFREDINI, Composer:

  The Final Chapter was the most fun I've ever had making a movie. It was just a riot. Craziness. There were four or five guys editing and we were trying to cut music in this house in Malibu. All the music was newly recorded. There were elements that were similar, but nothing that was just lifted and put in. It got to the point where the editors and I would be working with Frank Jr. behind us, looking over our shoulders. It was also a panic because they were up against the MPAA, who would only screen one reel at a time. It was insane.

  Corey Feldman becomes Tommy Jarvis.

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  You finish a picture and the MPAA looks at it. And they come back with some report that they're appalled. Then there's some serious negotiation process, which is such a mercurial thing, because you go to them and say, "How many frames should I cut from this?" and they're not allowed to tell you what to do. They're not allowed to be editors. They can only say "in the aggregate, we find this offensive."