The MPAA knows the practicalities of the business. They know you have a release date, and they're not going to take a major company down and not have the film ready. On the other hand, they're trying to pressure you to cut something, but they can't be specific. So it might be that you take a frame out, then you show it to them another time, and another time, and another time, and you negotiate into a position that finally everybody agrees to.
I absolutely believe a single frame makes a difference in how you perceive something, emotionally. It really changes how you feel about it. And you can take three frames out of an effect scene and have it work differently for you, and in fact three frames too many can have it stop working for you, too.
JOEL GOODMAN:
We had to go back and trim things three or four times. It became a mutual wearing-down. And I think that overdoing the gore in The Final Chapter was always part of the plan. You certainly don't censor yourself in the beginning, because you know somebody else is going to be ready to do that for you.
I thought Tom Savini's stuff was amazing in this one. It's totally horrifying. When I watched the movie again recently, I found myself squirming at some of the really gory stuff. I was having the audience reaction, but I don't think that happens at all while you're working on it—when you see footage with a slate at the beginning of it, you know what you're looking at isn't real. So it does become a bit abstracted. "Is this too gory? Can we get away with this?"
TOM SAVINI:
The effects in The Final Chapter were very quick. They were almost registered subliminally. Which was great, because Jason's death was so long and protracted, that it came as more of a shock. When that happened, you could see the whole audience shift backwards in their seats, as if they were being sprayed with blood themselves.
COREY FELDMAN:
There was some serious gore involved. Not to say it isn't gory in the final version, but when we shot the scene where I slice Jason's head with the machete, I just remember thinking, "That is the most awful thing I've ever seen!" The blade going up and down inside his skull, his eyes going up and down… I was like, "Um, OK, enough. I think you got that, Joseph!"
TOM SAVINI:
It was a fully articulated, mechanical Jason, for the moment when he slides down the machete, because you could never do that with a real person. All the expressions were cable controlled—the eyebrows moving, the nose twitching and the mouth gyrating. We even had a guy inside Jason's head with a tongue on his finger, wiggling it out of Jason's mouth.
We ended up shooting I don't know how many takes of his body sliding down that machete, different versions because of the ratings board. The machete was actually on a track inside the head. We also had the top of the head on a mechanism that would twist as if it was being sliced off. We did a number of takes of that, too. Finally, the last take was the one with all the blood, although in the finished film, we had to use a "clean" shot with only a bit of blood in the cutaway.
BARBARA HOWARD:
The editor told me that because my character was so likable, that when I died—the writhing and moaning on the floor—it was going to get the film an X rating. So they shortened that. I guess I was too sympathetic of a character to see in that much agony.
JOSEPH ZITO:
A number of the effect shots were cut back, some of them more than others. I think some even benefited, really, which is a rare thing, and some of them were hurt. But we were trying to protect the ending. The end of the movie plays very close to the way we wanted it to play. You do really see the machete enter Jason's head, you do see him slide down on the machete. That was pretty extreme for the time—you would not likely see that in a commercially released movie today. It was an accomplishment.
BARNEY COHEN:
One of the things we originally had talked about doing was to flash back a lot to the original Friday the 13th. But we never did. That's why, instead, there is that montage at the beginning, before the opening credits, that recaps all the earlier films.
JOEL GOODMAN:
I always felt that was a really smart idea. And then we could also open the film proper with that long crane shot with the helicopter, and the locations from Part 3—with this huge production value. It was to suck the audience in, that they're going to watch a "real movie" and that they are in good hands.
"It was a fully articulated, mechanical Jason, for the moment when he slides down the machete, because you could never do that with a real person," says Tom Savini of devising the mechanics of Jason's demise. "All the expressions were cable controlled—the eyebrows moving, the nose twitching and the mouth gyrating. We even had a guy inside Jason's head with a tongue on his finger, wiggling it out of Jason's mouth."
JOAN FREEMAN:
There was one scene we shot, my death scene, that didn't end up in the movie. I'm discovered in a bathtub by Kimberly, fully clothed, just lying dead face-up underneath the water. We also shot another scene, which was supposed to be the original ending of the movie. My eyes are all nightmarish, and I rise up out of the bathtub at Kimberly, as if I'm not really dead. Then it turns out to be a dream. I even had a "death mask" made by Tom Savini.
JOSEPH ZITO:
When Trish finds her mother, I felt we already knew Mrs. Jarvis was dead, so why show it? And the dream sequence of Mrs. Jarvis rising out of the bathtub—that came from Phil Scuderi and Frank Mancuso, Jr. The ending of the original Friday the 13th, with Jason lunging out of the lake, had been very effective. Phil wanted another scene like it. And what we shot with Mrs. Jarvis was quite scary—she had on white contact lenses on and almost exploded out of the tub like a monster. But I just didn't feel like it added to the film.
DANIEL FARRANDS, Documentarian:
In 2008, I directed a retrospective on the Friday the 13th series called His Name Was Jason. I loved the initial idea behind the documentary, but as a huge Jason fan, due to a number of factors I felt like it just didn't hit the mark or really tell the story I wanted to tell. Then, in one of those weird synchronicity things that happens in life, a good friend of mine, Geoff Garrett, who worked for Sean Cunningham and Crystal Lake Entertainment at the time of Jason X and remains a successful producer in his own right, was working out of a production office right up the hall from a guy named Tim King, who had been contracted by Paramount Home Entertainment to produce the new DVD deluxe editions of the Friday the 13th films. His company had already produced the deluxe editions of the first three films around the same time we were in production on His Name Was Jason. So, Geoff, being the astute producer he is, put two-and-two together, and it wasn't difficult for him to say to Tim, "Dan is producing this new documentary on Friday the 13th; you guys should get in touch." So he did. Initially, Tim was looking for people from the series that he could connect with and interview for the new bonus features, so it was easy for me to give him a couple of names. I guess my good nature or good will paid off, because when it came time to do the DVDs for the remaining Paramount Friday films Tim almost abashedly said, "Look, I don't know if I should ask, but would you be interested in coming on board and producing them? I really want someone who understands these movies." I didn't even have to think twice about it; I was in. So I immediately wrangled my partner in crime, Andrew Kasch, to serve as the editor of all the bonus materials and we got right to work.
The reality is that back when the Friday movies were first being made in the early 1980s, home video was just getting started so no one had the foresight to think that all this extra film was going to be of any use in the future. DVD hadn't even been dreamt of yet, so unfortunately a lot of the footage from some of the earlier Friday films was either lost or, sadly, especially in the case of Part VII, destroyed. So we told Paramount that we needed every single frame from these movies that was still available, and they literally sent us any scrap of Jason film that they still had in their vaults. Boxes were being delivered to me and Andrew for weeks on end, and we pored through every single second of it. We were like a couple of kids in
a candy store.
The Final Chapter is almost everyone's favorite of the sequels because it's so well-made. Since it was the first of the deluxe editions we were assigned to work on, we just knew we were going to have to really deliver the goods for this one. We worked closely with director Joe Zito and screenwriter Barney Cohen on the commentary. It was fun to get them in the room together to hear all their thoughts and memories on the making of the film. And with all of the footage that Paramount was sending us, we were jumping up and down. There were probably I think somewhere along the lines of 50 to 60 boxes containing tiny rolls of processed negative. We didn't even have a proper 35mm viewer to view them on. It was just Andrew and I holding these film strips up to a light source and unrolling them by hand with gloves on and being as careful as we could to preserve them. They're 25 years old! You don't want to damage this stuff. But it was like a treasure trove. They were mostly just dailies, stuff that was never cut into the final film. It was not like we took a finished workprint of the film and chopped up the pieces of the excised gore scenes and then put them on a reel. This was slow, painstaking work. But we were so excited, especially Andrew who did the bulk of the searching through this stuff; he would often call me in the middle of the night and say, "I found all the takes from Crispin Glover's dance scene! I found all the angles they shot of Judie Aronson's death scene!"
The one scene that I personally felt was the Holy Grail was the lost ending of The Final Chapter. I remember reading about it in Fangoria when I was a kid—this scene where Trish discovers her dead mother in the bathtub. Little by little we found the scene, but it was all over the place—just a few shots here, a few shots there—just a series of raw dailies, but eventually we found all of the pieces of film that comprised the scene. Andrew had his work cut out for him in putting it in some kind of order. We worked closely with Joseph to put it all together and to see what he thought. It was important to me to cut the scene together the way the director envisioned it, even though it was a quarter century later! Joe was fantastic and gave us tremendous input. And although the original dialogue and sound elements couldn't be located, Kimberly Beck was gracious enough to provide a narration track over snippets of Harry Manfredini's original score. Finding and putting together the original ending was such an amazing thing to be a part of, just as a fan. And, especially since it's one of my favorite films in the series, I'm particularly proud of the work we did on The Final Chapter.
JOEL GOODMAN:
Someone once said that films aren't finished, they're abandoned. There's truth in that. And The Final Chapter wasn't previewed, which can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, there's always something to be learned when you screen a movie for an audience. On the other hand, you may not always take away the right information from the reaction, so it can be liberating not to preview. This was also before the massive marketing and focus grouping of the world. You always end up shooting a longer movie than the final cut. That's part of the process, and it's not something you should short circuit.
I remember one sequence where Rob had all this techie equipment and he was laying it out to make a trap, and to monitor Jason's whereabouts—that was totally eliminated because it just didn't seem to further the story. It didn't add to the suspense. It wasn't like he caught Jason with that equipment—I think it either needed to be where he had trapped Jason with it, or another character got caught in it so there's some ironic angle to it.
There were also many more shots that tied the two main houses in the movie together. Joe had those houses in the movie built so that they would be in physical proximity to each other. But we gradually kept whittling those shots down because they just seemed to be occupying time and not really furthering the story. The pacing dragged. Eventually we were about to remove the last of these shots and Joe says, "We have to keep these two houses together! I made such a fuss that they had to build a second house." So a few remain in the film; now, rather than cutting from one person leaving one house and walking to the other, they are connected by a single pan, in one shot.
"We ended up shooting I don't know how many takes of his body sliding down that machete, different versions because of the ratings board," remembers Tom Savini of The Final Chapter's most crowd-pleasing moment. "The machete was actually on a track inside the head. We also had the top of the head on a mechanism that would twist as if it was being sliced off. We did a number of takes of that, too. Finally, the last take was the one with all the blood, although in the finished film, we had to use a 'clean' shot with only a bit of blood in the cutaway."
JOSEPH ZITO:
The Final Chapter is still out there on TV, playing with scenes in it that were absolutely not ever supposed to be there. You always end up shooting a longer movie, and a lot of the things get eliminated that only seem important on paper. We, as filmmakers, are supposed to be involved with the TV versions of our films—I can't even watch the TV version.
With Jason's gory demise left intact, Friday the 13th – The Final Chapter debuted on Friday, April 13, 1984, slashing its way onto 1,594 screens across North America. The advertisements promised, "This Is The One You've Been Screaming For!" and audiences agreed. The film grossed $11.2 million in its first three days, setting an opening weekend record—not only for the franchise, but for Paramount Pictures. Not yet jaded by the concept of never-ending sequels, fans turned out in droves, propelling the film's final box office gross to $32.9 million, making it the most commercially successful sequel behind Part 3. Jason, it seemed, had taken his final bow and left the stage on a high note.
Reviews were, predictably, negative. Though no attempt was made by the filmmakers to hide the fact that their movie was anything but a deliberate and deliciously manipulative thrill ride—albeit one crafted with care for its target audience—the majority of critical sentiment was pure venom, tempered only by a relief that the series had finally come to an end (or so they hoped). There were a few brief nods of praise, however backhanded, most famously from Janet Maslin in The New York Times: "While not exactly an actors' picture, The Final Chapter takes pains to make its characters a little more personable than the horror-movie norm. This is unfortunate, since there is nothing to do during the second half of the film but watch them die." Maslin's views, perhaps not so coincidentally, were shared by some of the film's cast, who strove so passionately to elevate the material they had been given and were now seeing themselves on the silver screen, some for the very first time. But whatever virtues The Final Chapter may possess, it is still most widely remembered by fans as the first Friday the 13th that promised to be the last. And wasn't.
BARNEY COHEN:
I tried to go out to see the film on its opening night. I went with my wife to a theatre on the Upper West Side in New York but we couldn't get in because it was sold out. So we went to another theater, and it was also sold out. So I said, "Let's go across town to the East Side, where they don't like movies like this." And we went, but we still couldn't get in—it was sold out again. So we just went home, and I remember thinking, "I think this movie's going to be a hit."
JOEL GOODMAN:
As a guy was leaving the theater, I asked him, "How'd you like the movie?" He said, "It's gonna scare the shit out of you!" For a movie like this, that's better than a glowing review in The New York Times.
FRANK MANCUSO, JR.:
To be honest, the audience for these movies rarely decided to go or not based on reviews. Critics, in a room by themselves, they are not going to enjoy these movies. I always thought that unless you saw it in a theatre and experienced the carnival-like atmosphere that surrounded them, you couldn't really comment. That's why so many reviewers came down so harshly on the Friday the 13th movies, because they were looking at it in a context that I don't think was reasonable. These films were designed to create a thrill ride that allowed you to work out your demons in an environment that was ostensibly safe. They weren't meant to be thought upon in the same way that Citizen Kane was. Had critics gone into a theatre
with a real audience, they might have had a different take, or at least seen what they did for an audience. That can't be ignored.
I think it depends on your relationship to cinema. What's unfortunate is that it's inevitable that someone will come to a specific genre of movie with their own likes and dislikes. It seems to me that people who like these types of movies deserve a reviewer who looks at it as, "If you like this kind of stuff, this one's worth checking out." And I'm not just talking about Friday the 13th. People who hate stupid comedies should not be reviewing a Zucker Brothers movie. The Zucker Brothers could have made the greatest Zucker Brothers movie of all time, and these critics would still hate it anyway.
LAWRENCE MONOSON:
I went opening night on Hollywood Boulevard to see the audience reaction to the film. I did not have a good experience. I found the thirst for and love of the violence to be disturbing. The energy in the theater was frightening. I was like, "Oh, my God, what have I done?" I didn't feel physically unsafe, but I certainly wasn't going to hang around and let people know I was in the film. I'm just not a big fan of that sort of low, shocker-based, angry energy.
I imagine it's a release for some people. I don't think it's the healthiest way to release anger and fear and what have you, but it is a way. You're dealing with simple structures and archetypes. It's storytelling, and storytelling is based in ancient mythology. Certainly Friday the 13th is not the highest example of mythology, but it is mythic.
ERICH ANDERSON:
I first saw it at a cast and crew screening in Westwood. I invited my parents to see it. They were horrified. And when the experience was over, I thought it was reprehensible. I thought we were completely irresponsible to make a film like this. Then I saw it again with a paying audience. All my friends came, and I'd say that 14 of them were back out in the lobby after the first 20 minutes of the picture. This was just not part of their culture. They were disgusted and they left—"Thanks for inviting me, Erich!" But I sat there and watched the thing with an audience, and these people were having the greatest time. They were running up and down the aisles, talking back at the screen and making fun of everybody. And it was only then that I got it.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 35
