Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition)
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DANNY STEINMANN:
During the shooting and editing, when it turns out that Roy the ambulance driver was impersonating Jason because his son was brutally chopped up, I quickly cut to Tommy in the hospital bed, hoping that the audience would accept the thin explanation, suspend belief, and move on. I apologize to the viewer if they feel that the Roy-Jason revelation lacks credibility, but it is what it is.
For the record, it was always my intention that Tommy was planning to kill Pam. I felt I had delivered on the producers' instructions to turn Tommy into Jason. He did become Jason. I never saw Friday the 13th Part VI, but I am told they brought Jason back from the dead, and the whole Tommy-to-Jason thing was thrown out. The decision to just eliminate Part V from the series, to pretend it never happened, is questionable, if understandable.
TIM SILVER:
After we looked at the first cut of the film, there were some hiccups. We decided we had to go out and shoot a pre-title sequence to bridge it with the previous Friday. It ended up being a little disaster. The idea was to do a dream sequence with the young Tommy Jarvis, a long point of view Steadicam shot going through a tunnel of branches at night, then it opens up to a scene at Jason's grave. Well, usually, you can get a Steadicam operator through your directory of photography, but Stephen Posey didn't really know anybody. So we ended up practically picking a name out of a hat, and then went out at night and shot the footage. But when we got the footage back the next morning it was terrible. It really looked like a home movie. So we had to get even more money and shoot more. Luckily, we ended up cutting it in a way that made it work.
DANNY STEINMANN:
Frank Mancuso, Jr. really let me shoot from the hip quite a bit. I wanted to have an opening sequence with Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis to bridge my picture with The Final Chapter, so Frank went out and got Corey for me and let me shoot it.
COREY FELDMAN, "Young Tommy Jarvis":
They originally asked me to come back and reprise the role of Tommy and do the entire of Part V, but unfortunately—or fortunately, which ever way you want to look at it—I was working on Goonies at the time. I was going to be on set with Richard Donner and Steven Spielberg for six months, six days a week. Frank Mancuso, Jr. said, "Well, we want you, but if you can't start for six months we're going to have to find another solution." So I said I'd do whatever I can, so they had me come in for just a single day's shooting, on a Sunday. Here I am working six days on Goonies, and on my seventh day Part V, and then back to Goonies for six more days. That was my only time as an actor in the Screen Actors Guild where I shot 13 days in a row without a break. And I was only 12 years old. That day was very strenuous.
It was supposed to be the middle of summer, but it was actually October. And they had no rain machine, because it was a small budget, so they just hooked a hose to a sprinkler valve of the house we were shooting at. On top of that, there is no Jason there. It's just me standing in my neighbor's backyard, freezing my ass off, going "Aaahhhhh!" And Danny Steinmann's saying, "Oh, now you see him come out of the grave! Now he's coming after you! Now he's chasing you!" It was not the most pleasurable memory of my career. But it was short and sweet.
It had become a tradition with each new Friday the 13th film to up the body count over previous chapters, as well as devise increasingly elaborate methods of dispatching victims, no matter how sensational or incredible. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Part V's final death toll, which reached an astonishing—and some would say absurd—22 victims by the end of the film's 95 minutes. The question of just how much was too much weighed heavily—and uneasily—on the minds of the filmmakers as A New Beginning neared the end of post-production.
DANNY STEINMANN:
Every kill in Part V was cut, starting with Joey's death, the ax in the back. Originally, we had a wide shot of Vic coming towards the camera with the ax, then the ax bursting through Joey's back and blood spurting out all over. But the MPAA ratings board simply said, "No good." Now, all that's left in the final film is Vic leaving frame about to swing the ax, then a close-up of Joey screaming. The thing that hurt me the most was that we had a rough cut preview of the film and we saw where all the "pops" were. In Part V there were two really big ones, and both were cut. The one with the ax, and when the guy on the motorcycle gets his head chopped off. Everybody jumped in the original version. It was much richer.
BRUCE GREEN:
Near the end of editing Part V, I hadn't gotten my hair cut in a long time and I was under all this pressure to finish the movie. So I had this guy cut my hair, while I watched this one scene over and over of Jason chopping off Junior's head. And after the guy was done, I went to pay him and he was literally shaking. He said, "I'm sorry—that was horrible!" I was looking at takes for the way the light was hitting the knife, and he just saw mayhem. He didn't talk to me anymore after that. He thought I was the devil.
In the first version we submitted to the MPAA, the machete cut off Junior's head and it went flying, and then it bounced about six times. We would take out one bounce and send it back to the MPAA, and they'd still say no. Then we sent it back again, with five bounces. And then it came back again. And again. Now, it is just one bounce.
JERRY PAVLON:
After the film wrapped, I had already moved back to New York. The filmmakers called me and said there was a problem with my death scene and the ratings board. They wanted to give the movie an X rating because of my death—they said a machete in the face wasn't just offensive, it was obscene! So they had gone back and forth about what to do—should they reshoot it? In the end, they just decided to be clever with the editing and take the literal moment when the cleaver smacks my face out of the picture. So now you only see me look up, then a cut to the machete coming down, and a sound effect—I guess what in the comic industry is called a "thwack!"And it's funny, over the years, so many people have sworn up and down that they remember actually seeing the actual machete hit to the face in the movie. But it was never there. It's just so effective that everyone thinks they saw it.
"That was the hardest scene to do," remember Melanie Kinnaman on her chainsaw battle with Jason. "I just could not keep a straight face. I mean, here I was with this smoking chainsaw, going after a six-foot three-inch guy with a saber in his hand. I thought, 'He could kill me in a second, and they're trying to make this play like I've got the upper hand!?'"
TIM SILVER:
Frank Jr. and I had talked with Danny before he went off and did his draft of the script, and we didn't expect it to be even more graphic than the original one sent to us from the East Coast. And the death of Tiffany Helm's character, I remember sitting down with Frank and reading it, and both of us kind of chucking, saying, "There's no way this is ever going to make it in." We talked with Danny, and there was a lot of debate. Danny fought to keep that scene in, so when we shot it, Frank came out to the set to try and contain what we got on the screen and to make sure it was done in a way that body parts weren't flying around.
TIFFANY HELM:
My original death scene looked like a gruesome ad for heavy-duty feminine protection. I was doing aerobics in my room, on my back with my legs in the air, scissoring. Jason comes in and, "Wham!" He machetes me right up the middle. Well, I thought it was pretty funny. The producers did not. And Danny did not. They knew that the scene would not make it past the censors.
Being that I was not exactly a "hard body," I had no problem changing the scene from exercising to what is there now, my dancing scene. And, by the way, that "robot dance" is what we were doing at the club I went to at the time—I think it was just weird enough to intrigue Danny. So the scene was changed and everyone was happy.
BRIAN CANHAM, Musician, Pseudo Echo:
It's funny what has happened because of that scene. There is a song called "His Eyes" that I wrote for our first album, that is an accumulation of all the Hammer horror stuff I grew up with as a kid. I wrote the main intro riff in that style, and given the dark content of the lyrics, the song just
has that horror movie kind of mood. The producers of Part V licensed the song from the record company, and none of us in the band were even aware that it was being used in the movie until some time after the fact. And only then did we actually come to realize the song had built a cult following of its own due to being in the film. It has become very popular with our fans, and we have even started to throw it into our live sets sometimes depending on the sort of crowd we're playing to—it can go over a lot of people's heads at the more mainstream venues but our more diehard fans love it. Today, we're really glad to have one of our darker works recognized, and thrilled to be a part of such a cult classic.
TIM SILVER:
That was also the one scene where, when I read it, I thought, "What am I getting myself in for?" Personally, I felt that the scene was not what the original Friday the 13th was about—that film was a clear demonstration of how you can shock the audience as much as possible but not cross the line. As far as I'm concerned, the original Friday the 13th—its power lied in what was only suggested. There was the fear that something was going to happen, and they really didn't linger on the graphic violence. Whereas with Part 2 and afterward, I felt that they just pointed a camera and went right for the close-up of the gore. That wasn't necessarily appealing to me. In Part V, to be honest, I think that the overabundance of kills… it's obvious why you set off a bomb every two pages. Because you haven't got a story that's working.
BRUCE GREEN:
You have to spend time setting characters up. To me, that's what it's all about. In Part V, we didn't set any of the characters up. I think the crudeness of the film comes from that. In porn, it's all about the penetration shot. And Part V is structured like a porn film. And that's its problem.
DANNY STEINMANN:
Originally, we did shoot more material with the characters. For example, the scenes with Ethel and Junior—their scenes were twice as long. But I had to comply with Phil Scuderi's orders, so you had to introduce some characters and kill them off a few minutes later. Remember, the only people left alive at the end are Tommy, Pam, and Reggie… and Pam was on her way out.
The Tommy-Jason story was really the essence of Part V. Each time you cut away to strangers that had nothing to do with the halfway house and kill them, it dilutes much of the story. The movie's purpose is to answer the question, "What the fuck is going on with Tommy?" Scuderi didn't give me much room to maneuver. And audiences wanted to get to the kills. I did it in a way that I thought would get the biggest response.
Unfortunately, because of the MPAA more than half of the kills happen offscreen. Those that are shown are shortened and choppy. Today, compared to the popular horror movies, I bet A New Beginning would get a PG-13 Rating. It's unbelievable—the Hostel and Saw films are so graphic. I'm surprised they don't get an X Rating. Frank Mancuso must have submitted Part V to the MPAA eight times. I believe what they finally allowed hurt the movie terribly. The tone of the film was negatively altered.
"For the record, it was always my intention that Tommy was planning to kill Pam," explains writer/director Danny Steinmann of Part V's controversial ending. "I felt I had delivered on the producers' instructions to turn Tommy into Jason. He did become Jason. I never saw Friday the 13th Part VI, but I am told they brought Jason back from the dead, and the whole Tommy-to-Jason thing was thrown out. The decision to just eliminate Part V from the series, to pretend it never happened, is questionable, if understandable."
SEAN CUNNINGHAM, Producer & Director, Friday the 13th:
Read the reviews about the original Friday the 13th, and they will tell you it's the most bloody, disgusting, horrible movie they ever saw. But the incredible thing is, it's not there. When we did the TV version of the film, all I had to cut out was approximately 22 seconds. That's it! All the blood that is in Friday the 13th is gone. Because the anticipation is what triggers the horror, and when you see those 22 seconds it's a mind fuck.
After the film was a huge, completely unexpected hit, it created a whole flurry of activity and noise and spawned I don't know how many dozens of imitators. Subsequently, I think they got suspense mixed up with gore, and plot mixed up with blood. If you say, "Well, I can't fix the plot so I'll kill two other people," it's no good. It doesn't work. I think eventually the slasher moviemakers discovered that even though you can do that, it becomes your own worst enemy. Because, ultimately, gore is very numbing, and I strongly dispute the dramatic effect of it. In my opinion, you just touch it enough to make you blink, and then it's got to be gone. The impression is still there. Psycho is tame by today's standards, but that ambiguous figure behind the shower curtain still haunts you.
I think there's been a big change that's taken place over the last 20 years. When we first did gore back in 1980, it was a magic trick. Now, anything you can dream of can be accomplished on film. The audience isn't surprised or particularly impressed when you do camera tricks. Remember Terminator 2, when we really started to see that morphing effect? And it was really amazing and cool? Well, then within weeks Gillette had a commercial where somebody was shaving and his face changed four or five times in 30 seconds. And the audience just watched it and said, "Eh." Suddenly the magic trick had lost its glamour. And now that the delight has been removed, you'd better replace that delight with something else—and that something else is the unexpected character and story twists. Which get ignored, because they're hard. But you have to tell a story that somehow achieves a resonance. If there is a lesson to be learned from any of the Friday sequels, that may be it.
HARRY MANFREDINI, Composer:
I will agree with Sean and say I wish they had cut more. It's amazing how incredibly horrific the first Friday seemed, and now it's tame. And as a result, on the sequels, the envelope was constantly being pushed. Eventually the filmmakers knew that the MPAA would cut out a certain amount, so they went way, way over the top, so far over that the movies contained more and more kills each time. I don't know if fans want to hear this, but I've seen the versions before the MPAA cuts—I scored them—and they are just as stupid. Only gorier. To me, they are like cartoons with knives.
I always tried to keep as much of the elements of the original Friday the 13th as I could, because I liked the way it worked. But you've gotta remember that in the first Friday, there was no Jason until the end. Subsequently, Jason becomes the shark, the killer, out to wreak havoc. So the essence of the pictures changed. They became more about setting 'em up and knocking 'em down. The subsequent films also had a lot more McGuffins and red-herrings. When you're scoring a red-herring, you have to score harder, because there's not gonna be a pay-off—you've got to work everyone up into a frenzy, only to let them down. So the sequels had a lot more of that stuff.
When it comes to these films, it's just like being a bricklayer, or a plumber. I write the appropriate music, and then I'm done. And I don't have to like them to do them. There is no question in my mind that the worst one was where the ambulance driver was impersonating Jason. I don't know how well the ideas of the plot, and the acceptability of the outcome, played to the audience. But while the series was getting stale, I do think the introduction of the Tommy Jarvis character gave it a few more breaths.
I thought my music for Part V was good. Over the years I had grown considerably as a composer. Many of the differences in the scores are a result of the actual films themselves—as they evolved, they added dimensions and character elements to try to disguise that it was just really another Jason film. The score for Part V was a noticeable evolution. I got to write a theme for Tommy, which was also to suggest something far beyond him, that there was madness afoot. It was necessary to use this because it was important to "point the finger" at various characters, not just him. And to suggest that things were not as you might expect. So while the harmonic and melodic elements of the early scores are still present, the new material evolved from the old. So at least that was fun.
BRUCE GREEN:
I learned something very valuable from Harry. When
I first got the job on Part V, I went and rented a couple of the Friday films. And I couldn't watch them because they were too scary. Instead, I'd put it on, but I'd turn the sound off and I would high-speed until Jason would pop up and kill somebody. Then I'd watch it silent. Then I'd turn on the sound again, and that's when it hit me that it was so much about the music—especially horror, more than any other genre. Harry Manfredini is, to me, the hero of these movies. And without him, quite frankly, a film like Part V might have been completely unwatchable.
View title designer Dan Curry's original hand-drawn storyboards for A New Beginning's opening title sequence.
No matter what those involved with A New Beginning felt about their creation, when it hit theaters on March 22, 1985 its opening weekend box office proved that there was still a sizable and hungry audience for the further exploits of Jason Voorhees. Even if it was an imposter. Cutting a swath across 1,379 screens in the United States, Part V became the fifth consecutive installment in the series to top the weekend box office, pulling in $8 million in its first three days. While greeted somewhat less feverishly than The Final Chapter, by the following Monday A New Beginning had already turned a sizable profit.
But soon the tell-tale signs of bad word of mouth were on the horizon: Part V suffered a stiffer fall-off than any of the previous installments in the series. By its third weekend of wide release, the film plummeted completely out of the top ten, eventually scaring up a respectable, if far from spectacular, final take of $21.9 million. Perhaps, in the end, it was enough to justify the film's subtitle—a decent enough "new beginning" for a franchise that no one ever expected to become a franchise in the first place. Or, as some of its makers feared, was it the truly the beginning of the end for Jason?