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

by Peter M. Bracke

  BRENDAN FLETCHER:

  I had this habit of going around and singing Destiny's Child songs all the time—it was one of my favorite things to do. And Kelly was actually really cool about it, even though I totally destroyed her songs. Well, I hope she thought it was funny.

  JASON RITTER:

  I gave Kelly some singing lessons. Just kidding.

  KYLE LABINE:

  Do you know what the worst part of the experience for me? The hair is not mine! The producers decided after I was cast that I would wear hair extensions. And it was horrible. Especially at the beginning, because when they first put the extensions in, they are very long until they cut them down to size. For the first couple of days I had this total mullet.

  JESSE HUTCH:

  I'll be honest: I didn't really feel comfortable doing the bedroom scene. I had never done anything like that before. The nudity was kept to a minimum because Katherine Isabelle was uncomfortable with it as well. We just wanted to get it over with. But being a new actor, I went along with it, but afterward I felt like, "That was a little uncomfortable for me." I thought the death could have happened without these two characters doing their business. It was one of those scenes—if I never see it, I won't feel bad.

  But I did love working with all the special effects, and just hanging around the studio to see how it was all put together. It was funny, when we shot it, I had to be totally in the moment. My spine had supposedly been broken in half, I've got blood all over me, and I'm crushing a beer can in my hand. Well, on the first take I got so into it that I spit the blood out of my mouth and hit the director of photography right in the face. He wasn't very happy about that.

  The battle begins...

  MARK SWIFT:

  When Damian and I went to the first test screening, during Trey's "bed kill," the crowd was so loud you couldn't hear the dialogue during the next two scenes. That, for Damian and I, was one of the great moments of our whole experience on Freddy vs. Jason, because that was one of the scenes that was filmed just like we wrote it. To have the audience love it like that just felt terrific.

  KELLY ROWLAND:

  One of my favorite scenes in the movie was when we are actually at the mental hospital and we're looking for some Hypnosil. We can't find any. And Jason throws the police officer, Officer Stubbs, through a glass door. And we run! And it was so funny because I was really scared in that scene, and Ronny kept telling me to calm down. He was, like, "Look at you on camera. You don't have to act scared, because you are!" He just got such a kick off it. That day was really fun.

  JOHN WILLETT, Production Designer:

  We created the entire Camp Crystal Lake set at Bunsen Lake Forest in Vancouver. We wanted something that looked real and audiences could immediately identify as a camp from the 1950s. It also is depicted in two different eras in the film: when we first see it, it is sparkling clean, then at the end of the movie, it looks like a scene out of D-Day, with pits and craters and blackened earth. It was a mammoth task—we had to move the beach, create most of the forest and put in all the buildings for the cabins and construction site. That is one of the sets I'm most proud of in the film.

  Recreating the Elm Street house was also a real challenge. There were no accurate drawing records kept from any of the earlier Nightmare films. We had to try and find a suitable house in Vancouver, which is very difficult. Obviously, we would never find exactly the same house, but we could find the bones of a place that we could then transform. Another challenge was that, because of our budget, we had to go inside the house and shoot most of the interiors on location, too, which is unusual because normally you build that stuff on stage. Finally, at the last minute, we found this great house in a perfect neighborhood. It's not quite identical, but it was about 80 percent the same. A lot of fans get nervous when that one little detail is off here or there, but I really felt we achieved the same look and spirit of the original.

  CHRISTOPHER MARQUETTE:

  We filmed the rave scene out in the middle of nowhere, in a cornfield that smelled like cow shit. It's a place I never want to go to again. It was really scary, desolate and dirty. On top of that, they had this flammable blue goop everywhere, for the big moment when Jason, on fire, comes slashing through the cornfield. It was really frightening, because the goop is still there even after the fire goes out, so if you get it on your shoe or elbow, you could totally go up in flames. It was pretty hard to concentrate on your acting when you are scared of being burned to death.

  WILLIAM TEREZAKIS:

  That rave scene became like a fucking triathalon. You'd finish stabbing someone in the chest here, then you've got to run over there and inflate Jason's lung, then go back and stab someone else, then bust some other guy's leg. It was like one gag after another, and they were just working us like fucking animals. In total, there were 12 of us on set handling different units all at the same time, because they often had three cameras going at once. I could hear the circus music playing as we ran. We even resorted to getting vitamin B injections in our necks to keep going. It was a brutal shoot, but fun.

  Although the creators of Freddy vs. Jason had put forth their best effort to make the characters more than just typical slasher film fodder, no one was under any illusions as to what audiences were really coming to see. The climactic slugfest between the two titans of terror had to be nothing less than the most spectacular, knock-down, drag-out fight in horror history. The expectations of the fans weighed heavily on the mind of Ronny Yu. He knew that after nearly a decade of hope and hype, the battle between Jason and Freddy had to be so over-the-top, so outrageous, that audiences wouldn't be able to stop talking about it on their way out of the theater. And it certainly had to be bloody. But even Freddy vs. Jason's seen-it-all makeup effects crew was taken aback by Ronny Yu's carnival of carnage. As filming wrapped, stage blood was being ordered up not by the bucket, or even by the gallon—but by the barrel.

  "Freddy and Jason are like T-Rex and Godzilla fighting," says director Ronny Yu. "Are they going to hold back? No! They are going to tear each other's limbs off... like two animals."

  DOUG CURTIS:

  New Line—this was a studio that didn't tolerate filmmakers who spent a lot of money. Bob Shaye is very hands-on, and he cared about every project he did. He says, "That's how much money we're going to spend on this" - and that is truly the last nickel. If you are the kind of film producer who can't do that, don't work there. The budget for Freddy vs. Jason was about $32 million, but we had $6 million in script development which left $25 million—which was a small amount for what we did. We had a lot of CGI—350 shots, many of which didn't end up in the movie, because they just didn't work. But we got on the screen was pretty good for the budget.

  RONNY YU:

  I didn't look at Freddy vs. Jason as being just another slasher movie where the audience would simply sit there, waiting for the kills and the body count. I looked at this as being an action-horror movie, like ALIENS—something with lots of action, lots of scary moments and lots of horror. I saw Freddy vs. Jason as being like King Kong vs. Godzilla—plenty of combat and scenes of the two monsters fighting.

  I'm also a big fan of the WWF, even though I don't like it—it's just so bizarre that I keep tuning in. I also have realized what great scriptwriters those people are, because everybody in the WWF has a character, a larger than life persona. And when you see them fight, you somehow have to root for one side. So that was also one of my inspirations.

  MARK SWIFT:

  Most of the changes made to our final draft were in the third act. Our ending was not supposed to be as over-the-top. We didn't ever want to make the thing cerebral, but we wanted it to be smarter than what maybe was expected.

  Our original idea was to bring in Pinhead from the Hellraiser franchise, but New Line didn't own that property. So then we did a rewrite which had Freddy and Jason in hell, and a cameo by Satan. But if you go CGI, it would have looked like shit, and if you went with a real set, it would have cost far too mu
ch money. So it was dropped. What we eventually came up with was a more elaborate version of what is in the film now, with more characters and a whole subplot about a housing development being built at Camp Crystal Lake that tied into some of the other movies. We fought for that. We did our best. Then it got lost. So now, when suddenly they end up fighting at a construction site, you're like, "Why?"

  DAMIAN SHANNON:

  We even had a reference to Tommy Jarvis in there. The developers at this Crystal Lake construction site were having problems with Tommy protesting. I think that might even have been where that Internet rumor came about, that Corey Feldman was going to be in Freddy vs. Jason. I also thought it would be a great idea to put more victims in between the fight, to see people get caught between Freddy and Jason. We had a lot more people getting killed. But they just didn't want to introduce more characters.

  DOUG CURTIS:

  The whole ending of the movie we lost because it was stupid. It involved a lot of people in a construction trailer that the audience was not invested in. It was a different movie and it was very expensive. As it turned out, I think the ending we came up with was even more expensive, but it was certainly more exciting because it involved our two protagonists fighting it out to the death. That's what audiences were paying to see. And it is why, eventually, the movie tested so high—everybody talked about the end battle of the movie.

  MARK SWIFT:

  Another thing we wanted to do with the fights is to equally represent the Friday the 13th and Nighmare environments, that the fans of each love. So the fights had to take place both in the real world and the dream world. The trick was making that happen without violating the established mythology of either character.

  JOHN WILLETT:

  The most fun I had on Freddy vs. Jason was designing the sets for Jason's world and Freddy's world. Both are truly nightmarish environments and, visually, are signature moments in the film. The idea was to change the color for each. We always used blues and greens and water colors for Jason, and reds, rusts and earth colors for Freddy. We felt this way you would visually guide the audience, and that they would always know exactly where the story was at any given point in time.

  "Freddy and Jason have been childhood fears of mine, so doing this movie kind of freaked me out at first," says Kelly Rowland. "Then when I got to the set, everybody was so nice. Of course, they soon started to play jokes and scare me. But it was so much fun!" Ironically, the one scene that didn't scare Rowland was filming the violent death of her character, Kia.

  RONNY YU:

  Freddy vs. Jason is "more, more, more!" I told the crew to imagine that Freddy and Jason are like a T-Rex and Godzilla fighting. Are they going to hold back? No! They're going to tear each other's limbs off and go for the eyes like two animals. Let's go back to the rawness of it, the basics. I also said, "All the violence—let's go wilder so the audience will laugh at it and not get disturbed by it." These are two beasts, who the audience has no emotional investment in. And they never die anyway. But visually, there's a lot of excitement. I took from all those samurai movies I saw when I was little—there's blood squishing everywhere. Push it, push it, push it, so the audience has a fun time.

  The movie I kept in my mind throughout shooting this was Rocky. The scene that really hit me is at the end, the final fight, when Apollo beats the crap out of Rocky. Yet Rocky has the spirit to fight back even though his eye is swollen and all of that. Then he tells his trainer, "Cut it open." And they actually slice open his wound and the blood just spills out! And that for me is the rule I followed on Freddy vs. Jason.

  MARK SWIFT:

  We started off writing what was probably the bloodiest film ever made, and that was because Bob Shaye at New Line told us to make it as violent as possible. Ultimately it became less bloody, but it stayed essentially the same story all the way through. Although, when we came out to visit the set, we were talking to one of the special effects guys and he was just shaking his head at some of the over-the-top stuff Ronny was doing. He was just going, "Man, this is something out of Monty Python!"

  RONNY YU:

  One of the special effects people came up to me and asked, "Can you tell me how much blood we should order? In terms of buckets or gallons?" I said, "Gasoline barrels. Get me two dozen."

  MONTY SIMMONS, Stunt Coordinator:

  Ronny is not your classic slash and gash director. He brought a whole other layer to the fight scenes in Freddy vs. Jason because of his Hong Kong background. Just the wirework was phenomenal. I mean, we sent these guys flying in every conceivable direction. We had them flying into objects, through walls, up stairs, down stairs—you name it, we did it. In real life they would've been dead 15 times, but in this world they go flying across the room through a wall and crash down two stories. They get up and they come right back at each other again. It just keeps going and going.

  KEN KIRZINGER:

  The fight sequence at the end I was particularly happy with. I did most of the stunts and I really enjoyed it. I also got my own little touches in there. There's a scene after Jason's been knocked down by the crushed air bottles and he gets up and snaps his shoulder back into place. The best part of playing Jason was just being able to come to work, put the costume on and get all these nice toys—a nice big machete, prosthetic bodies and stunt guys to play with. It was a really fun environment.

  ROBERT ENGLUND:

  When they say, "You're gonna fly through the air on fire and we're gonna see it from up in the sky," they actually shoot it that way. It's amazing. And you just sort of have to surrender yourself to their incredible imagination, because it's so unrestricted.

  I've never worked so hard in my life, and I'm an old dog now. Even though we're padded and stuff, we're doing them over and over and over again. And in the cold you don't quite feel it. Have you ever played baseball on a cold day and you've caught a line drive? It was the same thing with doing the fight scenes. You're a little numb, so it was rough. Ken is a stuntman, so he could get in there and get a lot more down and dirty than I could. But sets are very macho and very male and you want to get in there, too. So I gave him my two cents' worth. I showed no quarter.

  MONICA KEENA:

  Lori is the least likely action hero ever. I'm supposed to be this very quiet, subdued, virginal character. Then all these terrible murders start happening and I have to find this strength within me and take care of everybody. I go through a huge metamorphosis during the course of the movie. I kind of turn warrior at the end. Women in horror movies have often been sex objects that are just there to look pretty and get murdered. But in Freddy vs. Jason, I didn't think Lori was victimized. She wasn't just this pretty girl running around looking hot the whole time. In a way, it's a coming-of-age story because she really finds herself, and a strength she never knew she had—she refuses to be kicked down by these monsters.

  But it was hard to think about anything positive when you're spending 15 hours a day covered in blood and mud. It was difficult. I had moments where I'd been doing it for weeks and weeks, and it just reached the point where I was exhausted and didn't want to see any more blood. But then I got excited all over again at the idea that I'm part of this.

  When we had to jump into Crystal Lake at the end of the movie, I had the flu and it was freezing in Vancouver. It's the coldest I've ever been in my entire life. I was crying. And my clothes were too skimpy so I couldn't wear a wetsuit. Jason Ritter would have been able to, but he was so kind that he opted not to just so he wouldn't have an advantage over me.

  Claw versus the Machete.

  JASON RITTER:

  I was trying to make Monica feel better about it because she was sick, and feeling all hot and cold. And I was going to jump in the cold water and be like, "It's fine. Jump in!" And then I jumped in and screamed, "It's freezing!"

  We did lots of running, screaming, and some more running. I've never been in a movie where we're running away from fire and jumping into a lake with an explosion behind us. But it was like
my little childhood dream of explosions and blood. It was the hardest part of making the film, but the most fun, too.

  KELLY ROWLAND:

  For my death scene at the end, I had all this fake blood running down my head, which is made out of corn syrup and red dye. And you're supposed to keep the blood on your face between takes so that they can take pictures for continuity reasons. But I didn't know that, and I'm a sweets fanatic. So I kept licking the blood off. Finally, my makeup artist said, "Kelly, please stop licking the blood!"

  But man, the fight between Freddy and Jason was really cool. Especially where I actually tell Freddy off, where we're face to face and I'm letting him have it. Those were my favorite scenes. When I actually get into Kia mode, I just have to laugh because she just has this strength about her—that she just doesn't care what anyone thinks. If you piss her off, then that's the worst thing you've done, because she'll let you have the third degree. She's very mouthy, very sassy, and she's a worldly girl. She's very cool to be with, but don't step on her toes because she can be a real diva.

  MARK SWIFT:

  I have a feeling that when Kelly Rowland came into the process, she thought she needed a bigger kill. And she wanted to say more to Freddy—she probably wanted to talk some smack. I bet that whole speech was written just for her. So now there are a couple of lines in there that Damian and I are like, "For God's sake—tell someone, anyone, that we didn't write those!" One was when Freddy says to Kia, "How sweet, dark meat!" That was actually Englund's line. But then Kelly Rowland calls Freddy a faggot—I can't believe she did it.

  DAMIAN SHANNON:

  Both those lines we're not big fans of. We didn't write either of them. At least "dark meat" I can laugh at, because Freddy's a pig—he's a villain. You want to hate him. To me, I think Freddy should be able to say anything. He could be as un-PC as he wants to be. But to have Kelly Rowland say "faggot"—that doesn't make any sense.