A group of camp counselors are re-opening a Summer camp, but are unaware of what happened there years and years ago. A young boy had drowned and the year after two counselors were murdered. Someone mysterious is stalking the new counselors and is murdering them one by one.
Blaine: Sean S. Cunningham had made a few shorts and porno films, but what he really wanted to do was make something of himself by making a film people would remember him for. He made two comedies called “Manny’s Orphans” and “Here Come the Tigers”, but they weren’t huge hits. In 1972, Sean had produced a horror flick called “The Last House of the Left”, directed by Wes Craven (Scream & A Nightmare on Elm Street). During that time, Sean had an idea for a title that could be used for a movie. It was called “Friday the 13th”. Slasher films were starting to become very popular after the release of John Carpenter’s “Halloween” and inspired a lot of filmmakers to come up with ideas for their own slasher films. Sean thought he could use his “Friday the 13th” idea as a slasher film. Together, Sean and his good friend, Victor Miller, made this poster with the title “Friday the 13th” on it. Sean didn’t know what it was going to be about at the time, except it was going to be a slasher film. There was no script, just the name of the title. Sean wanted to present his poster to movie studios. Paramount Pictures loved the idea and demanded that a script be written.
Victor Miller had immediately started putting together the script for “Friday the 13th”. Victor felt the most important thing was to figure out where the movie would take place. It would have to be somewhere that was adult free and then Victor had thought about a summer camp. Victor had finished the script by the Fall of 1979. There were certain parts of the script that the studio didn’t like and wanted to be changed. Ron Kurtz was hired to make those changes, but his work was never credited. After that, Sean went looking for the perfect location to be Camp Crystal Lake. He found a boys camp that looked perfect and the good news was they could have it all to themselves because it was off season.
“Friday the 13th” starts off in the late 1950s and two camp counselors go somewhere private to have sex. Then someone mysterious and creepy shows up, kills the male and the female is terrified because not only is her lover been killed right in front of her, but she is next. The shot is in slow motion when it focusses on her and then when she screams, it just stops and zooms in on her. That scares me because of how it looks, but that’s good because you’re supposed to be scared.
They needed fresh and new faces to play the camp counselors and the casting directors were looking forward to cast the new talent. The counselors were supposed to be smart, but stupid enough to get themselves into a death trap that would make the audience say “don’t go in there!” several times. Adrienne King plays Alice, the female who survives at the end. Alice has been described as someone who needs space and is more focussed compared to the other counselors. There are rules to the slasher genre and I think “Friday the 13th” was the first to say you can never have sex or else you’ll die. You have to be a virgin in order to survive. I mean “Halloween” had sex in it, but in “Friday the 13th” almost everyone wants to do each other.
Two of the actors had acted on Broadway together, Jeannine Taylor and Mark Nelson. The only actor who became a huge star after “Friday the 13th” was Kevin Bacon. Everyone who worked on “Friday the 13th” knew that Kevin was going to make it big. Kevin decided to do the job after his agent had informed him that he would make love to a beautiful woman, for which is all for. There was one actor who was apart of “Friday the 13th” who was such a great actor that some of the other actors thought he was scary and crazy. The actor’s name was Walt Gorney and his character was Crazy Walph, a nut job who like everyone else knows that Camp Crystal Lake is a dangerous place after the murders that happened there. Walt was always getting himself into character and the other actors didn’t know that, so they just assumed her was a weirdo.
Sean S. Cunningham needed to find a makeup artist who could create the death sequences of “Friday the 13th” and then he saw George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”. Sean was so impressed with the makeup effects that were done in “Dawn of the Dead” that he demanded to know who did them and it was Tom Savini. Tom Savini had been a combat photographer during the Vietnam War and he had seen a lot of dead or damaged bodies which is what influenced him to make the effects he has done through his career. Kevin Bacon’s death would happen in a bed. They put a hole in the bed and Kevin would put his head through it while the rest of him would be sitting down underneath the bed. There was a fake chest that would go up to the neck and it would be put up against Kevin’s head. Tom Savini would push the arrow through the fake neck and another guy would be on the other side of the bed blowing out the blood though a tube.
Victor wanted there to be clues to who the murder is. He wrote clues in the script, but they were never used in the film. Sean wanted the killer to be completely unknown until the end. It had to be the person you would least suspect and that was Mrs. Voorhees. When you first see Mrs. Voorhees, she acts sweet and innocent, but then she starts to feel like a threat and then acts crazy and dangerous. Originally Estelle Parsons was offered the role of Mrs. Voorhees and she accepted it, but then the shooting schedule got pushed and they couldn’t keep her because she had other things to do. The next person they went to was Betsy Palmer and she thought a project like this would be a piece of crap after reading the script, but she did it anyway. Mrs. Voorhees hears her dead son, Jason, in her head and Victor Miller based that off of “Psycho”. In “Psycho" Anthony Perkins believes he is the mother. Jason’s name came from a kid who Victor Miller knew in his youth whom he didn’t like because he was a tattletale.
Mrs. Voorhees goes after Alice to kill her and at one point she hits her. Betsy Palmer would really hit Adrienne King as they were shooting that scene. Betsy had never done a movie that required her to hit someone and she thought she had to hit someone for real. Adrienne would tell Sean that Betsy was really hitting her and Sean informed Betsy that she had to fake it. At the end of the fight, Alice uses an axe to chop off Mrs. Voohees’ head in order to defeat her. Tom Savini did a cast of Betsy’s head. Tom's assistant would be Mrs. Voorhees' body when her head is cut off and the hands reach up to the missing head. The assistant had bent down his neck while Tom put something on his shoulders and then he used toothpicks to hold the head to the body and it would come off when a machete hit the head.
The music was done by Harry Manfredini and he did the theme by making noises that went like ke…ke…ke…pa…pa….pa on a microphone. There wasn’t an ending to the script because they didn’t know how “Friday the 13th” was going to end. Tom Savini had just seen “Carrie” and liked that it ended with Sue Snell visiting Carrie’s grave and everything looks so peaceful until Carrie’s hand reaches out and grabs her. And so they had young Jason Voorhees come out of the river and grab Alice. Sean wanted the audience to think everything was peaceful before Jason showed up. People flew out of their seats and some of them ran out of the theater when they saw that ending. Others would walk out of that theater liking that they had been tricked by that ending. Alice wakes up in a hospital after that and a policeman informs her that her friends are dead. Then she asks about the little boy and the policeman says that they didn’t find a little boy. Alice says “Then he is still out there” and it cuts to the river at Camp Crystal Lake. As the shot zooms into the river there are two ripples that could possibly be air bubbles. For some it said “sequel”.
“Friday the 13th” opened on May 9,1980 and had grossed 39.7 million dollars at the box office. Critics didn’t like the movie, but audiences thought it was terrifying and they had fun getting scared. It surprised the people who were all involved with “Friday the 13th” that it became so successful with audiences. There was one critic who thought they should all be arrested for horrible crimes against humanity. Another said it was terrible for Betsy Palmer to play a character like Mrs. Voorhees after seeing her as someone nice in the past. But still “Friday the 13th” became a huge success.
My rating on “Friday the 13th” is five out of five stars.
