Video Scripts: A Fish Called Wanda, Night of the Creeps, Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI
Cody is now writing videos both for the JoBlo Originals and JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channels.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and for the last couple years I have also been writing scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
Three more videos that I have written the scripts for have now been posted, and I'm sharing them below. This time, one of these videos is not like the others. I'm no longer writing just about horror movies; now I'm also contributing scripts to the Revisited series on the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel.
My first non-horror video script was on the 1988 comedy A Fish Called Wanda. Here's that episode of Revisited:
A Fish Called Wanda script:
A director who was thought to be past his prime. Scenes that attempt to get laughs out of the deaths of adorable animals. A lead actor who was very nervous about his comedic performance. Reshoots resulting from negative test screening reactions. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but this is actually the story of the hit British comedy A Fish Called Wanda, the movie we’re looking at in this episode of Revisited.
SET-UP: From 1947 to 1958, the British film studio Ealing produced a series of beloved comedies that have come to be known, appropriately enough, as “the Ealing comedies”. The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Ladykillers, they’re all Ealing comedies, and several of the films in the series were directed by a man named Charles Crichton. Actor John Cleese, best remembered for his work in the Monty Python comedy troupe, didn’t get into the entertainment business until a decade after the Ealing comedies had come to an end, but pretty much from the moment he started acting he began hoping to team up with Crichton on their own comedy feature. It just took them a while to get their movie into production. About twenty years, in fact.
Cleese and Crichton worked together on some TV projects in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, but they didn’t start crafting the story for their movie until 1983 – and when the brainstorming began, they only had two ideas: Cleese wanted to have a scene in which a stuttering character has to deliver some important information, while Crichton just wanted someone to be run over by a steamroller. The duo would meet up three times a month to discuss the story they built around those two ideas, and over the course of two and a half years and thirteen drafts they created the screenplay for A Fish Called Wanda.
Several of the characters in the film are thieves who have gathered together in London to pull off a diamond heist worth thirteen million pounds, but this isn’t the sort of movie that spends most of the running time building up to the heist. The diamonds have been stolen within the first twenty minutes, then the problems come after the thieves have the diamonds in their possession. The heist was masterminded by an Englishman named George Thomason, who is played by Tom Georgeson and has a devoted lackey in fellow Englishman Ken Pile, the stuttering character Cleese had in mind from the beginning. Unfortunately, George brought a seductive American named Wanda into the mix, and Ken is also so enamored with her that he names one of the fish in his fish tank after her. Thus the title. They need a weapons expert to help pull off the heist, so Wanda suggests her brother Otto, who is supposedly a former CIA agent. Otto may or may not have been in the CIA, but he’s definitely not Wanda’s brother – the pair have actually been in a relationship for the last two weeks, and they’re planning to steal the stolen diamonds out from under George and Ken. They set George up to be caught by the police, and it isn’t until George is already in jail that they realize he moved the diamonds after they parted company and put them somewhere they don’t know about. Figuring George will tell his lawyer where the diamonds are in exchange for a lighter sentence, Wanda sets out to seduce the information out of his barrister… a plan that doesn’t sit well with the insanely jealous Otto, who insists he isn’t jealous. Hilarity ensues, just as you hope for from a comedy.
Cleese wrote the four main characters with specific actors in mind: he would take on the role of the barrister named Archie Leach, which happened to be the real name of iconic actor Cary Grant; he envisioned Jamie Lee Curtis, who he had seen in Trading Places, as Wanda; he wrote the role of the high-strung moron Otto for Kevin Kline after seeing him in Sophie’s Choice and working with him on Silverado; and Ken Pile was a perfect character for his fellow Monty Python veteran Michael Palin to play. It’s no shock that Cleese got exactly the cast he wanted, even though Curtis thought it was a mistake when she heard he wanted to get in contact with her. She assumed he’d rather collaborate with her husband Christopher Guest, since he had co-written and starred in the 1984 comedy classic This Is Spinal Tap. Cleese wanted to work with Curtis instead, but did make an appearance in Guest’s film The Big Picture the year after A Fish Called Wanda was released.
The only collaborator Cleese brought to the table to be met with resistance from the studio was the one the project had originated with, Charles Crichton. Not only was the studio concerned about Crichton’s directing ability, since he hadn’t made a theatrically-released movie since 1965, but they were also worried about his age: Crichton would turn 77 in the midst of production. Just in case the director was too rusty or were to drop dead on set, they had Cleese take on the uncredited job of co-director – making this his feature directorial debut, although he didn’t have much to do since Crichton proved to be competent and in good health. That was fine with Cleese, who admitted that he didn’t know anything about directing anyway.
With Crichton at the helm, A Fish Called Wanda was shot in just four weeks and it came together so well that it’s considered to be one of the best comedies ever made.
REVIEW: Cleese named his character Archie Leach because he figured this would be the closest he’d ever get to playing a Cary Grant type of role. What’s surprising is that he basically gave himself the “straight man” role in the film, and that even came as a surprise to Cleese himself. When the cast got together for a read-through of the script before filming began, all of the characters and performances worked except for Cleese’s read of Archie. He came to realize that he couldn’t try to push the character over-the-top to make him funnier than he was on the page, but instead had to step back and be a more grounded character in the middle of the madness caused by Kline and Palin’s characters. Which isn’t to say that Cleese doesn’t get any laughs in the movie, just that his comedic moments are more low-key than the antics around him.
Archie is a stuffy fellow with a soul-crushing home life; he’s married to a woman who barely pays any attention to him, and they have a spoiled teenage daughter, played by Cleese’s own daughter Cynthia. So when Wanda shows an interest in him, he doesn’t realize he’s being tricked in a quest to find the diamonds, he just immediately falls head-over-heels. This puts him into some bad situations that are very amusing to watch play out, including a few scenes where people walk in on him while he’s trying to romance Wanda. He happens to be completely nude in one of those scenes – and Cleese wasn’t originally supposed to be the character who is caught naked, he had initially written the scene for Wanda. Not interested in doing nudity again after Trading Places, Curtis convinced him to undress instead.
Archie is cheating on his wife to hook up with Wanda, none of the characters in this movie are without their flaws, but we feel sorry for him at the same time because we know he’s being conned. Not to mention the amount of stress and humiliation the tryst causes for him, even leading to a moment where he gets knocked unconscious while staging a robbery of his own house. You can’t say he doesn’t put effort into this affair.
As funny as the scenes with Archie are, Kline and Palin really do run away with the show. Kline’s unforgettable performance as the British-hating, armpit-sniffing, idiotic Otto is so energetic and over-the-top that it’s almost exhausting to watch… and you might get exhausted from laughing at the character’s stupidity. It’s a terrific comedic performance that’s made all the more impressive by the fact that Kline was racked with anxiety throughout the shoot, as he never felt comfortable with what he was doing. That discomfort was worth it, because he won a Best Supporting Oscar for this role, beating out the likes of Martin Landau, Dean Stockwell, River Phoenix, and Ealing comedy veteran Alec Guinness.
The funniest moments Curtis gets are connected to Otto’s buffoonery, as we see that she gets extremely turned on whenever she hears a language other than English being spoken. Otto manipulates this by pretending to be fluent in Italian, even though most of the words he knows are lifted from restaurant menus. Who knew talk of eggplant parmesan could be so arousing?
Some viewers may not appreciate that A Fish Called Wanda attempts to get a lot of laughs out of Ken’s stutter, which gets better and worse depending on how stressed the character is feeling in the moment. Palin’s father had what he described as a “serious and disabling stammer”, so he worked some of his father’s issues into the performance. When confronted about the problem of playing a stutter for laughs, Palin was inspired to open the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children, which is now one of the premier treatment centers in the world for childhood stuttering.
Since this movie has a primarily British cast and came from a British writer and director, the producers were worried that audiences outside of England wouldn’t be receptive to its humor, and co-producer Michael Shamberg, who was an American, went through the script to make sure there wouldn’t be any jokes that might be considered “too British”. While he was doing that, he certainly didn’t remove any of the jokes that might be considered too dark, and that did lead to some trouble when the film was in post-production.
Ken has a subplot that involves him trying to assassinate an old lady named Eileen Coady, played by Patricia Hayes, who was nearly eighty years old at the time of filming. As if that weren’t already dark enough, the humor of the situation comes from the fact that Ken repeatedly fails, and instead of killing the old lady he accidentally kills one of her Yorkshire terriers on each attempt. Yes, the movie wants you to laugh at the sight of adorable little dogs meeting an untimely end, on three different occasions. This wouldn’t work at all if the character causing the deaths of the dogs was Otto, since he despises animals so much that he refers to them all as insects. It’s funny because Ken is an animal lover; he likes animals better than humans, even has an anti-animal cruelty poster hanging on the wall in his apartment, and here he is killing dog after dog. He’s more appalled and devastated by this than even the most disapproving viewer would be.
Dogs aren’t the only animals killed in the name of comedy in A Fish Called Wanda. There’s also a sequence where Otto tries to torture information out of Ken by eating the fish from his fish tank one-by-one. Of course, no animals were actually harmed in the making of the film. When Otto sticks the Wanda fish in his mouth, it was reportedly made of Jell-O, while the other fish we see him chewing on were made of a rubbery substance that tasted so bad, Kline offered to eat real fish in the scene just so he wouldn’t have that taste in his mouth anymore. Otto gets his comeuppance for the fish slaughter – he’s the one who gets run over by a steamroller.
There were objections when a test screening audience saw all of this death and torture, especially since Crichton did not hold back when showing the deaths of the dogs. The first cut of the film had Yorkshire blood and guts splattered across the screen. Viewers were so disgusted, the crew had to go back for reshoots to tone down the way the deaths were presented, making them more cartoonish. This change was beneficial to the movie, as the dog death scenes are hilarious as a result, with one shot of a run-over pooch looking like it came straight out of Looney Tunes.
The torture sequence was also toned down, and Otto was spared thanks to the testing process. Getting run over by the steamroller was supposed to kill him, as it would. But audience members didn’t want him to die, so a moment was added to assure us that he survived getting flattened, unlike Eileen Coady’s dogs.
The most surprising request made by people who saw the test screening was that they wanted a “happily ever after” ending for Archie and Wanda. Although Wanda was just trying to get information out of Archie and it’s played that way for most of the movie, the audience actually fell for Wanda’s act along with Archie and decided their relationship needed to be real. A couple changes were made to twist the situation in that direction, but Curtis was not happy about this, feeling like they were wimping out by giving Archie a happy ending. An ending where we know Archie is going to get screwed over as soon as the credits start rolling seems much more fitting for the movie than the one it ended up with, but at least they made the test screening audience happy.
While the very ending of the film feels like a misstep, the final version of A Fish Called Wanda – honed through test screenings, reshoots, and an editing process that saw around twenty minutes being whittled out of the running time – is a great, fast-paced comedy that’s fun to watch despite being about awful people. Carried by strong performances, it amuses with some bedroom farce type material and also wrings laughs out of situations you wouldn’t typically expect to laugh at. All the time Cleese and Crichton spent on the script paid off, and not just because they had the script in near-perfect shape by the time filming began. That script also earned them an Academy Award nomination and served as the foundation of a hit movie.
LEGACY/NOW: Made on a budget of eight million dollars,A Fish Called Wanda ended up earning nearly one hundred and ninety million at the global box office when it was released in 1988, then went on to become the number one VHS rental of 1989 in the US. In addition to all the financial success, it also received a lot of critical praise, and then started racking up the award nominations. Charles Crichton, the director the studio had been worried about before production began, was nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards… but the only Oscar the movie won went to Kevin Kline. There were also Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, and not just for the leads – Maria Aitken received a BAFTA nomination for her role as Archie’s wife Wendy. She didn’t win in her category, but Cleese and Palin both won BAFTA awards.
Over the years, A Fish Called Wanda has been featured on multiple lists of the best comedies of all time, including lists published by the American Film Institute, the British Film Institute, Premiere magazine, and Empire.
But perhaps the greatest honor the film has ever been given is the fact that it actually caused a man to laugh himself to death. That man was Doctor Ole Bentzen, a 56-year-old Danish audiologist who went to see A Fish Called Wanda in 1989 and laughed so hard at the Otto and Ken torture scene that he went into cardiac arrest and died right there in the theatre. As part of the torture, Otto sticks fries – or chips, as they’re called in England – into Ken’s nostrils, and the sight of this was reportedly what sent Doctor Bentzen over the edge, as it reminded him of a time he and his family goofed around and stuck cauliflower in their nostrils at the dinner table. Cleese himself thought the torture scene was the funniest thing he had ever seen, but he couldn’t have expected that it would be lethally amusing. The filmmakers considered getting in contact with Bentzen’s family and asking if they could mention his death in the marketing, but ultimately decided it would be in poor taste. And the movie did just fine without capitalizing on the fact that it caused someone to laugh themselves to death.
With all this success, it makes sense that there was a follow-up of sorts. The 1997 film Fierce Creatures isn’t a sequel, but it did bring John Cleese, Michael Palin, Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, Maria Aitken, and Cynthia Cleese back together. Charles Crichton sat that one out, having retired in 1988 – and lucky for him, because Fierce Creatures didn’t do very well at the box office or with critics. Cleese would go on to say that he regretted making the movie at all.
Fierce Creatures didn’t work, but A Fish Called Wanda still holds up as a comedy that’s worth seeking out more than thirty years after its release and that unfortunate death. Just a word of warning: when you watch it, be careful not to laugh too hard.
Switching back over to horror, the latest Best Horror Movie You Never Saw script I wrote was on the 1986 horror comedy Night of the Creeps. The feature debut of The Monster Squad director Fred Dekker:
Night of the Creeps script:
Do you like movies with zombies, parasitic aliens, spaceships, axe-wielding slashers, hard-boiled detectives, cryogenically frozen monsters, or college campus hijinks? Then you’d probably love the movie Fred Dekker made his directorial debut with, because it takes all of those elements and blends them together into one 90-minute thrill ride. The movie is the 1986 cult classic Night of the Creeps, and it happens to be the best horror movie you never saw.
Fred Dekker earned his first screen credit by coming up with the story for the 1985 film House, which was directed by genre regular Steve Miner from a screenplay by Dekker’s college roommate Ethan Wiley. But beyond House, Dekker wasn’t having much luck getting projects off the ground. He wrote a time-travel epic called The Forever Factor that he said was rewritten to death and never made it into production. He and Miner developed an American Godzilla movie that ended up falling apart, and Dekker made an unsuccessful run at the chance to write the sequel to the horror sci-fi classic Alien, with the gig going to James Cameron instead. Having nothing to lose, he sent out his horror-comedy script Night of the Creeps with himself attached as a director, and TriStar Pictures actually took a chance on letting him make the movie.
Armed with a budget of $5 million, Dekker assembled a cast headed by Tom Atkins as the tough but traumatized Detective Ray Cameron, a role that cemented Atkins as a genre icon. When slug-like alien parasites start turning co-eds on the local college campus into mindless zombies, Cameron realizes that this zombie outbreak has something to do with the night back in 1959 when his ex-girlfriend was murdered by an axe-wielding mental patient. The connection is that while Cameron’s ex was being murdered by the maniac, her date that night discovered a canister that fell from the sky, like The Blob. But instead of a deadly ooze, this canister contained one of those alien parasites, which leapt into his mouth and took over his body. His alien-controlled body was then captured and put in cryostasis in a secret lab at Corman University, named after legendary producer Roger Corman, one of the many genre filmmakers who get name-checked in the movie.
Twenty-seven years later, college kids Chris, played by Jason Lively, and his best friend JC, played by Steve Marshall, accidentally let the walking corpse and the quickly multiplying space slugs out of their icy tube while pulling a prank meant to get them into a fraternity—a fraternity they wouldn’t really fit into, especially since the most prominent member is the douchey Brad, played by Mama’s Family’s Alan Kaiser. Chris was hoping to impress his crush, Jill Whitlow, as sorority girl Cynthia, who happens to be dating Brad when Chris falls for her at first sight. Now, Cameron, Chris, Cynthia, and JC must figure out how to eradicate the college’s alien slug infestation. Unfortunately for many people on campus, the infestation gets way out of hand and really messes up plans for a school dance.
The idea for Night of the Creeps began with Detective Cameron’s catchphrase, which he says several times in the movie. Dekker imagined a tough-guy character answering the phone with “Thrill me,” and then built the Cameron character around that moment. He had previously created the college students Chris and JC for a short film, with the Chris character being heavily based on himself, and decided to mix them into whatever story Cameron could be part of. He then crafted the story by cobbling together every B-movie cliché he could think of: nerds, co-eds, wisecracking detectives, corny bit characters, slimy monsters, zombies, scum from outer space, and, as he described it, “the equivalent of throwing a bunch of different genres into a hockey rink and having them beat each other over the head.”
He apparently considered calling the script Sorority Girls vs. the Zombies at one point but ended up going with Night of the Creeps. On the set of the movie, he would jokingly refer to his film as “the last B-movie,” telling Fangoria that viewers wouldn’t need to see any more B-movies after this one because it pays homage to all of them. He added that he was attempting to make a stupid low-budget horror movie that would hopefully have characters people care about when they die. At the time, he also claimed that he wrote the screenplay in just one week, but in an interview 20 years later, he said it took him two weeks, and recently he admitted that writing the first draft took closer to three weeks to complete.
Night of the Creeps was filmed around the University of Southern California campus and inside an abandoned Woolworth’s building. Since Dekker was backed up by a solid cast and decent budget, had Steve Miner shooting the second unit for him, and could rely on an FX crew led by David B. Miller, who had worked on The Terminator, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, among other projects, they made it through principal photography without running into major issues. Problems didn’t arise until post-production. Once Dekker and editor Michael Annu started cutting footage, they discovered that the movie had a serious pacing issue, which the director says the studio railroaded him on. Disagreements over the pacing got so serious that an executive shut Dekker out of the editing room and did their own pass on the film. Dekker then watched the executive’s cut and approved anything about the film he didn’t hate.
The studio gave Dekker a lot of grief about the pacing at the time, but when he recorded the audio commentary for a DVD and Blu-ray release of Night of the Creeps 20 years later, he voiced his own displeasure with the pacing of certain scenes and sequences still in the final cut. He learned his lesson about making sure moments are paced right, and from this experience on, he kept a stopwatch with him on set and asked the actors to speed things up if a scene was taking too long.
The film ran into more trouble during a test screening, which Dekker described as disastrous. Reactions convinced TriStar that four or five days of reshoots were necessary to enhance the climactic action sequences. Dekker gave Cameron more cool things to do in his battle against the space-slug zombies and, at the suggestion of a studio executive, added a scene in which Chris and Cynthia, already armed with a shotgun and flamethrower, seek shelter in a tool shed and use other implements against the undead, notably a lawnmower—a precursor to the lawnmower sequence in Peter Jackson’s zombie movie Dead Alive. One thing that couldn’t be salvaged was Dekker’s preferred ending: a scene featuring a spaceship hovering over a graveyard. The special effects weren’t finished for the test screening, so viewers were confused by it, and TriStar ordered it be replaced by a jump-scare ending with a zombie dog puppet, which Dekker wasn’t happy with.
That dog ending was in the theatrical cut, which ended up being the cut put on VHS and LaserDisc. The TV cut had the spaceship ending with finished effects, and when Night of the Creeps came to DVD and Blu-ray, Dekker made sure the movie had the TV cut ending. The ending he wanted all along.
The effort to get the movie into the best condition didn’t pay off in 1986. TriStar had so little faith in Night of the Creeps that they gave it a limited regional release, playing in only 70 theaters scattered across the United States. Some of those areas didn’t even have the proper title; in Cincinnati, for example, Night of the Creeps was released as Homecoming Night. Because of this botched release strategy, the movie didn’t find its audience until it was on home video and began airing on cable. Once genre fans got the chance to see it, it quickly gained a cult following and remains beloved to this day.
The box-office failure of Night of the Creeps didn’t bother Dekker much because he was already working on his second feature, The Monster Squad, another movie we’ve covered in the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series. The director hated Night of the Creeps for years because he only saw its flaws. It took a long time for him to see the charm that won fans over. Both Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad are considered classics today and have legions of fans, but Dekker says Creeps reflects his personal aesthetic more, as executive producer Peter Hyams had a major influence on how much of The Monster Squad was shot. Dekker was calling his own shots on Night of the Creeps but wasn’t fully responsible for the final cut or the theatrical ending.
You can tell from the opening moments that Night of the Creeps is going to be an awesome movie. It begins on a spaceship with a quick action scene featuring a trio of funny-looking aliens. Dekker didn’t intend for these aliens to get a laugh, but it’s hard not to chuckle at the sight of them, and the director quickly realized that was a good thing. These creatures, as the first things the audience sees, give them permission to go along with the film’s humor and continue laughing throughout the running time.
One of the aliens is under the control of the slugs, and the other two try to stop it from launching the canister that contains one of the parasites into space. The aliens aren’t able to keep the canister on their ship, despite firing their laser guns at their zombified pal. The film then jumps to a great black-and-white sequence set in 1959, with both the canister and an escaped mental patient ruining a couple’s romantic night out.
It will take a while for Night of the Creeps to reach this level of excitement again once the story moves ahead to 1986. So, it’s understandable when you hear that Dekker still has issues with the pacing, but the film has an entertaining tone and likable characters that carry you through to the next sequences of action and horror. Dekker was able to achieve his goal of making sure the audience would care about Chris, J.C., and Cynthia, and Tom Atkins really steals the show with his performance as the wisecracking Detective Cameron. Cameron has a dark secret and becomes unhinged and suicidal when the infestation of space slugs causes that secret to resurface – literally. But he doesn’t allow his dark mood to stop him from continuing to drop amusing lines or from putting his all into wiping out zombies.
The zombie dog puppet may be disappointing to the director, and the aliens were unexpectedly funny, but overall David B. Miller and his crew did an incredible job with the film’s special effects, which are still nice to see all these years later. Night of the Creeps also wins points due to the fact that the J.C. character is unable to walk without using crutches, but Dekker didn’t make a huge deal about this in the story. It is addressed, but it’s taken as a fact about the character. When asked why he had J.C. use crutches, Dekker replied, “There’s no reason, except that we just don’t see it. You can make a movie with a character who’s handicapped without the story being about the fact that he’s handicapped.”
The opening scenes are a highlight, but there’s more fun to come as Night of the Creeps goes along. There’s a suspenseful scene where J.C. has a run-in with the space slugs in a restroom, and one of the best moments comes when Cameron is faced with the axe-wielding rotten corpse of the homicidal mental patient he executed 27 years before, now under the control of the alien parasites.
Then we get the big action sequence at the end, with a horde of zombies attacking the sorority house while Cameron, Chris, and Cynthia gun them down and blast them with the flamethrower. The movie’s low budget does show through in how simple the action is; viewers probably expect the action to take up more time and be more elaborate in a modern movie. You can see why the reshoots and the addition of the tool shed scene were absolutely necessary because the climax would feel underwhelming without them. But thankfully, the studio realized this aspect of the film needed to be enhanced before they released it. What’s in the finished film works quite well and is a lot of fun to watch.
Dekker has described Night of the Creeps as a strange little movie, saying that’s part of its charm. He isn’t sure what a modern viewer would make of it if they were just seeing it for the first time now, but he does feel that the movie holds up. He told the Dark Lord Bunnykins website that it has a resonance because “there are very likable characters, and it’s really kind of a crazy story. And it’s tough to go wrong with those two things.” Horror fans who have a love for 1980s genre movies, old-school practical effects, and B-movie clichés are really likely to have a blast with Night of the Creeps, whether they watched it for the first time in 1986 or 2022. And if you really want to be assured that this is a quality horror comedy, you don’t have to take our word for it – trust genre icon Tom Atkins, who ranks Night of the Creeps as his personal favorite of all the movies he’s made. Coming from an actor who’s been in such films as The Fog, Escape from New York, Creepshow, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Lethal Weapon, and Maniac Cop, among many others, it makes it clear that Night of the Creeps is something special.
And for the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie series, I wrote about the making of director Tom McLoughlin's amazing Friday the 13th sequel Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI. The movie I credit with making me a horror fan. McLoughlin saw this video and shared it while saying, "It's a 20 minute commitment to watch, but EVERYTHING you need to know is in it! I guess I'll never need to do another interview about Jason Lives again."
Jason Lives script:
Paramount Pictures tried to end the Friday the 13th franchise with the fourth film, The Final Chapter, in 1984. The movie did so well at the box office that they couldn’t resist continuing the series with A New Beginning the following year. Once again, they had a success on their hands – but the movie made substantially less money than its predecessor had, and the executives thought they knew why. The franchise had tried to move on without murderer Jason Voorhees, and the audience felt cheated. They wanted more Jason. So when development began on another sequel, there was only one mandate in place: Jason had to be brought back from the dead. Writer/director Tom McLoughlin was hired to resurrect the iconic slasher with Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI… and we’re here to tell you What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
When Paramount acquired the distribution rights to the independently-produced horror movie Friday the 13th, nobody expected greatness would come from this cheap little slasher. But the movie turned out to be a massive hit and kicked off a franchise that was a reliable money-maker for the studio throughout the 1980s. They could fund each sequel for a relatively small amount and then receive a great return on their investment. For example, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter had a budget of two-point-six million and made thirty-three million. That’s why we got A New Beginning, even though Jason Voorhees was killed off at the end of The Final Chapter and they meant for him to stay dead. They stuck to that: while A New Beginning does have a slasher wearing a hockey mask in it, it’s not Jason. It’s a copycat. The film was a bit cheaper than Part 4, with a two-point-two million dollar budget, but also had a slightly disappointing box office haul of twenty-two million. Since it made ten times its budget, Paramount still wanted to make a Part 6, but they knew they couldn’t make another movie like A New Beginning, which some found to be off-putting and sleazy. And they knew they couldn’t make another one of these movies without Jason.
Frank Mancuso Junior, the son of the president of Paramount at the time, was the executive who oversaw the franchise for the studio. He got his start on Fridays by taking a job as a production assistant on Friday the 13th Part 2, but ended up being promoted to associate producer by the time filming was over. He was the primary producer on Part III and The Final Chapter, then decided to take a step back from the movies after that. He remained involved as an executive producer and the rights holders, the people who had invested in the original movie, liked dealing with him, but starting with A New Beginning he wasn’t as hands-on as he had been on the previous two films. A New Beginning turned out to be his least favorite Friday of the Paramount era, but he felt they could turn things around with the next sequel and improve the box office.
Mancuso had been impressed by writer-director Tom McLoughlin’s feature debut, the low budget 1982 horror film One Dark Night, and the pair had nearly worked together on the comedic pseudo-slasher April Fool’s Day. Mancuso produced April Fool’s Day and McLoughlin was attached to direct the film at one point, but a shake-up at the studio resulted in him being replaced by When a Stranger Calls director Fred Walton. So Mancuso decided to offer the Friday the 13th Part VI writing and directing job to McLoughlin as a consolation prize for losing April Fool’s Day. The filmmaker wasn’t thrilled by the idea, because he wasn’t really a fan of slasher movies, but this was an offer he couldn’t refuse. The chance to not only write and direct a movie for a major studio, but a movie that was part of a popular franchise. He took the job… and then he had to catch up on the previous films, because he had only seen the first Friday the 13th. Paramount gave him a five movie private screening so he could see what he had missed.
Once McLoughlin had all the Friday knowledge he could get, Mancuso sent him off to write the script, and the only instruction he was given was to bring Jason back to life. Before McLoughlin got involved, there had been some consideration given to bringing A New Beginning actors Melanie Kinnaman and Shavar Ross back as their characters Pam and Reggie, and Ross had even been told that they wanted to kill him off in the opening scene. That was no longer on the table by the time McLoughlin started writing. He didn’t want to acknowledge a lot from A New Beginning anyway, but that film did present a logic hurdle for him to overcome: in A New Beginning, it’s said that Jason’s body was cremated. How could they bring him back from that? The explanation he found was to say that there had been a plan to cremate Jason, but then somebody paid off city officials to have him buried instead. In the final scene of the movie, we would find out this mysterious person was Jason’s father, who was envisioned as being similar to the mystic Rasputin. The appearance of Jason’s father was something Mancuso vetoed immediately, as this was a character he had zero interest in introducing or having to deal with. So in the finished film there’s no mention of the fact that Jason was said to have been cremated. He’s buried in a cemetery and you just have to brush aside this continuity discrepancy.
Having an intact corpse to work with, McLoughlin was able to turn to a classic for the method of resurrection. Just like Frankenstein’s Monster, Jason would be revived through a lightning strike. It sounds ridiculous, but it works – because if it’s good enough for Boris Karloff, it’s good enough for Jason Voorhees. The fact that our killer is a re-animated corpse also gave McLoughlin the chance to write a slasher he could feel better about putting out into the world, because he imagined that Jason would emerge from his grave more powerful than ever before. His issue with slashers was the fact that the violent acts in these movies could so easily be imitated by people in real life. So for the most part, his Jason doesn’t just go around stabbing people like any unhinged viewer would be able to. He puts his increased strength to use. The deaths in Jason Lives – or, as McLoughlin’s initial treatment was titled, Jason Has Risen – include a heart being ripped out, a head being twisted off, a head being crushed in Jason’s bare hands, a person being folded in half, a face being pushed through the side of an RV, and three people being decapitated with one swing of a machete. The kills are over-the-top, but highly entertaining and satisfying.
A couple of the kills did have to be re-thought between the treatment and the script. Trying to figure out how to equip Jason with multiple weapons he could use throughout the film, McLoughlin decided he would come across a group of hunters in the woods, and one of these hunters would be a really macho guy who carried all sorts of accessories with him. A machete, a hunting knife, darts… and in the treatment, the guy was even carrying an Uzi. The idea was that Jason was going to take the Uzi and use it to open fire on a young couple in an RV. After writing that, McLoughlin realized these murders would be too easy to imitate, it was too close to real world violence. So he took the Uzi out of the story and made the people Jason comes across in the woods a group playing paintball.
In addition to making the kills more unrealistic, McLoughlin also made this slasher more palatable to himself by increasing the humor. He put a lot of comedy into Jason Lives, from character interactions to sight gags and a moment where a cemetery caretaker breaks the fourth wall, looks right into the camera and says, “Some folks have a strange idea of entertainment.” There’s a self-referential edge to the film, with one character noting that she has “seen enough horror movies to know that any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly”, and nods to genre directors and actors: Sean S. Cunningham, John Carpenter, Karloff. Mick Garris hadn’t directed a movie yet at the time, but he got a character named after him because he was friends with McLoughlin. The movie even has a parody of the double-oh-seven gun barrel, with Jason standing in for James Bond. McLoughlin cleared this humorous approach with Mancuso before he started writing and found that the executive was open to taking the franchise in different directions and trying different styles. As long as he didn’t make fun of Jason, he was free to make his Friday more comedic. He followed that rule. While the movie around Jason is rather lighthearted and amusing, Jason himself is a terrifying, unstoppable force.
McLoughlin was given an incredible amount of creative control. Aside from the Uzi change he made himself and the removal of Jason’s father, the film ended up being very close to the treatment he wrote at the start of the process. The story he came up with centers on Tommy Jarvis, a lead character introduced as a twelve-year-old in The Final Chapter. Tommy is the one who put Jason down with multiple swings of a machete at the end of that film – and it traumatized him so badly that A New Beginning, which aged him up several years, showed that he had spent time in mental health institutions. Those movies seemed to be building up to Tommy taking over as the slasher in this franchise, which probably would have been the case if Paramount hadn’t seen the financial benefit of bringing Jason back. Instead, McLoughlin’s film finds that Tommy is determined to get over the trauma Jason caused him, and he figures the way to do that is to dig up Jason’s corpse and burn it.
Poor, misguided Tommy. Jason is dead and at peace down in that grave. But when Tommy unearths him and the lightning strikes, he wakes up very angry and resumes his killing spree. The town of Crystal Lake has tried to put the Voorhees nightmare behind them, the place has even been renamed Forest Green. The local youths have been told Jason was just a legend, and the camp is open for business. Now history’s repeating itself, as Jason slashes his way from the cemetery back to the campground. Tommy tries to get the town sheriff to believe that Jason’s back, but he doesn’t have much credibility. The only ally he’s able to get is the sheriff’s rebellious daughter Megan. It all builds up to a rematch between Tommy and Jason in the waters of Crystal Lake… Because now that McLoughlin had made Jason a fully, very obviously supernatural being, he thought the character should have some kind of monster mythology as well. He has Tommy do research in occult books, where he discovers that the only way to stop Jason now is to put him to rest in the place where he originally died. That would be Crystal Lake, where he drowned as a child in 1957.
So we have another movie about Jason killing a bunch of people, but the writer-director didn’t want to give the audience the same old thing all over again. He built his script around elements that hadn’t been seen in previous Fridays. An underwater fight scene. A car chase sequence where Tommy and Megan are trying to escape from the sheriff and his officers. A spectacular RV crash that ends with one of the most iconic shots of Jason we’ve ever seen. A fully functional camp populated by children, as McLoughlin thought having kids present would raise the stakes.
The previous three Fridays had been filmed in California, but the unions there were becoming very unhappy about these studio-funded non-union shoots, so Jason Lives was sent off to the “right to work” state of Georgia, which also gave them more flexibility with the shooting hours of the young kids playing the campers. To hide from unions and curious fans, the film was shot under the title Aladdin Sane, taken from a David Bowie album. The production was based in the town of Covington, not far from Atlanta, and many other horror movies have been shot in that area over the years, like Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, Doctor Sleep, Freaky, and Fear Street 1978.
Tommy Jarvis had been played by Corey Feldman in The Final Chapter and by John Shepherd in A New Beginning, and it was assumed that Shepherd would be back as Tommy for Jason Lives. But Shepherd was at a crossroads in his life, not sure if he should continue acting or go to seminary school, and he decided he didn’t want to do another slasher movie. So the role went to Thom Mathews, who had recently caught attention for his part in The Return of the Living Dead. McLoughlin was able to assemble a really good cast for his movie, including David Kagen as the tough, disbelieving Sheriff Mike Garris; Vincent Guastaferro as the deputy who’s proud of his new laser scope; Jennifer Cooke as the sheriff’s daughter and Tommy’s love interest Megan; Kerry Noonan, Renee Jones, and John Travolta’s nephew Tom Fridley as Megan’s fellow camp counselors; Tony Goldwyn in his first screen role as an unlucky victim; McLoughlin’s then-wife Nancy as another victim; child actress Courtney Vickery as a camper who’s aware of Jason’s presence at the camp; Welcome Back Kotter’s Ron Palillo as a friend of Tommy’s; Darcy DeMoss, who had nearly been in A New Beginning, as the girl whose face gets smashed into the RV wall. The list goes on, because you need a lot of victims in a Friday the 13th, and this is a standout slasher movie because McLoughlin cast good actors and gave them good dialogue to deliver. He very effectively made us like and care about many of the characters.
The role of Jason was offered to The Final Chapter’s Ted White, but he hadn’t been too enthusiastic about playing Jason in the first place and turned down the chance to come back. So the filmmakers turned to stunt coordinator Dan Bradley, who still works in stunts to this day and has also become a very successful second unit director, handling the action scenes on Bond, Bourne, and superhero movies. Unfortunately, Bradley would get fired from playing Jason because the producers didn’t like his build. According to people involved with the production, he had put on some weight between the time he was hired and when he reported to set for the scene where Jason kills the paintballers. His scene is still in the movie and he’s great in it, but the higher-ups weren’t pleased and he got the boot. His replacement was the runner-up who had been passed over because he didn’t have any film experience: nightclub manager C.J. Graham, who had been an infantry platoon sergeant in the U.S. Army.
Graham came to the filmmakers’ attention because an illusionist performing at his nightclub had a moment in his act where Jason comes busting through a wall, so he put Graham in the Jason costume. That illusionist happened to be a friend of Jason Lives special effects artist Martin Becker. Becker saw the act with Graham as Jason and suggested he be cast in the movie. McLoughlin found Graham to be a great performer to work with, because he followed direction perfectly. Since Jason is now a rotting-but-walking corpse, the director wanted him to move differently than he ever had before, more robotically. Graham nailed that sort of movement, and while appearing calm and methodical he also comes off as being very sinister.
You can spot Bradley in the movie because, aside from a shot of Graham holding a severed arm, he is Jason in the daylight scenes. If it’s night, it’s Graham. And there’s a whole lot of night in the movie; the production took place over six weeks of night shoots during winter months. That had to be a grueling schedule for the cast and crew, and those nights weren’t always easy. Nancy McLoughlin especially had it tough during the filming of her death scene. First, she was nearly impaled when a spear didn’t break through a windshield in the way everyone expected it to. Then she had to stick her head into a water puddle in the middle of a cold night and found that the oxygen regulator she had been provided with wasn’t working properly. So she just had to hold her breath.
The climactic fight scene in the lake involving Jason, Tommy, and Megan was so complicated that it was filmed in three different locations. The shots above the water were done in a lake in Georgia, where C.J. Graham would get covered in leeches while submerged. Most of the underwater shots were done in a temperature controlled pool in California – but the owners of the pool wouldn’t let McLoughlin film the moment where Jason’s head gets chewed up by a boat’s outboard motor there. So McLoughlin went over to his parents’ house and filmed that shot in their pool. The gore from Jason’s damaged head ended up wrecking the pool’s filtration system, so it turns out the other pool owners were right to not want that in their water.
Despite any issues, McLoughlin and his cast and crew made magic on the days and nights they were working on Jason Lives, delivering a fun, fast-paced, clever Friday the 13th movie with great production value. Cinematographer Jon Kranhouse helped McLoughlin make an awesome-looking movie that appears to be much bigger than its three million dollar budget.
Bringing the film in on budget was a struggle. The producer in charge of the cash flow was Don Behrns, who didn’t seem to be popular with McLoughlin or the crew. It has been said that he was a cheapskate who rushed the filming of certain moments and denied equipment requests from McLoughlin, making the director re-think how to shoot some scenes. He was so disliked that the director and crew decided to get some revenge on the night they filmed the RV crash. Behrns had reserved the swamp cooler on top of the vehicle for himself, he wanted that to be removed from the RV before the stunt so he could put it on his own RV. The crew chose not to remove the swamp cooler, and in the finished film you can see it getting destroyed, tumbling down the road as the RV flips over.
Ready to give McLoughlin more grief was the ratings board, known for having issues with the Friday the 13th films. Having dealt with them several times by this point, Mancuso started preparing for the rating showdown as early as the script stage, advising McLoughlin to rework kills he knew the ratings board would object to. The special effects artists at Reel EFX also cut back on some planned effects because Mancuso told them, “It’ll never make it into the movie, so don’t try.” Even then, McLoughlin shot three versions of some kills, ranging from bloodshed he judged to be PG-13 level to gore that was certain to be cut out. And while they knew the ratings board was going to be a pain, the movie still ended up with three more kills than McLoughlin had intended. After watching an early cut of the film, Mancuso decided they needed to do reshoots to add in some extra kills. The scene where the drunken cemetery caretaker played by Bob Larkin and the newly engaged couple played by Roger Rose and Vincent Guastaferro’s wife Cynthia Kania get killed in the woods was added during post-production. The caretaker had been meant to survive the movie, and would have interacted with Jason’s father in that discarded ending, and the engaged couple was added in just to be killed. The death of camp counselor Sissy, played by Renee Jones, was also enhanced with additional photography. Her death had been entirely off screen, but they added in a moment where we see Jason twisting her head off. There was an elaborate special effect done to show her head being removed, but the ratings board made sure that was cut.
McLoughlin was a little bummed that Mancuso had him add kills, because he wanted the total body count to be thirteen. He thought that would be the perfect number. There’s some questionable math at work here, though, because those three added kills didn’t boost the film to a total of sixteen deaths. There are eighteen kills in Jason Lives.
The ratings board made them trim down some of those kills, and even with all the self-censorship that had been done before the movie was screened for them, they still had plenty of problems with it. McLoughlin has said the movie had to be shown to the ratings board and the death scenes had to be altered nine times before it finally got an R rating.
The deaths were the only things the ratings board could have found objectionable with this sequel, as it was the first and to this day remains the only Friday the 13th movie that doesn’t have any nudity. Fridley and DeMoss do have a sex scene, but nothing is revealed. The producers encouraged McLoughlin to ask DeMoss to take her top off for the sex scene on the day it was filmed, but she declined. McLoughlin wasn’t interested in playing into slasher movie clichés anyway; he wasn’t into the “sex equals death” concept, and this isn’t a slasher that directly punishes characters for smoking weed or having premarital sex like so many other movies do.
McLoughlin wanted to give the audience a thrill ride, an old fashioned popcorn horror movie with a comic sweetness, a legitimate storyline, and likeable characters – and he was successful in achieving this. His movie was made all the more fun with the addition of music from legendary rocker Alice Cooper. There are three Alice Cooper songs on the soundtrack: “Teenage Frankenstein”, “Hard Rock Summer”, and one that was written specifically about Jason Voorhees and plays over the end credits. Jason and Alice shared the screen in the video for this song, “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)”. Beyond the rock music, there’s also – for the sixth movie in a row – a terrific score from Harry Manfredini.
Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (which is, by the way, how the title appears on screen, rather than being Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives) had all the elements in place to give fans a great time… but unfortunately, fewer of them turned out to see the movie than had come out to see any previous Friday. Released on August 1st, 1986, Jason Lives opened at number two at the box office, coming in behind Aliens, which had just been released two weeks earlier and drew a lot of horror fans away from Jason’s return. Jason Lives took another hit the following weekend when David Cronenberg’s The Fly showed up to take more attention away from it. This sequel was supposed to be a rebound from A New Beginning’s disappointing twenty-two million, but instead it made even less. Jason Lives ended up with a box office haul of just over nineteen million.
The numbers weren’t what Paramount was hoping for, but again there was enough return on investment that they decided to move ahead with another sequel. Mancuso offered McLoughlin the chance to direct Part 7 – but McLoughlin felt he had already put all of his good ideas into Part 6. Mancuso told him there was a chance that wouldn’t be an issue, because the seventh film might not be just another Jason movie: they were in talks with New Line Cinema to do a crossover with that company’s horror icon. They were talking about making Freddy vs. Jason. Unfortunately, Mancuso had to come back to him soon after and tell him that the deal with New Line couldn’t be worked out. Almost twenty years went by before Freddy vs. Jason was actually made. With that crossover no longer an option, McLoughlin pitched one of a different sort, one that could take the Friday the 13th franchise further into comedic territory than Jason Lives had gone. In the tradition of Abbott and Costello’s encounters with the Universal Monsters, McLoughlin suggested they do Cheech and Chong Meet Jason, with Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong playing stoner camp counselors. Paramount didn’t go for it, and Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood was made without McLoughlin’s involvement… so we can only imagine what it would be like to see Cheech and Chong cross paths with Jason.
The underwhelming box office does not at all reflect the quality of Jason Lives. This was a rare Friday the 13th that actually got some good reviews from critics, and it’s widely considered to be one of the best films in the franchise. It’s a favorite among fans, and screenwriter Kevin Williamson even told McLoughlin that the film’s self-referential, humorous tone was a source of inspiration when he was writing Scream. It didn’t get the reception it deserved in 1986, and the competition it faced definitely had an impact, but it all worked out in the long run. McLoughlin brought Jason Voorhees back from the dead, and it was a triumphant return.
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals and JoBlo Originals!
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