Video Scripts: The Rock, Witchboard, and Friday the 13th Part 2
Sharing three more videos Cody wrote for JoBlo Originals and JoBlo Horror Originals.
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. Recently I started writing video scripts for the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel as well. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
Three more videos that I have written the scripts for can be seen below; one for the JoBlo Originals channel and the other two for JoBlo Horror Originals.
For the Revisited series, I took a look back at the awesome 1996 action movie The Rock:
The Rock script:
INTRO: Hollywood Pictures was a relatively short-lived production and distribution division of Disney, and it did not have a good reputation. Their logo showed an image of the sphinx, and the saying going around was, “If it’s the sphinx, it stinks!” There were some notable exceptions to that rule, though. One of those exceptions was the 1996 action film The Rock, which gave a sixty-five year old Sean Connery the chance to be a badass again, and boosted Nicolas Cage from award-winning character actor to movie star status. That’s why we feel The Rock is worth being Revisited.
SET-UP: Built on the foundation of a spec script written by David Weisberg and Douglas S. Cook, The Rock is essentially another variation on Die Hard. You could call this one “Die Hard on Alcatraz”. But director Michael Bay, the film’s lead cast members, and a series of mostly uncredited script doctors – including Quentin Tarantino, who had just won an Oscar for the Pulp Fiction screenplay, and Aaron Sorkin, who would go on to win an Oscar for writing The Social Network – were able to shape it into something special. The set-up is familiar, but the execution is uniquely entertaining.
Bay received a lot of attention for his commercial and music video work before making his feature directorial debut with the 1995 buddy cop movie Bad Boys. In fact, Bad Boys producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson first took note of his skills five years earlier, when he shot a video for their movie Days of Thunder. Bay was offered the chance to direct The Rock around the time he wrapped production on Bad Boys, but he turned it down. The way the story was told just didn’t work for him. Some months later, Bruckheimer and Simpson came on board to produce The Rock, and Bay got the offer again – reportedly after Tony Scott had passed on it in favor of directing The Fan. Now that his Bad Boys producers were involved, Bay decided to take the job… and to start figuring out how to get the script into shape.
The story Weisberg and Cook came up with begins with a platoon of disgruntled Marines raiding a military base and stealing fifteen rockets filled with VX poison gas, a highly lethal substance that causes a gruesome death for anyone who’s exposed to it. They then take control of Alcatraz Island, using the old prison as their base and locking more than eighty civilians in the cells. The rockets are aimed at the San Francisco Bay area; if their demands aren’t met in forty-eight hours, San Francisco is toast. With most countermeasures off the table for one reason or another, the Department of Defense and the FBI decide that the most viable option to deal with this situation is to infiltrate Alcatraz. A team will have to sneak onto the island through the tunnels beneath the prison – a team that will include the FBI’s best chemical expert and another person who doesn’t officially exist. Someone who has made his way through those tunnels before. The only prisoner to ever successfully escape from Alcatraz.
There were cool ideas in Weisberg and Cook’s script, but Bay wanted rewrites to make it smarter and more serious. He wanted his film to show how the government would really handle a situation like this. The first person hired to revise the script was TV veteran Mark Rosner, and Bay felt his work took the script too far into serious, technical territory. He compared the Rosner draft to an earlier Bruckheimer and Simpson production, Crimson Tide, and while that movie had been a box office success, he wanted his movie to have a broader appeal than Crimson Tide had. So Die Hard with a Vengeance writer Jonathan Hensleigh was brought in. It’s Hensleigh that Bay credits with writing the movie he made. Unfortunately, the Writers Guild saw it differently. On the finished film, the only credited writers are Weisberg, Cook, and Rosner. Bay said it was a travesty that Hensleigh didn’t receive credit and called the guild’s arbitration process a sham. According to him, the only reason Rosner was credited over Hensleigh was because Rosner was the first person to do a rewrite.
It’s tough to say who wrote what in the movie, but we do know that the script wasn’t complete by the time filming began. They had a June 1996 release date locked in place, they needed to get this thing rolling. Hensleigh and other writers would continue working on the script throughout production, with some characters undergoing substantial changes at the request of the actors that were cast in the roles. The biggest changes were made to the FBI’s chemical expert – a role that was once offered to Arnold Schwarzenegger, but ended up being played by Nicolas Cage in his action movie debut.
It would seem to make more sense if Schwarzenegger had been offered the role Connery played, the man who escaped from Alcatraz, but Arnie himself said it was the Cage role. In earlier drafts, the character would have been more fitting for him. He started out as Bill Goodspeed, an FBI agent who was stuck at a desk job but really wanted to be out there in the field. If the character was a frustrated man of action, Schwarzenegger could have played it well – but he didn’t want to do the movie because the script was a mess when he got his hands on it. He said it was eighty pages with a lot of handwriting and scribbles on it. So he turned down The Rock, a decision he said he ended up regretting. But it would not have been the same movie if he had played this Bill Goodspeed guy.
Cage had been told that he was too quirky to star in an action movie. Even at that point, he had already been told again and again in his career that his acting choices were crazy, wrong, off beat, too off the wall. But he wanted to work with Bruckheimer and Simpson, and when he was given the chance he was also able to prove that he could still make his quirky choices while starring in an action blockbuster. Bruckheimer welcomed his ideas. Bay encouraged them. So he basically rebuilt the Goodspeed character from the ground up, starting with a name change. Cage doesn’t play Bill Goodspeed, his name is Stanley Godspeed. And Stanley is perfectly happy remaining in the office. He doesn’t want to be a field agent. Cage met with a real chemical expert who had a sad look in his eye while describing how deadly a certain poison could be. That person’s demeanor inspired the addition of Stanley being wary of bringing children into such a dangerous world – a feeling he expresses right before his girlfriend, played by Vanessa Marcil, tells him she’s pregnant. A line where Stanley references the Elton John song “Rocket Man” right before killing a villain with a rocket made Cage decide to make the character a music fan. He prefers vinyl over CDs, he’s a Beatlemaniac, he mentions “Superfreak” and grunge. Cage also refused to swear as the character, replacing vulgarity with terms like “A-hole”, “Gee whiz”, “Gosh”, and “Zeus’s butthole”. He saves his swears for special moments near the end. A lot of what makes Stanley Goodspeed so much fun to watch are things that Cage specifically brought to the movie.
The man who escaped from Alcatraz is John Patrick Mason, a character who was similarly reworked when Sean Connery showed interest. It has been suggested that Connery was looking for an action project in response to the excitement surrounding the return of James Bond in 1995’s GoldenEye, Pierce Brosnan’s debut as the character. Whether that was part of his decision-making or not, Connery did confide in Bay during filming that it felt good to get to kick some ass again. Connery had a writing duo brought in to work on the script even before he had officially signed on. Those writers were Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, who had previously done unscripted work on his rogue James Bond movie Never Say Never Again a decade before. Connery wanted them to punch up Mason’s dialogue, add some humor, and make the character more British. They also deepened Mason’s back story, putting some Bondian touches in there, like saying he was in British Intelligence. One thing the producers told them not to touch was the action sequences, and they weren’t interested in writing those anyway.
Mason’s reason for being imprisoned also came from Connery. We find out that Mason has been locked up for more than thirty years because he stole J. Edgar Hoover’s top secret microfilm files. Files that contain information not only on prominent Americans and Europeans, but also information on the alien landing at Roswell and the truth about the JFK assassination. He never turned over the microfilm, so he was never released even though he was never put on trial. And since he has so much information, the FBI decided to cover up his existence. He was sent to Alcatraz in 1962, but moved elsewhere after briefly escaping in ’63. He escaped again in the ‘70s, was caught again. He did have enough time to impregnate a woman he met in a bar after a Led Zeppelin concert, though. And the fact that he has a twenty-year-old daughter living in San Francisco gives him an emotional connection to the Alcatraz terrorist situation. Having a scene where catches up with his daughter, played by Claire Forlani, right before he returns to the island was a very smart choice.
Once the La Frenais and Clement revision was done, Connery officially signed on to not only star in The Rock, but also receive an executive producer credit on it.
The group of Marines who take over Alcatraz are led by General Francis X. Hummel, a highly decorated war hero, a veteran of multiple wars. He has even carried out missions the government has never admitted to. Over the years, eighty-three Marines have died under his command, but since they were on secret missions their families were lied to and denied compensation. The men weren’t given military burials. Hummel is doing this to right that wrong; he’s demanding a hundred million dollars, and eighty-three million of that is meant to go to the families of the Marines who were killed in action. It’s a noble objective, but he’s breaking laws and threatening innocent lives to get there. Ed Harris was cast to play Hummel, and he could sympathize with his character. The sympathetic aspect of Hummel was played up in the movie, and while Bay says it wasn’t fully explored, it does come through. It becomes clear to the viewer that Hummel doesn’t really want anyone to get hurt – but he has taken things so far that people do get hurt. They get killed. And there are members of his team who are just fine with causing the amount of death and destruction Hummel has threatened to cause but never intended to go through with.
REVIEW: There’s a reason for the saying about too many cooks. Often when a script has been assembled by multiple writers and there are suggestions coming in from every direction, you end up with a muddled mess. But The Rock is a great example of a strong collaborative effort. Somehow this mixture of ideas worked out and resulted in a really cool action movie with some admirable character work in the middle of the mayhem. What reached the screen may not have been what Weisberg and Cook originally envisioned, but it is a blast.
Bay has built a career on dazzling audiences with frenetic action sequences, and his skills in that department are already on full display in this movie. When action breaks out in The Rock – and it does frequently – it’s fast-moving, hard-hitting, and exciting.
There was a version of this movie that had less action; it was shown to a test screening without the Ferrari versus Humvee car chase through the streets of San Francisco. Bay felt it was important to have a car chase in the film at that point because there is a long stretch of movie that focuses on first Goodspeed and then Mason being recruited into the Alcatraz mission. It especially takes a while to convince Mason that he should be a part of this. When the movie was shown without the chase, Bay was proven right – things got dull without it. It needed some action in there, and he inserted this vehicular madness at just the right time.
It was during the filming of the chase that Bay nearly got in trouble from Disney for falling behind schedule. He was taking too long with it. He was called in for a meeting where he was sure he was going to get a stern talking to… but luckily, Connery offered to accompany him to this meeting. Connery stood up for him and said he was doing a good job, so leave him alone. And you don’t argue with a legend like Connery.
Despite the Connery intervention, Bay did have issues with the studio throughout production. He couldn’t always accomplish what he wanted to because he didn’t have the time or budget to do it all. This conflict really came to a head when they told Bay he couldn’t have the submersibles the team of Navy SEALs use to infiltrate Alcatraz with Goodspeed and Mason. Nearly half of the movie’s 136 minute running time is spent building up this infiltration sequence, and Bay felt it had to be impressive. They couldn’t cheap out on it. The studio didn’t agree. So for about two hours in the middle of production, Bay quit The Rock. The studio threatened to slap him with a sixty million dollar lawsuit if he didn’t go back to work, but when he did go back he got what he wanted. The SEALs use their submersibles in the movie.
The Navy SEALs are led by Michael Biehn as Commander Anderson, and Bay said he cast Biehn in this role with the intention of fooling the audience. They had seen Biehn in The Terminator, Aliens, he was even a Navy SEAL in the movie Navy SEALs. Viewers would expect him to be around a while and do some heroic stuff. But after a tense standoff between the SEALs and Hummel’s men, a really great scene of Harris and Biehn interacting while everyone is pointing guns at each other, Biehn and the rest of the SEALs get wiped out very quickly.
That leaves Mason and the inexperienced Goodspeed as our only heroes on the island, forced to take on over a dozen Marines by themselves while attempting to neutralize the rockets. It’s a rough time for them, but it means the audience gets to enjoy watching Cage and Connery bounce off each other in highly entertaining scenes while their characters take on the challenge and overcome the odds. Connery wanted to work with Cage and of course Cage had grown up watching Connery be awesome. When they got on set together, they proved to have good chemistry – and all of those writers worked together to give them some really amusing lines to say to each other.
In addition to Ed Harris, Bay cast some terrific character actors as the Marines our heroes have to deal with. There’s David Morse, John C. McGinley, Bokeem Woodbine, and Raymond Cruz, among others, with Gregory Sporleder and Candyman himself Tony Todd playing the two who are really the worst of the bunch. Don’t worry, the Marines who have fully gone to the dark side are taken out in some very satisfying death scenes.
There are more notable character actors in the bureaucratic scenes, like John Spencer, Philip Baker Hall, Xander Berkeley, Todd Louiso, and William Forsythe. It’s always nice to see any of them show up in a movie, and here we get to see them all over the course of this wild journey.
At its core, The Rock may just be another variation on Die Hard… but some of those Die Hard knock-offs turned out really well. This is one of them. The Rock is one of the best action movies to be released in the ‘90s. It has a great cast playing great characters that they helped create, and those characters are dropped into some spectacular action scenes.
LEGACY/NOW: The budgetary and scheduling disagreements between Bay and the studio weren’t the only problems behind the scenes. The Rock was also destined to be the final film from the producing team of Bruckheimer and Simpson. Although they had been working together since the early ‘80s, in December of 1995 they agreed to part ways once this movie was finished. The reason for the dissolution of their partnership was Simpson’s cocaine addiction… an addiction that took his life in January of 1996. The Rock is dedicated to his memory.
Bruckheimer and Simpson had incredible success making movies together. Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Bad Boys. Their last collaboration was another huge success. Made on a budget of seventy-five million dollars, it earned three hundred and thirty-five million at the global box office. It also got a decent enough critical reception to be the only Michael Bay movie to date to have a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
In 2016, it was revealed that The Rock had a very unexpected impact on the world. The Chilcot report, a public inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq War, unearthed the fact that MI6 believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq due to reports from a dishonest source. This source described the weapons of mass destruction they had supposedly seen – and this description was of the fictional VX poison gas as seen in The Rock. In the movie, this substance is kept in glass containers. In reality, it would not have been. So some agents at MI6 immediately knew this source was lying and getting their information from The Rock. But that didn’t stop the march to war.
Perhaps the greatest honor The Rock has ever received came when it was given a special edition release as part of the Criterion Collection. It was added into a collection which is largely made up of arthouse movies. Criterion chooses films they believe are “important classic and contemporary films” that represent “cinema at its finest”.
Yeah, that sounds like the perfect way to describe The Rock. “Cinema at its finest”.
For the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw video series I wrote about one of my all-time favorites, director Kevin S. Tenney's Witchboard. Tenney called the video "high praise that left me utterly speechless, which anyone who knows me can tell you doesn't happen very often."
Witchboard script:
INTRO: What do you call those spirit boards that are used to communicate with the dead? Many call them wee-gee boards, while others say wee-juh. For certain horror fans, the reason they use the Ouija pronunciation is because the 1986 film Witchboard told them that’s how to say it. Those same people have imagery of things like hammer hatchets, a seriously troubled Tawny Kitaen, a mystic called Zarabeth, and a creepy guy named Malfeitor stuck in their minds. That’s because Witchboard is one of those movies that sticks with you after you’ve seen it. And if you haven’t, it’s the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: The feature debut of writer/director Kevin Tenney, Witchboard stars Todd Allen and Tawny Kitaen as Jim and Linda. This young couple has been together for around two years. They live in a Victorian mansion that has been converted into apartments, and their landlady is played by Rose Marie from The Dick Van Dyke Show. You might have seen this mansion in movies like Waxwork, the original Willard, and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, among others. One night Jim and Linda have a party, and Linda’s ex Brandon – played by Stephen Nichols – brings his Ouija board over so he can show it off. Brandon uses this board to communicate with spirits regularly. One he talks to often is the spirit of a ten-year-old boy named David, who died thirty years earlier. Intrigued, Linda agrees to use the board with Brandon. After briefly talking to a spirit who pretends to be David, they manage to contact the real deal. Linda suspects that she’s pregnant, so when David confirms that reincarnation is real – and that spirits choose their new parents – she’s hooked. Brandon forgets to take the Ouija board when he leaves, and Linda starts using it to talk to David by herself.
That’s a huge mistake, because a person is more susceptible to being manipulated by spirits when using the board alone. The wrong spirit will take advantage of this. They’ll act nice and helpful, get the person addicted to communicating with them. Then they’ll change; they’ll start terrorizing the person, breaking down their resistance. Finally, they’ll possess them. This is called progressive entrapment, and Linda has fallen into it. This is obvious from her change in demeanor; she becomes tense, unable to sleep, starts swearing. Jim chalks it up her pregnancy, but Brandon knows there’s something else going on. He brings in the medium Zarabeth, played by Kathleen Wilhoite, to deal with David. He also begins to suspect that David wasn’t honest about who he was.
Jim and Brandon have to work together to figure out what’s going on with Linda, which they find difficult to do. Formerly best friends, they no longer get along because Brandon isn’t happy that Jim is with his ex. He doesn’t think Jim’s good enough for Linda. But they try to put aside their differences to save the woman they both love. Their search introduces a man named Carlos Malfeitor into the story… and the closer they get to solving this mystery, the more people get killed by the spirit that’s targeting Linda.
BACKGROUND: Witchboard wasn’t only the first movie Tenney made, this was also the first feature screenplay he had ever written. He was a film student at the University of Southern California at the time, and actually wrote it for a class assignment. It’s interesting that he chose to write this sort of story, because he wasn’t really a horror fan at that time. He had only seen a handful of horror movies in his life. But he had lived in a Victorian mansion that had been converted into apartments. A friend of his had brought a Ouija board to one of his parties. And this friend said that at a different party, someone had angered the spirit he was talking to. The spirit retaliated by blowing out a tire on the person’s vehicle. This same thing happens in the movie, when Jim insults David during the party scene. Tenney thought a spirit being offended while communicating with partiers through a Ouija board would be a great starting point for a story. And while doing research on Ouija boards, he discovered the concept of progressive entrapment. Witchboard was born.
Tenney and his classmate Gerald Geoffray were able to get the script into the hands of a man named Walter Josten, who worked in commodities. He was blown away when he read it. And not just because it happened to be the first script he had ever read. Tenney had written it so well, Josten could envision the movie while reading every page. He thought he could get this movie made – and he did. He secured a million dollar budget and Tenney left film school so he could direct the movie. Gerald Geoffray is credited as the producer on Witchboard, while Walter Josten receives an executive producer credit.
Tenney had originally thought of casting his friend James W. Quinn in the role of Jim, but ended up moving Quinn over to the role of Jim’s wisecracking buddy Lloyd. Who happens to be the first character to get killed. The actors who were cast in the lead roles weren’t well known at the time, although Kitaen had been in Bachelor Party. They all had some experience. At one point during the casting process, Tenney came close to casting Deborah Foreman of Valley Girl and April Fool’s Day as Linda. The problem was, Foreman wanted top billing, and that had already been promised to Todd Allen. So Kitaen got the job because she got along with the line producer and the guys in the production office were enamored with her. Luckily, Kitaen and Nichols both ended up becoming quite popular right around the time Witchboard was being released. Nichols landed a role on Days of Our Lives, while Kitaen became known as “the girl in the Whitesnake videos”. She wasn’t dating Whitesnake singer David Coverdale at the time of filming, but she was dating O.J. Simpson. Simpson would come around the Witchboard set on occasion – and Tenney says he would give a fake name when trying to contact Kitaen. He was newly married and this was supposed to be a secret affair. Everyone working on Witchboard seemed to know about it anyway.
Once filming wrapped, the project entered a long post-production phase. First Tenney had to whittle the one hundred and eighty minute first cut down to the final ninety-eight minute running time. To do so, he removed an unnecessary subplot about an ex of Jim’s who had committed suicide. He also had to make some tough decisions – like cutting down the role of Rose Marie, who was the most popular cast member during filming. He even removed an opening sequence that would have shown David’s death in a boating accident, complete with a large explosion. It sounds crazy, a million dollar movie cutting out its explosion. But Tenney knew it was better for the story and the pace to jump right into the party scene with the Ouija board.
A year went by while Tenney and the producers did test screenings and searched for a distributor. There were false starts along the way because some potential distributors ran into financial issues. For one distributor screening that was held in Times Square, the filmmakers invited people off the street to sit in the audience. That way the distributors could see how the average movie-goer would react to it. Tenney worried that he had been so focused on the dramatic side of the story, the characters and the acting, that he had forgotten to make the movie scary. But then he got to witness an audience jumping and screaming at all the right moments, proving he had made a properly scary movie.
During the year the project spent in limbo, Witchboard underwent a title change – because Witchboard was not the original title. Tenney wrote and filmed the movie under the title Ouija, but then an insurance company warned him he might not be able to use that title. Ouija is a registered trademark of Hasbro, and Tenney didn’t want to deal with any legal issues. He chose the new title from a line of dialogue where Brandon explained that Ouija boards are also called “witchboards”. Unfortunately, he had already cut that line by the time the title was changed, so “witchboard” is never actually said in the movie.
That didn’t stop Witchboard from getting its distribution deals. The Samuel Goldwyn Company acquired the foreign distribution rights while Cinema Group released the film in the United States. Witchboard got a limited release in fifteen locations on December 31, 1986. It did well enough in those places that it expanded to a wider release on Friday, May 13th, 1987. By the end of its theatrical run, it had made around eight to ten times its budget at the box office. It received some good reviews, and even got positive attention from Stephen King. When it reached home video, eighty thousand copies of the VHS were sold. The movie ranked number eighteen on Billboard’s list of the top forty video rentals of the year.
Having made a successful movie, Gerald Geoffray and Walter Josten decided to continue working in the film production business together. Tenney went back and finished his film school education, and then chose to direct Night of the Demons as his second film. That one was also a success, and a lot of horror fans make sure to watch it every October, since it’s set on Halloween. It was after Night of the Demons, when he was now a two-time horror filmmaker, that Tenney decided to expand his knowledge of the genre. And actually came to appreciate it. He has made several more horror movies over the decades since – including writing and directing Witchboard 2 in 1993 and writing Witchboard III: The Possession in 1995.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: In an interview he gave when the first Witchboard was being released, Tenney said, “Most horror movies have characters that do everything wrong, which puts the audience at a distance. Viewers develop the attitude of ‘I’d never do anything that stupid.’ I make my characters do everything right and they still get killed. That’s actually scarier.”
His dedication to making sure his characters were smart people with depth is a big reason why the movie works so well. Jim, Linda, and Brandon have an interesting dramatic story going on to begin with. That gives the film a strong emotional center for Tenney to build the horror story around… and he came up with a great one. The scenes of spirits communicating from the afterlife are legitimately unnerving. The mystery of who Linda is truly in contact with is intriguing. And there are some very effective jump scare moments.
All of the actors did great work in their roles, making you care about the characters. You want to see them get through this situation without being harmed. Even Brandon, who seems insufferable at first, becomes likeable. That’s due the performance of the actor and the writing that lets us see the reasons why everyone behaves the way they do. Even characters like Lloyd and Zarabeth, who aren’t around for many scenes, make a strong impression. You want them to stick around longer.
The script Tenney wrote is so good, it’s shocking that it was his first one. He also did an incredible job directing his first film. He had a great vision for it, with interesting shots that were influenced by his appreciation for Alfred Hitchcock movies. Tenney said he was always a big fan of Hitchcock’s fancy camera shots. So he packed some stunning ones into his own movie. There are multiple crane shots, even a spinning crane shot, and spirit P.O.V. moments where we drift through locations. The most jaw-dropping shot of all comes when the camera falls out a window with one of the characters. It’s very impressive that all of this could be accomplished on a relatively low budget indie like this.
According to Tenney, one potential distributor was even put off by the camera work. The guy said, “You call this a horror film? This is Hitchcock!” And he meant it as an insult. Tenney achieved those shots with cinematographer Roy H. Wagner. It’s no surprise that Wagner went from this to shooting the high profile horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. He earned it. Just look at the scene where Jim and Brandon visit a fog-shrouded cemetery. That’s some excellent horror imagery.
Witchboard has an unsettling atmosphere throughout, a feeling of building dread. This is enhanced by the score composed by Tenney’s brother Dennis. Dennis also teamed up with the band Steel Breeze to bring us the end credits song “Bump in the Night”. A song that might have you sitting through the credits repeatedly.
One clever, subliminal way Tenney puts the viewer on edge is by having the design of the Ouija board change. Depending on the tone of the scene it’s being used in, the board has different images on it. During nicer interactions, it’s topped with an angel and a smiling crescent moon. When the spirit is more sinister, the angel’s wings are replaced by demonic bat wings and the moon has an evil grin. Many viewers don’t even consciously notice this until it has been pointed out to them.
BEST SCENE(S): One of the best scares involves an actor we haven’t mentioned yet. J.P. Luebsen. Luebsen didn’t intend to be in Witchboard, he was a still photographer who was interested in being the movie’s second assistant director. But when Tenney saw him, he was inspired to cast him as Carlos Malfeitor. A man who was evil when he was alive… and is still evil now that he’s dead. Tenney felt Luebsen had the right look for Malfeitor, and had a prosthetic forehead put on him to make him look even creepier. At one point in the movie, Linda has a nightmare where Malfeitor appears out of nowhere and chops her head off with an axe. Not only has that moment scared a lot of viewers over the years, it even frightened Kitaen so badly that she found it difficult to watch. She told Scream Factory, quote, “I did that scene. I was there, I know how that was done. And still to this day, if I see it … it scares the living hell out of me. It really, really does.”
There are several shocking bursts of terror like that in the movie. Tenney did a great job of building up to those moments. He puts the viewer on edge, waiting for the scare. A great example of this is a scene where Jim and Brandon go to the lake where David died. They have a Ouija board with them, of course, to communicate with the spirit. We watch this conversation, hanging on the spirit’s every slowly spelled out word. Knowing that something terrible is about to happen. And it does.
There are wonderfully executed scenes of horror and equally great dramatic scenes. Your favorite moment may be the Malfeitor nightmare. Or the scene where Jim and Brandon finally discuss the issues they have with each other. Or maybe your favorite moment will involve the high-energy, irreverent Zarabeth. Whatever the tone of the scene, Witchboard is a well-crafted film in every way.
PARTING SHOT: The movie has a solid cult following, but it still feels like it doesn’t get quite as much attention and appreciation as it should. And neither does Tenney. The director who gave us Witchboard and Night of the Demons hasn’t made a movie in over a decade. He hasn’t even been able to raise funding for a new Night of the Demons sequel. It’s a shame, because we have gotten some great Tenney movies over the years and we need some more. With Witchboard, he showed the promise of being a master of horror – a genre he wasn’t even a fan of yet. His first feature is a classic that deserves to be mentioned alongside the other classic horror movies of the ‘80s.
And for the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie? series, I dug into the making of Friday the 13th Part 2:
Friday the 13th Part 2 script:
The classic slasher film Friday the 13th was an independent production from Georgetown Productions, made on an initial budget of around five hundred thousand dollars. Then the major Hollywood studio Paramount Pictures picked up the domestic distribution rights and gave the film a wide theatrical release. It performed beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, pulling in forty million dollars in North America alone and becoming one of the highest grossing films of 1980. It was the second biggest film of the summer, behind The Empire Strikes Back. With a return on investment like that, getting a sequel off the ground as soon as possible was a no-brainer. But how do you make a follow-up to a film where nearly every character was murdered and the villain was decapitated? We’re about to find out, because we’re digging into the making of Friday the 13th Part 2 (watch it HERE) with this episode of What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
Directed by Sean S. Cunningham from a screenplay by Victor Miller, the original film starred Betsy Palmer as Mrs. Voorhees, who was working as a cook at Camp Crystal Lake when her young son Jason drowned there. Blaming the counselors for not paying enough attention to her child, Mrs. Voorhees got the camp closed down – by murdering two counselors the following year. Every time the camp attempted to re-open, she would sabotage it in some way. More than twenty years after Jason’s death, the son of the camp’s owners tried to open the place again. So Mrs. Voorhees killed him and the new counselors he hired. All except one: a counselor named Alice Hardy, played by Adrienne King, was able to fight back against Mrs. Voorhees. And cut her head off with a machete. Alice was safe… But Cunningham wanted to throw one last jump scare at the audience. So he added a scene, presumably a nightmare, where the long-dead Jason jumps out of Crystal Lake to pull Alice out of her canoe. This moment was just put in there as a joke on the audience. A way to startle them before they left the theatre. But it ended up serving as the foundation for a franchise.
Friday the 13th was released on May 9, 1980. By July, Paramount and the producers at Georgetown were in agreement that they needed to make a sequel. Filming was scheduled to begin in September. They just needed to figure out the story. Cunningham and Miller suggested using the title Friday the 13th for an anthology series; every year, a new movie would be released that would take place around Friday the 13th, but there would be no story connections between the films and no returning characters. John Carpenter would later suggest doing the same thing with the Halloween franchise. The anthology idea was shot down in both cases. The higher-ups wanted Friday the 13th Part 2 to be a direct sequel – and the Georgetown producers, particularly a man named Phil Scuderi, insisted that Jason be at the center of the film. This is the point at which some members of the first film’s creative team started distancing themselves from the sequel. Cunningham didn’t want to direct something that was going to be too similar to the movie he had just made. Miller didn’t want to write about Jason. Jason was dead. If he wasn’t, there was no point to the first movie. Special effects artist Tom Savini agreed. He thought the idea of making the sequel about Jason was so dumb, he chose to work on a different camp slasher movie, The Burning, instead.
The first choice to replace Savini was Stan Winston. But he was too busy to do anything other than help create the severed head of Mrs. Voorhees. He suggested that the filmmakers get in contact with legendary effects artist Dick Smith, who was a hero of Savini’s. And Smith pointed them in the direction of Carl Fullerton, whose work was impressive enough that it was believed he could be the next Savini.
Georgetown didn’t have to look far to find replacements for Cunningham and Miller. Steve Miner had been working with Cunningham since being a production assistant and assistant editor on the 1972 Wes Craven film The Last House on the Left, which Cunningham had produced. He was an associate producer, production manager, and second unit director on Friday the 13th – and when Georgetown asked him to produce the sequel, he decided to pitch himself as the director as well. He figured he could do as good of a job as anyone else would, and felt he understood what horror fans and the audience that had enjoyed the first movie would want from Part 2. Cunningham agreed to vouch for Miner as director as long as Miner hired his wife, Susan E. Cunningham, as editor. The deal was made. A writer named Ron Kurz had done some uncredited rewrites on the first film – and added the scene with the motorcycle cop – so he was hired to write the script for the sequel. The title on the script he wrote was simply Jason.
Scuderi worked closely with Kurz while he was crafting the script, giving him ideas during their regular meetings, suggesting kills and acting them out in the middle of busy restaurants.
One thing Kurz didn’t fully write out was the opening of the film, which finds that Alice Hardy is still staying in the town of Crystal Lake two months after she stopped Mrs. Voorhees’ killing spree. From what we hear of a conversation she has on the phone with her mother, it seems she thinks being in Crystal Lake and working on her art will help her be able to put her life back together. These lines were not scripted; Adrienne King wasn’t given a copy of the script when she arrived on set. She was just told to improvise. While we’re catching up with Alice, we’re also aware that someone is lurking outside her house – and our first glimpse of Jason comes when we see his legs crossing the street in front of Alice’s place. Not only is this the first thing we see of the adult Jason, it’s also the only time in the franchise that Jason was played by a woman. Those legs belong to costume designer Ellen Lutter.
After an extended sequence that includes what may be the fastest shower in history, Alice finds Mrs. Voorhees’ severed head in her refrigerator – and the dead woman’s son is standing right behind her, holding an icepick. Alice survived the first movie, but she doesn’t even make it thirteen minutes into Part 2. Different reasons have been given for why Alice isn’t in the movie longer. Some say the decision-makers wanted to focus on new characters, some say King’s agent asked for too much money. But King has said she requested that she be given a short amount of screen time in the sequel because she was being tormented by a stalker in her personal life at that point.
Once Alice has been killed, the story jumps ahead five years. A man named Paul Holt has opened a place called the Packanack Counselor Training Center across the lake from the now-abandoned Camp Crystal Lake. Locals disagree with his decision, feeling that he’s asking for trouble by opening a new place so close to the old camp, but that doesn’t stop counselors from arriving for their training course. But the locals – including the returning character Crazy Ralph, still hanging around to tell people they’re doomed if they go out near the lake – are right to be concerned. As soon as the counselors get set up at Packanack, people start getting picked off one-by-one. The first person to get killed at the counselor training center is Crazy Ralph, who didn’t heed his own warning.
To bring Packanack to the screen, Miner and his crew were able to find an awesome location in Kent, Connecticut. Unfortunately, the locations from this movie really do seem to have been cursed. The only ones still around are the places that stand in for the town of Crystal Lake. The phone booth characters are shown using isn’t there anymore, it was fake to begin with, but the buildings remain. Sadly, the house Alice was staying in has since been demolished. The bar characters go to burned to the ground soon after filming was completed. And a few years ago, someone bought the campground and took out the cabins. A house now stands on the spot where Packanack Lodge used to be. You can still visit locations from most of the other Friday the 13th movies, but there’s not much left to visit from this one.
Miner was aiming high when he went into production on Friday the 13th Part 2. He set out to make the most terrifying film ever, and he felt he could accomplish this while sticking to the structure of the first movie. But he wanted to make sure his film would top its predecessor by having more realistic characters and better dialogue. The sequel also had a higher budget, allowing Miner to give it a more polished look with more camera movement. They even had a Steadicam to use on this one. Kurz was successful in writing a good bunch of likeable characters, and while viewers often pick on the acting in ‘80s horror movies, Miner was able to assemble a solid cast for this one. A lot of counselors show up at Packanack, but several of them are background extras. In addition to Paul, who is played by John Furey, the ones we focus on are the counselors who will have reason to stay behind at Packanack while Paul goes into town with everyone else to celebrate a successful first day of training. They are Bill Randolph and Marta Kober as Jeff and his girlfriend Sandra, who gets them in trouble when she becomes fascinated with the story of Camp Crystal Lake and wants to see the place for herself. After a police officer catches them wandering too close to the old camp, Paul punishes them by making them stay at Packanack that night. Kirsten Baker plays Terri, who doesn’t leave because her little dog Muffin has gone missing. Jeff and Sandra suspect the dog may have been killed by something out in the woods, but they don’t tell Terri that. Russell Todd plays Scott, who stays at Packanack because he wants some extra time to creep on Terri. The producers at Georgetown requested that there be a character in a wheelchair, and that turned out to be Mark, played by Tom McBride. He doesn’t go to town with the others because he doesn’t want to spoil their good time. And Vickie, played by Lauren-Marie Taylor, has a crush on Mark, so she wants to stay by his side. While the others are away, Jason wipes out all of these people.
A notable counselor who doesn’t get killed is the wisecracking Ted, played by Stu Charno. Ted survives this movie by staying in town and drinking all night. And of course any slasher movie needs a heroine. The final girl. Replacing Alice in that role is Ginny Field, who was named in tribute to Friday the 13th parts 1 and 2 production designer Virginia Field. A counselor who’s in a relationship with Paul, Ginny is studying child psychology, which turns out to be helpful when she and Paul return to Packanack to find that the legendary Jason Voorhees has killed everybody there. Played by Amy Steel, Ginny is one of the most popular heroines in this series because fans admire her intelligence and the fact that she is able to gain some insight into how Jason’s mind works. Steel’s performance was so well-received, the filmmakers even wanted her to come back for Friday the 13th Part III. But she wanted to make what she considered important movies, which didn’t include slasher sequels, and wanted more money than the producers were willing to offer, so she decided not to reprise the role of Ginny. A decision she would come to regret later on. Steel has since largely stepped away from acting and became a therapist in real life.
We have to address the fact that Jason, a dead little boy in the first movie, is now a grown man, alive and homicidal. Mrs. Voorhees was trying to avenge his death, and now he’s killing people to avenge her death. How does this make sense? Well, the movie doesn’t try to give any direct answers, which is for the best. The history of Jason and his mother is told as a creepy campfire story by Paul. He tells us that Jason’s body was never recovered from the lake and that some believe he didn’t die. That he has been surviving on his own in the wilderness. We are shown that Jason has put together his own shack in the woods, where the centerpiece is a shrine to his mother’s head. Miner believed that Jason survived the drowning incident and that the child Alice was grabbed by at the end of the first movie wasn’t the real Jason, it was a figment of her imagination. But there is no one in Part 2 to confirm whether Jason survived and his mother didn’t know it, or if he rose from the grave after his mother was killed. It’s open to interpretation. Fans can come up with their own theories. Like Ginny does. After hearing the campfire story, Ginny begins wondering what Jason would be like if he really exists. She feels sympathy for him. His mother was the only person he knew, his only friend. She understands why he would feel driven to kill for her. And that’s how she is able to beat Jason in the end.
Jason has the look of someone who has been living off the wilderness in this film. He doesn’t have his iconic hockey mask yet, he doesn’t get that until Part III. Here he wears a white sack over his head, with a hole cut in it for his one good eye to peer out of. Some have said that this was inspired by the look of the killer in the 1976 film The Town That Dreaded Sundown, and it is quite similar. Friday the 13th Part 2 was already in production by the time David Lynch’s movie The Elephant Man was released in October of 1980, and that movie also features a disfigured character who wears a bag over his head, with one hole cut in it so he can see. When Miner saw this, he said it was an “unfortunate coincidence” that Jason looked like The Elephant Man. That’s probably why he ditches the sack in the next movie.
Various crew members put on the Jason costume throughout filming, like Ellen Lutter did for that shot of his legs. Miner initially offered the role to Taso Stavrakis, an actor and stuntman who had also been Savini’s assistant in the effects department on the first Friday. But he turned it down. So the role ended up going to Warrington Gillette, an actor who had stunt training and first got involved with the project when he thought he had a shot at playing Paul. Instead, he found himself buried under prosthetics that took six hours to apply so he could play the silent role of Jason. Gillette understandably hated wearing that makeup, and he and Steel both hated filming the scene where an unmasked Jason lunges at Ginny through a window. A scene that had to be shot multiple times before they got it right. So Gillette was eventually replaced by stuntman Steve Daskewisz, who also went by the name Steve Dash and sometimes had his named spelled Steve Daskawisz. He wore the sack mask to pursue Ginny throughout the climactic chase sequence. A sequence that’s packed with scares, stunts, and even a bit of urine: the producers wanted a character to urinate in fear during the movie, and that person ended up being Ginny. She hides from Jason under a bed, and while the killer searches for her a rat comes walking up to her face. The urine flows, giving away her hiding spot.
Dash got very banged up filming Jason’s confrontations with Ginny and had to make some trips to the hospital. During the filming of one scene, he broke some of his ribs by falling on Jason’s pickaxe, and later he had to get stitches in a finger when Steel accidentally sliced him with a machete. The chase sequence ends in Jason’s shack, where Ginny figures out she’ll be able to trick Jason by putting on the sweater Mrs. Voorhees was wearing when she was killed. A sweater that happens to be there by her severed head. When Jason sees Ginny in his mom’s clothes, he has visions of her talking to him, with Betsy Palmer reprising the role of Mrs. Voorhees in a cameo. Palmer’s cameo was filmed by director Steve Miner’s old friend Wes Craven.
Since Gillette is credited as Jason Voorhees and Daskewisz is credited as Jason’s stunt double, it took decades for Dash to get the proper recognition for his contributions to Friday the 13th Part 2. But fans eventually became aware of just how much work he did on the film, and he was able to interact with them at conventions for many years before he passed away in 2018. The Jason of Part 2 is different than the hockey masked version of the character, he’s smaller and clumsier, but Dash did a great job of playing this bloodthirsty woodsman Jason.
Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t feature much of the blood that Jason spills. The ratings board had received a huge amount of backlash for letting the first Friday the 13th get by with an R rating after just a few seconds had been trimmed from the kill scenes. So they were much tougher on the sequels. Miner had to submit Part 2 to the ratings board nearly ten times, whittling fifty-four seconds out of the death scenes along the way, before the sequel got its R rating. Every single on-screen kill had to be cut down to some degree. The effects work that was supposed to earn Carl Fullerton the reputation of being on the level of Tom Savini wasn’t seen by the audience. And for almost forty years, the uncut gore footage was believed to be lost forever. It wasn’t until Scream Factory was gathering material for the Friday the 13th franchise box set they released in 2020 that it was discovered Fullerton still had a VHS copy of the kills he and his crew created for the film. Thanks to Scream Factory, fans have finally had the chance to see the Friday the 13th Part 2 death scenes in all their gory glory – with scenes like Scott getting his throat slit while upside down and Jeff and Sandra getting impaled together with a spear while they’re in bed being ones that really benefit from being longer and bloodier.
Over the years, some genre fans have noticed that a few of the kills in the first two Friday the 13th movies are oddly similar to kills in the 1971 Italian film A Bay of Blood, which was directed by Mario Bava and is also known as Twitch of the Death Nerve. In particular, scenes of people with axes or machetes stuck in their faces and the double impalement of Jeff and Sandra look they could have been lifted right out of Bava’s movie. Sean S. Cunningham has said that any similarity between the films is purely coincidental, as he didn’t see A Bay of Blood until years after the Friday movies were released. But others involved with these movies were definitely aware of Bava’s film before the first two Fridays went into production. Martin Kitrosser, who worked as script supervisor on the first two movies and co-wrote the screenplays for parts 3 and 5, is such a huge fan of Bava’s work that he even named his son Mario Bava Kitrosser. By the late 1970s, Kitrosser had his own sixteen millimeter copy of A Bay of Blood, and he watched it with his friend Ron Kurz. When interviewed by Tim Lucas for the book Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, Kitrosser said that when Kurz heard Cunningham and Victor Miller were planning to make a slasher movie to cash in on the success of Halloween, he suggested that Kitrosser let them borrow his copy of A Bay of Blood. So according to Kitrosser, they had seen the movie before they made Friday the 13th.
When Kurz was hired to write Friday the 13th Part 2, he and Kitrosser felt they should model the kills after the ones seen in A Bay of Blood… and Kitrosser even thought the movie should include a dedication to Bava, who had passed away the month before Friday the 13th was released, in the end credits. That suggestion was shot down by the producers. The producers at Georgetown were also familiar with A Bay of Blood. They were theatre owners in Boston, and had their own distribution company called Hallmark Releasing. Hallmark had brought A Bay of Blood to America in 1972 and had great success with the film, which they often sent out to drive-ins as a double feature with The Last House on the Left. So there’s no denying that multiple people involved with the early FRIDAYs knew they were following in the footsteps of Bava’s film.
Friday the 13th Part 2 didn’t deliver the amount of bloodshed that had been seen in either A Bay of Blood or Friday the 13th, but it was a success when it reached theatres on April 30, 1981… nine days short of the first movie’s one year anniversary. Made on a budget of just over one million dollars, Friday the 13th Part 2 earned almost twenty-two million at the box office. This was substantially less than the first movie made, but still a good return on investment. It did have a bigger opening weekend than its predecessor had, then had a steeper drop-off. Exactly why it didn’t do as well as the first movie isn’t quite clear. Were fans disappointed that the kills had been watered down? Was it because the market was flooded with slasher movies in 1981? There were a lot of them released that year, but Friday the 13th Part 2 is one of the best slasher films ever made.
Whether or not Miner was successful in his endeavor to make Part 2 better than the first movie is up to individual fans to decide… just like it’s up to us to come up with our own answers as to what really happened to Paul and Muffin. Miner certainly made a worthy follow-up and was able to turn Jason Voorhees, that dead little boy, into a believable, threatening slasher. The film takes the viewer on a creepy, fun, fast-paced ride, introducing us to likeable characters and then knocking them off in entertainingly shocking ways. It’s a thrilling and important chapter in the legend of Jason Voorhees. And when Miner came back to direct Friday the 13th Part III, he took the character a step beyond and turned him into the hockey mask-wearing icon we know and love.
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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