Video Scripts: The Thing, Monkey Shines, Friday the 13th
Cody shares a few more of the videos he has written for 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, and this time all three were for the JoBlo Horror Originals channel.
For the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie video series, I dug into the making of John Carpenter's 1982 sci-fi horror classic The Thing. I packed so much information into this script, some of it didn't make it into the video. To read a whole lot of interesting information on the making of The Thing, check out the producer's blog The Original Fan.
The Thing script:
John Carpenter’s The Thing didn’t go over well at all when it was released in 1982. Ignored by movie-goers, it was a box office failure. Reviled by critics, it even saw Carpenter being labelled a pornographer of violence by some reviewers. It was such a disappointment for the studio, they took another project away from Carpenter as punishment. But the sci-fi horror film gradually found its audience, building up a cult following. And soon, a legion of fans and critics alike began calling it one of the greatest horror movies ever made. It didn’t take long for The Thing to go from being known as reprehensible trash to being considered an all-time classic. So let’s take a look at the making of this classic with a new episode of What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie?
It all goes back to author John W. Campbell, who started writing science fiction stories as teenager. Several of his stories were published in the pages of Amazing Stories, which earned him the reputation of being a writer of space adventures. So when he started writing stories that weren’t space adventures, he used the pen name Don A. Stuart – inspired by the name of his wife, Doña Stewart. Under the Stuart name, he wrote the story that inspired The Thing. The story initially had the title Frozen Hell, but after removing the first three chapters and doing some revisions he decided to call it Who Goes There? Published in the pages of Astounding magazine, Who Goes There? is said to have been the last significant piece of writing Campbell ever did – and he was only twenty-eight at the time. For the remaining thirty-three years of his life, he focused on serving as the editor of Astounding magazine. Which he renamed Astounding Science Fiction.
Who Goes There? tells of an incredible discovery made by the inhabitants of a research outpost in Antarctica. Beneath the snow and ice is a UFO that crashed on the continent long ago… and near the downed vehicle is an alien that emerged from within. Only to end up frozen in the subzero temperatures. The corpse of this alien Thing is taken back to the outpost. When it thaws out, it’s still alive, and it has the unique ability to perfectly replicate other life forms. Now the people at the outpost can’t be sure which of them is still human. And which among them have been assimilated, replaced by the Thing. This concept was so intriguing, filmmaker Howard Hawks purchased the film rights to Campbell’s story. But it had to be simplified for the adaptation The Thing from Another World, which RKO released in 1951. Produced by Hawks and directed by Christan Nyby, that film moves the setting to the North Pole. And drops the idea that the alien can take the form of the people. There it’s simply a rampaging humanoid being, played by six-foot-seven actor James Arness.
The Thing from Another World did well at the box office, and was the most successful science fiction film of the year. Campbell understood that changes had to be made to the story on the way to the screen. He figured the original concept would have been too scary for 1951 audiences to handle anyway. So he was fine with the movie, and hoped it would make some viewers get into science fiction. One fan of that film was aspiring director John Carpenter, who first met future producer Stuart Cohen while they were attending film school. Cohen had been a fan of Who Goes There? since reading it when he was just twelve years old. He and Carpenter would first discuss the story and the film adaptation in the University of Southern California cafeteria in 1970. Cohen had a dream of someday getting to produce a new adaptation of Who Goes There? Carpenter was so reverent of The Thing from Another World, he at first felt like it should just be left alone. A remake couldn’t match up to what Hawks and Nyby had made. But then he began to see the potential of making a more faithful adaptation. A movie that presented the alien Thing in the same way Campbell did in his story. As Cohen wrote on his blog The Original Fan, which is packed with information on the making of The Thing, he loved Who Goes There? because the heart of the story is a locked door murder mystery. He felt that its “strength lay in it’s success in dramatizing the internal nature of the conflict and the resultant issues of trust and identity rather than the external threat posed by the creature”.
In 1975, Cohen took the idea of making a new adaptation of Who Goes There? to producer David Foster, whose company had a deal with Universal. At that time, The Sugarland Express writers Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins had the rights to Campbell’s story, but they didn’t have any intention of doing anything with it. So they gladly sold the rights to Cohen and Foster. To make sure their version of the story wouldn’t run into any legal trouble, Universal also secured the rights to remake The Thing from Another World. This was important to do because Universal wanted to cash in on the popularity of The Thing from Another World and call the new movie The Thing. Cohen had been hoping they could call it Who Goes There? The rights to the 1951 film were in the hands of Wilbur Stark, who had bought the rights to many films in the RKO library when that studio ran into financial trouble. At one point, Universal was planning to team up with Stark on a series of RKO remakes. But when The Thing and a remake of Cat People were both box office failures in 1982, that plan got tossed in the trash.
Cohen wanted his friend Carpenter to direct The Thing, but Universal wasn’t open to the idea. Carpenter was a total unknown, years away from making Halloween. He had only directed Dark Star then, and was working on Assault on Precinct 13. So the studio turned to an established horror director: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper. The problem was, Hooper and his Chainsaw co-writer Kim Henkel were not fans of Who Goes There? They had no interest in digging into the issues of trust and identity. They didn’t want to have to deal with a creature that can assimilate and replace its victims. So they wrote a straightforward creature feature about a man hunting a monster in Antarctica. That wasn’t a movie anyone involved was interested in making, so Hooper and Henkel moved on and The Thing continued making its way through development hell. Future An American Werewolf in London director John Landis was offered the chance to work on the project. He passed. Playwright David Wiltse wrote a draft of the script, but clearly considered the material to be beneath him. Logan’s Run screenwriter William F. Nolan wrote a treatment. According to Cohen, all of the scripts that were written during this time avoided using the idea of the creature assimilating people and causing paranoia among the characters. The producers were having so much trouble getting a satisfactory script, Universal was losing interest in the project. Then Alien was released in 1979 and became a hit for 20th Century Fox, proving there was an audience for horror movies about creatures from another world. Universal became enthusiastic about The Thing again. And since Carpenter had just had huge success with Halloween, they finally agreed to let Cohen hire his director of choice.
Carpenter signed on under the condition that his film would bring the ideas of Campbell’s story to the screen. The alien creature would assimilate people. The characters wouldn’t know who among them was a human and who was the Thing. He also insisted that the movie would have to include the standout sequence from the story: one where the people at the outpost perform a blood test to find out which one of them has been taken over. Every bit of the Thing is a living being itself, so if a heated wire is stuck into a petri dish of the creature’s blood, it will react. Subjecting everyone to this blood test proves to be a very effective way of revealing who has been assimilated. The blood test scene would end up being one of the most popular moments in the movie.
Carpenter didn’t want to write the script himself, so multiple potential writers were considered. Legendary horror author Richard Matheson declined an offer to write the script. Carpenter considered Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale, but ended up working with him on Halloween III instead. Cohen had been a fan of the 1976 comedy The Bad News Bears, so he brought in writer Bill Lancaster. With The Bad News Bears, Lancaster had already proven he was great at writing an ensemble piece. And after reading Who Goes There?, Lancaster said he was interested in getting the chance to really play up the paranoia. That’s exactly what Carpenter and Cohen wanted to hear. So Lancaster went to work writing the script. It looked like The Thing was on track to go into production and be ready to reach theatres in the summer of 1981.
But Lancaster missed his deadline by three and a half months. By the time he turned in his first draft of the script in late 1980, a summer ‘81 release was no longer an option. Carpenter and the producers didn’t mind the delay once they got a look at his script, though. They were blown away by what Lancaster had managed to do with the concept. He had written the perfect cinematic adaptation of the ideas in Campbell’s novella. While there were around forty people at the research outpost in Campbell’s story, Lancaster whittled the count down to just twelve. The bare essentials. Since most of the story takes place within the confines of the American outpost (Outpost 31, to be exact), he had been asked to open up the scope in the first half. He did so by adding in another research camp: a Norwegian camp. He wrote that the Norwegians were the ones who discovered the crashed UFO and its frozen passenger. So by the time the Americans get involved, the story is already in progress. They have to catch up and figure out what’s going on.
Lancaster’s script begins with a chase across the vast, snow-covered land of Antarctica. A dog being pursued by a helicopter from the Norwegian camp. The two passengers of the helicopter are acting very strangely. Freaking out, firing shots at the dog. When the dog reaches the American outpost, the behavior of the Norwegians gets them killed. One mishandles a grenade, blowing up himself and the helicopter. The other is still armed and is coming off like a threat, so one of the Americans shoots him. The dog is taken into the outpost and a few of the Americans fly off to see what’s going on at the Norwegian camp. Nothing’s going on there. The place is destroyed, there’s no sign of a life. But there is the frozen corpse of a human. And the burnt corpse of a monstrous creature with human organs. The Americans soon find out that the Norwegians had discovered a crashed UFO, and head out to the crash site to see this vehicle for themselves. Somehow it’s even creepier to see the characters checking out a UFO that has already been unearthed than it would have been to watch them discover it and dig it up. It’s also helpful to the story, because the discovery and the unearthing of the UFO would have taken up a lot of time. That’s what happened in the three chapters Campbell cut out of his novella. This way the discovery has already been made and the Thing is already on the loose. In fact, it has already infiltrated the American outpost. The Norwegians wanted to destroy that dog because it was an alien creature. As the Americans find out when it attacks the sled dogs in their kennel. Now they know they’re dealing with an alien that can assimilate other living beings and replace them. This Thing has already assimilated people in their camp. And they have to find out which one of them is a Thing. Not just for their own survival, but for the survival of the planet. If the Thing makes it to another continent, the entire world population will be assimilated in just three years. If the threat isn’t contained within this little outpost in Antarctica, it will be an apocalyptic scenario. What a way to start the winter.
There are no female characters in The Thing. Every person at the American outpost is a man. The producers were prepared to defend this choice if the studio took issue with it. But they didn’t have to. Universal was impressed with Lancaster’s script and immediately gave the project a greenlight. But for a moment, it looked like Carpenter wasn’t going to be directing after all. He had a Western project called El Diablo set up at another studio before he signed on for The Thing, and it looked like the Western was about to get its own greenlight. If it did, Carpenter felt he would have to choose El Diablo over The Thing. Universal liked Lancaster’s script so much, they didn’t want to wait for Carpenter to be available again. Other directors were considered: The Getaway’s Sam Peckinpah, The Bad News Bears director Michael Ritchie, The Warriors director Walter Hill, who had also produced Alien. But a director switch wasn’t necessary. El Diablo didn’t get a greenlight after all. That movie did get made, but not until 1990. Carpenter produced it, with Peter Markle directing.
Now Carpenter had to find a cast to bring Lancaster’s characters to life. Given that he had just worked with Kurt Russell on Elvis and Escape from New York, you might think that casting Russell in the film was his first decision. But that wasn’t the case. Russell was actually the last person to be cast in the film. Actors who were considered for the role of helicopter pilot MacReady before Russell was hired include Christopher Walken, Nick Nolte, Sam Shepard, Jeff Bridges, and Kris Kristofferson. John Heard, Ed Harris, Jack Thompson, Tom Berenger, Brian Dennehy, Scott Glenn, Peter Coyote, Fred Ward, Tim McIntyre, and Tom Atkins were all brought in for meetings about the role. Dennehy was also a contender for the role of physician Doctor Copper, as was William Daniels, but the role ended up going to Richard Dysart. Thomas Waites was cast as radio operator Sanders, who earned the nickname Windows when Carpenter had Waites put on a pair of sunglasses. Richard Masur met about the role of meteorologist Bennings, but was cast as dog handler Clark instead. Bennings was played by Peter Maloney. Joel Polis was cast as assistant biologist Fuchs, Charles Hallahan as geologist Norris, T.K. Carter as cook Nauls.
Carpenter had Escape from New York cast members in mind for the roles of mechanic Childs and station commander Garry. He wanted Isaac Hayes for Childs and Lee Van Cleef for Garry. But he was open to seeing other actors about the role. Which is why Geoffrey Holder, Carl Weathers, and Bernie Casey were all considered for Childs. Ernie Hudson was nearly cast as the character – but then Keith David entered the picture and won the role. Potential Garrys included Jerry Orbach, Kevin Conway, Richard Mulligan, and Powers Boothe. But when filming began, it was Donald Moffat who played the character. Carpenter thought of casting Halloween and Escape from New York’s Donald Pleasence as biologist Blair. Then decided to go with Wilford Brimley instead.
Having worked with special effects artist Rob Bottin on The Fog, Carpenter chose him to handle the effects on The Thing as well. And Bottin wanted to do more than just provide the special effects. He wanted an acting role, and had his sights set on playing mechanic Palmer. It was decided that the special effects would be too demanding for Bottin to also be able to appear in the film. And since the effects work took so much out of Bottin that he ended up being hospitalized with exhaustion, double pneumonia, and a bleeding ulcer, that was the right decision. There was some thought given to casting a comedian as Palmer. Jay Leno, Garry Shandling, and Charles Fleischer were all brought in to meet about the role. But it went to David Clennon, who is neither a comedian nor a special effects artist.
With the cast in place and Bottin working hard on the special effects, plus Stan Winston assisting with the dog-Thing effects, filming on The Thing began in June of 1981. The first footage shot was the helicopter chasing the dog across the snow. A sequence that was filmed in the Juneau Icefield at the border of Alaska and British Columbia. While they were at the icefield, the crew also filmed the shot of MacReady, Palmer, and Norris exiting the helicopter to approach the UFO crater. None of the actors were present for this shot. Those are crew members wearing the characters’ winter clothes and protective gear. That might even be Carpenter himself as MacReady.
The exterior of the American outpost was built in Stewart, British Columbia – which was then considered to be the snowfall capital of the world. But most of the interior scenes were filmed in Los Angeles, on sets that were refrigerated to almost freezing temperatures. Eight weeks of shooting took place on those sets. And much like in the movie itself, there was some tension and paranoia among the cast during this time. Some of the actors didn’t feel that Carpenter was communicative enough. Some felt he was more focused on the monster effects than on their characters. At times there would be long delays on set while the effects were being prepared. Tired of hearing his co-stars complain so much about the creature effects, Wilford Brimley told them, “Don’t you guys get it? It’s all about the Rubber Man.” Although Brimley was in tune with what The Thing was, he was also the only cast member who wasn’t required to make the trip up to the exterior sets in Stewart. His character is only seen outside a couple times, and those shots could be accomplished with a double.
Shooting began in June so the Los Angeles portion of the shoot would be completed before a potential labor strike in October. The Stewart portion of filming couldn’t begin until December, so there would be plenty of snow at the outpost. That meant there was a six week gap in the schedule, which allowed Carpenter to go through the footage with editor Todd Ramsay. He was not happy with what he saw. The exterior scenes hadn’t been shot yet and neither had some of Bottin’s effects. But Carpenter already felt like the film was coming off as long and dull. And confusing, as the way the Thing assimilates victims wasn’t explained well enough. Carpenter had done extensive reshoots on his previous horror film, The Fog. He didn’t want that to happen again. So he began writing new scenes to fill out the second act. Scenes that would make it clear how the Thing operates, including a moment where Blair watches a demonstration of the assimilation process on a computer. Scenes that changed the fates of the Bennings and Fuchs characters. Scenes that put more focus on the MacReady character. And scenes that would increase the tension. To fight against the feeling of the movie being long and dull, Carpenter and Ramsay started cutting out any moment and any dialogue exchange that didn’t progress the plot. By the time two hundred and fifty crew members and the film’s cast – minus Brimley – gathered together in Stewart, Carpenter had figured out how to make The Thing into the classic that it is.
Which isn’t to say the movie we got is exactly what Carpenter and his collaborators envisioned. Although the movie had a healthy budget of fifteen million dollars, some moments had to be cut for budgetary reasons. Like a helicopter crash, which they tried to film with a miniature. It looked ridiculous. Also a major set piece that would have been set outside, with monster tentacles bursting out of the ice and a dog creature leaping through the air, transforming in mid-air. Any time something got cut for being too costly, Carpenter and the producers would joke that they were saving that for the twenty-five million dollar version. Universal put some money into the creation of an experimental camera that would allow Carpenter to do extreme changes in speed with a remote control. He thought this could be an interesting way to film things like tentacles moving around. But the camera didn’t work quite right, so it wasn’t used. A lot of money was saved when Carpenter decided they should only build one outpost in Stewart, as the plan had been to build two. The functional American outpost and the destroyed Norwegian one. But the American outpost gets wrecked over the course of the movie, so Carpenter had the clever idea of having the destroyed American camp double as the Norwegian camp.
The Thing was such a demanding production, Carpenter wasn’t able to compose the score for the film, as he usually did for the movies he directed. Jerry Goldsmith was contacted about providing the music, but he was too busy working on Poltergeist and The Twilight Zone. So the producers reached out to Ennio Morricone, who also said he was too busy. But he was convinced to take a look at the footage. Carpenter flew to Rome to show him the footage that was available at that time and to talk to him about the sort of music he would like to have for the film. Which was difficult, since Morricone didn’t speak English and Carpenter didn’t speak Italian. But the meeting went well, and Morricone agreed to compose some thematic suites that could be edited to fit the scenes. Not all of the music Morricone provided was used in the movie. Some of the unused tracks were later used for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Carpenter also ended up recording some tracks of his own.
Universal was very supportive of The Thing at first, and at one point they considered it to be their biggest chance of having a hit in the summer of 1982. They also had Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extraterrestrial on the schedule, but had been underwhelmed by that one at a studio screening. E.T. was a kids’ movie. The Thing was going to draw in the teens and adults. Their attitudes about these films would change substantially once they held test screenings. The test audiences made it clear that E.T. was a heartwarming crowd pleaser, while the bleakness of The Thing was a bummer. Many viewers were disgusted by the violence and the creature effects. There were even walk-outs at the test screenings. And the film’s ambiguous ending – which shows MacReady and Childs sharing a drink out in the cold, and doesn’t clearly state whether or not the Thing has been successfully destroyed – did not go over well. Some viewers were confused by the ending, others were angered by it. Carpenter wasn’t receptive to Universal’s request that he cut down the creature effects. But he agreed to consider changing the ending. Jaws editor Verna Fields was brought in to try to help change the final moments. To make Childs seem less suspicious, and use different line readings to make the scene feel less ambiguous. But given the material they had to work with, the scene couldn’t be changed very much. So there was an alternative option: they cut Childs out completely, leaving MacReady alone in the cold. The version without Childs was screened for a test audience, and scored about the same as the original version. So Carpenter was able to stick with his original ending.
There was another ending shot that Carpenter never intended to use. A happy ending that would show MacReady, having been rescued, sitting at the McMurdo Station, the biggest year-round science facility in Antarctica. In this scene, it would be confirmed that MacReady had not been assimilated. The Thing had been beaten. Carpenter never even screened this ending for the studio. If he had, they probably would have made him put it in the movie. As it stands, Carpenter says that no one other than himself, not even cinematographer Dean Cundey, knows exactly what the situation was at the end of the film.
So Universal was stuck with a dark, gross-out horror movie they had lost all enthusiasm for. They poured most of their marketing budget into E.T., which they released on June 11, 1982. Two weeks later, they tossed The Thing out into the world on June 25th. Critics tore the film apart, calling it disgusting, depressing, boring. A moron movie. A barf bag movie. They compared it to porn, traffic accidents, trainwrecks. A common opinion was that Carpenter had gone too far this time. The Thing is Carpenter’s favorite of all the films he has made, and to be called a pornographer of violence for making it really hurt him. Even people who were involved with the film reacted poorly to it at first. There was a feeling that Bottin’s effects overwhelmed everything else in the movie. Visual effects artist Albert Whitlock, whose team provided the matte paintings of the crashed UFO, was offended by the film. Kurt Russell was disappointed that character moments had been cut out in favor of the gross creature moments. He felt the ick factor of the film was too high. He would eventually change his view on that, saying, “The monster is so insane, it’s easy to get past the monster and into the story of paranoia.” But things were different in 1982.
Fans today are very familiar with the poster art Drew Struzan created for the film. The image of a person in winter clothes, their face obscured by a bright glow. It’s the artwork that has always been used to promote The Thing, so by now it’s thought to be iconic. But when Carpenter first saw it, he hated it, feeling that it made the movie look like a slasher. Good or bad, it didn’t draw people in. The general audience didn’t turn out to see the movie. The Thing had an opening weekend of three million dollars, then lost almost half of its screens in the middle of its second week. It was a disaster. Universal had been working with Carpenter and Lancaster on an adaptation of the Stephen King novel Firestarter. When the numbers came in for The Thing, Carpenter and Lancaster were removed from Firestarter. Carpenter and Cohen were also developing a remake of the 1939 film Only Angels Have Wings at a different studio. That project was cancelled due to the failure of The Thing. Luckily, Carpenter was able to go into production on a different Stephen King adaptation, Christine, just six months after The Thing came and went at theatres.
The Thing began gathering a cult following once it reached home video. And with some distance from the release date and the summer of E.T., critics started re-assessing the film and giving it more positive write-ups. Its bad reputation was left far behind. Now it was being seen as a well-crafted film with an excellent script. A masterpiece of building tension and dread. A dazzling showcase of Rob Bottin’s genius effects work. One of the greatest horror movies ever made. That’s the reputation it has held for decades now. It has been celebrated with multiple special edition DVD and Blu-ray releases. And it’s often said that the audio commentary recorded by Carpenter and Russell ranks as one of the best commentaries ever.
The Thing got so popular, there was talk of follow-ups. Universal attempted to cash in on the title by releasing a prequel with the same name in 2011. And in 2020, it was announced that Universal, Blumhouse, and Carpenter would be teaming up for a reboot of The Thing. Another adaptation of Campbell’s story Who Goes There?, this time using elements from the Frozen Hell draft of the manuscript. Whatever the future holds for The Thing, it’s doesn’t seem likely that any further additions to the franchise will be able to match up to what Carpenter, Lancaster, and their collaborators accomplished in 1982. They brought Campbell’s concept to the screen in an amazing way. There were ups and downs. Bad reviews. Box office failure. Angry audience members. Personal disappointments. The Thing overcame all of the issues and endures as a classic.
And even though the outpost in the film doesn’t function like one would in reality, it has been embraced by the scientific community in Antarctica. At some research stations, it has become tradition to celebrate the beginning of winter with a screening of The Thing. The people who attend those screenings get to watch the film under the perfect conditions. Sitting in an outpost in Antarctica, imagining what might happen to them if there really was something monstrous lurking outside, in the dark, beneath the ice…
For the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw video series, I wrote about the 1988 film Monkey Shines, directed by one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, George A. Romero:
Monkey Shines script:
INTRO: Most viewers know George A. Romero as the filmmaker who changed the definition of the word zombie with his classic Night of the Living Dead. You’ve watched him splash gore across the screen with several entries in his zombie franchise. You’ve probably seen his Stephen King anthology Creepshow, and maybe his sort-of vampire movie Martin. But have you ever seen Monkey Shines? His 1988 movie about a scientifically enhanced monkey who gains telepathic abilities and homicidal tendencies? If not, it’s the best horror movie you never saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Taking its title from a term that has been around since the 1800s and is used to describe mischievous behavior, Monkey Shines started off as a novel that was written by Michael Stewart. An author known for thrillers that have a scientific angle to them. Published in 1983, Stewart’s novel told the story of Oxford law student Allan Mann, who is left quadriplegic after an accident. To help him navigate day-to-day life, Allan is gifted with a helper monkey named Ella. Things go smoothly at first. Ella is very helpful, and she and Allan develop a deep bond. Problem is, Ella has undergone some scientific procedures that were meant to increase her intelligence. They have done that, but they also enable her to establish a telepathic connection with Allan. This connection is very twisted, as being tapped into Ella’s primate mind causes Allan to easily go into animalistic rages. And when Allan gets really angry at someone, Ella takes it upon herself to remove them from his life.
The film rights to Monkey Shines were purchased by Charles Evans, the older brother of legendary producer and studio executive Robert Evans. Charles had been successful in the fashion industry and in real estate, and decided to dabble in film production in the late 1970s. His first production was a massive hit: the 1982 comedy Tootsie, which ended up being nominated for multiple Academy Awards. Jessica Lange even won an Oscar for her performance in the film. For his follow-up, Evans decided to give horror a try. So he started developing Monkey Shines with executive producers Peter Grunwald and Gerald S. Paonessa. Paonessa happened to be an old friend of Romero’s and had tried to set up another project with him previously. That one didn’t get off the ground, but Paonessa thought Monkey Shines could be the chance for them to work together. He felt that Romero’s dark sense of humor would be a perfect match for the material. When he suggested that Romero should direct Monkey Shines, Evans was into the idea. So Romero was contacted and provided with a copy of Stewart’s novel, as well as a draft of the screenplay.
Romero was in a transitional period at this time. He had been working with his producing partner Richard P. Rubinstein since the early ‘70s. They had formed the production company Laurel together. Laurel brought us the likes of Creepshow, Day of the Dead, and the TV show Tales from the Darkside. And the entire time Romero was working with Rubinstein at Laurel, he had a fixed salary. But Laurel had recently gone public with the intention of getting deeper into television production and working on safer projects. Wanting to stick with making movies and not interested in playing it safe, Romero decided it was time for him to leave the company. And then he was adrift, with no salary. He needed a job. Luckily, he found the idea of Monkey Shines to be appealing. He read the novel, wrote a ten page treatment for his own adaptation, and accepted the producers’ offer for him to write and direct the film. This was going to be his first work-for-hire feature.
Writing the script, Romero stuck fairly close to the source material. One of the biggest changes was that he moved the setting from England to the American city he lived in. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Another change was made at the request of the producers. While Allan remained quadriplegic at the end of the novel, Evans wanted him to be healed by the end of the movie. So Romero did research into spinal issues and found a way to explain how Allan would regain the ability to walk in the story. In the script, Allan does become quadriplegic after being hit by a truck. But that was a terrible coincidence. The injury he sustained in the accident isn’t actually the reason for his paralysis. The real reason is a congenital problem that can be fixed with another surgery. But Allan won’t find that out until late in the film, by which time he has already formed a dangerous bond with Ella.
Romero did run into a bit of trouble with the producers when he turned in a script that was two hundred and forty pages long. The general rule is that one page of script will equal one page of screen time. So unless Monkey Shines was going to be a four hour movie, that script needed to be trimmed down substantially. Grunwald worked with Romero to lower the page count. And through making this movie together, Romero and Grunwald established a working relationship that would continue with Bruiser, Land, Diary, and Survival of the Dead; and the Night of the Living Dead documentary One for the Fire.
Soon the script was in place. Charles Evans had secured a budget in the range of six to seven million. A production schedule of at least eleven weeks was put together. The cast and crew would work twelve hour days, six days a week. Filming was set to take place in Pittsburgh, of course. Scenes would be shot at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, in residential areas, and on sets constructed by production designer Cletus Anderson and his crew. Romero proceeded to assemble a strong cast for the film, with many of the actors going on to become either well known or quite prolific. Jason Beghe was cast as Allan, with Kate McNeil as monkey trainer Melanie Parker. Who becomes Allan’s love interest as things progress. Joyce Van Patten, who already had forty years of credits to her name, was cast as Allan’s mother Dorothy. Who sees her son’s injury as a chance to make up for her past failures as a parent and smother him for the rest of her life. Romero cast his then-wife Christine Forrest as Allan’s live-in nurse Maryanne. Who brings her budgie bird into the house with her. A personal touch added to the story by Romero, as he and Forrest had budgies in their home. Stanley Tucci plays Doctor John Wiseman, who treats Allan after his accident. And takes the opportunity to steal his girlfriend Linda, played by Janine Turner. Stephen Root plays Burbage, an antagonistic dean at the local college who oversees the experiments being conducted by Allan’s friend Geoffrey.
Romero had some trouble casting the role of Geoffrey. He knew who he wanted to play the role: John Pankow. He had seen Pankow in To Live and Die in L.A. and thought he was the next Roy Scheider. But for whatever reason, Pankow’s agent wouldn’t pass the Monkey Shines script along to him. This problem was solved when Romero and Pankow happened to cross paths at a social event, so Romero was able to tell him directly that he wanted him to be in the movie. Pankow gladly signed on to play Geoffrey. The character who worked with Ella in the science lab. Who regularly injects her with an intelligence-enhancing serum that contains shavings from human brain tissue. And has the bright idea that this clever little creature would be the perfect helper monkey for his friend Allan.
BACKGROUND: The monkey Ella was the most difficult role to cast. A trained monkey who Romero had been promised was going to be a superstar refused to cooperate. They could get monkeys from a service animal program called Helping Hands, but the monkeys in that program have had their canine teeth extracted. Ella needed to have all of her teeth. You see a lot of her teeth in the movie. In fact, as the film goes on and the bond between Ella and Allan grows stronger, there are moments where Allan’s teeth are emphasized so it looks like he has fangs like hers. The perfect Ella was found when a monkey trainer revealed that she had adopted a foster monkey named Boo. Boo still had her teeth, and was actually willing to cooperate with the film production. She ended up doing around ninety-eight percent of what you see Ella doing on screen. For some moments, Romero’s frequent collaborator Tom Savini and effects artists Everett Burrell and Mike Trcic provided monkey puppets, including one that was remote controlled. As well as monkey hands that were used for close-ups where Ella’s hands are shown doing something Boo couldn’t do. Like strike matches.
As talented as Boo was, it wasn’t easy working with her or with the other monkeys seen in the movie. This was said to be the toughest shoot of Romero’s career because of the monkeys. And since it took an average of fifteen takes any time the monkeys were required to do a specific action, he also shot more film on this movie than on any of his others. To get reactions from the monkeys, crew members would have to find a way to surprise the them. They would wear different hats, play maracas, whatever it took. They would have to find a different way to surprise the monkeys for each scene, because once something had surprised them it wouldn’t work a second time. The monkeys made a mess of the set, peeing all over the place. And some would develop an inexplicable hatred for members of the crew. Boo hated a certain trainer, so whenever they needed a shot of her looking angry, they would just put that trainer in her line of sight. A monkey in the lab hated a specific set dresser so much, when it was set loose it went straight for the guy and bit him on the arm. He had to go to the hospital to get his wound treated.
Scenes where Ella is shown being particularly affectionate toward Allan were shot when Boo was in heat. And while Boo liked Jason Beghe, she was certainly capable of directing some monkey shines his way. During a scene where Ella is feeding Allan grapes, Boo decided to give Beghe a special treat. She pulled a turd from her butt and stuck the piece of poop in his mouth.
Since the monkey is named Ella and is shown to enjoy music, Romero wanted to put Ella Fitzgerald songs in the film. He even wrote Fitzgerald lyrics into the script in scenes where the songs would be playing. But he couldn’t get the rights to any of Fitzgerald’s music, because her agent decided it would somehow be insulting to show Ella and Allan listening to her songs. So songs by Peggy Lee were used instead. When it came time for the score to be composed, Romero also couldn’t get his top choice for composer: multiple Oscar winner Henry Mancini. Romero had been in contact with Mancini and the composer was willing to take the job. The problem was the distributor. Through personal connections, Charles Evans had managed to secure a release for Monkey Shines through Orion Pictures. And Orion refused to let Romero hire Mancini, fearing that Mancini’s music would sound too sweet for a horror movie. They gave him a list of composers they would let him work with. And he chose another Oscar winner, David Shire. Shire listened to the temp score Romero had put together using Mancini tracks and attempted to give him a similar sound. Romero said that there are moments in the Shire score that sound even sweeter than the music Mancini probably would have delivered. But it wasn’t Mancini music, so Orion was satisfied.
Romero didn’t have a pleasant experience working with Orion. The music wasn’t the only area where he ran into trouble with them. He wanted to end the movie with a scene that shows Dean Burbage in the lab with the monkeys, indicating he’s up to some monkey shines of his own. Orion hated this scene. They repeatedly told Romero that they wanted the Burbage scene removed and replaced with a Carrie ending. Some kind of attempt to replicate the famous jump scare ending from the movie Carrie. Orion felt vindicated when a test screening was held and the audience reacted poorly to the final moments. But it wasn’t the Burbage ending viewers didn’t like. It was the scene before that, the one that shows Allan’s surgery has been successful and he has regained the use of his arms and legs. The audience thought it was a cheat, if not preposterous, that Allan could be healed in the end. But Orion kept their focus on the Burbage scene and forced Romero to do additional photography to give them a Carrie ending. Romero ended up shooting a nightmare version of Allan’s spinal surgery that shows Ella emerging from his back. It’s nonsense, but it’s a jump scare, so Orion got what they wanted. And it was because Romero had to shoot this extra scene that he lost the job of directing the Stephen King adaptation Pet Sematary. That movie was heading into production while he was still working on Monkey Shines for Orion. So he had to let go of Pet Sematary, and Mary Lambert took over as director.
Orion didn’t even like the title Monkey Shines, feeling that it sounded like a comedy. They considered calling the movie An Experiment in Fear instead, but settled for adding that as a subtitle on the marketing material. They made a poster that Romero hated, featuring a cymbal-smashing monkey toy. And instead of a simple tagline, they came up with a whole poem to use to try to sell the concept. The poem goes like this: “Once there was a man whose prison was a chair. The man had a monkey; they made the strangest pair. The man was the prisoner; the monkey held the key. No matter how he tried, the man couldn’t flee. Locked in his prison, terrified and frail. The monkey wielding power, keeping him in jail. The man tried to keep the monkey from his brain, but every move he made became the monkeys game. The monkey ruled the man, it climbed inside his head. And now as fate would have it… One of them is dead!” The full poem was featured in a trailer for Monkey Shines, while a shortened version is on the poster.
This rhyme that equated being in a wheelchair to being in prison didn’t go over well with the public. When Monkey Shines was released, protesters showed up at screenings. Protesting the wording of the poem, and protesting the fact that Allan has recovered by the end of the movie. In addition to putting together a terrible marketing campaign, Orion also made the bad decision to release Monkey Shines on the exact same day as the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail. July 29, 1988. Cocktail opened at number one. Monkey Shines didn’t even crack the top ten on its opening weekend. Coming in under films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Coming to America, Die Hard, Midnight Run, The Dead Pool, Big, and a re-release of Bambi. Clearly Orion had sent Monkey Shines out into the world at the worst possible time. The movie didn’t enter the top ten at any point during its theatrical run. It ended up making just over five million dollars at the box office. Less than its budget.
Romero slammed Orion, saying, “They blew it. They were the worst. A terrible studio. They made all the wrong decisions. They kept films they should have thrown in the garbage and they hated films that made a lot of money. They didn’t like Dances with Wolves. They thought The Silence of the Lambs was garbage.” And even though Orion did release Best Picture winners Dances with Wolves and The Silence of the Lambs in the years following Monkey Shines, the rest of their output was so underwhelming that they ended up going bankrupt by the end of 1991.
When Monkey Shines reached VHS, more viewers started giving it a chance. It gradually earned a cult following. It has never gotten as popular as some of Romero’s other movies, but it has its share of fans. And as more genre enthusiasts check it out in the days of DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming, its following continues to grow.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Romero considered Monkey Shines to be a take on the concept of Jekyll and Hyde. Allan being the Jekyll and Ella being the homicidal Hyde that brings out his bad side. The movie was seen as being something a bit different from the rest of the genre movies on Romero’s résumé. As John Pankow told Fangoria magazine, “It’s a psychological thriller, a suspense picture. It’s much less horror than Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, or Day of the Dead. It’s a whole different type of movie. You know, the talk is that this is a real departure for Romero, that it’s a pretty risky proposition for him because it’s new territory. You don’t see anyone’s legs cut off in this movie.” Savini repeated the “It’s a psychological thriller” line in his own interview with the magazine. But while Monkey Shines may not be the gorefest that the zombie movies Romero and Savini made together were, the movie definitely fits into the horror movie. And even though some may scoff at the idea of a killer capuchin monkey, especially one that taps into the thoughts and emotions of the human it cares for, this is an effective horror movie.
The story works because Romero never once attempts to make a joke out of it. Allan’s situation is treated very seriously, and the actors do a great job of digging into the emotional weight of it all. We sympathize with Allan, and Ella is adorable. So when this monkey is brought into Allan’s home and proves to be helpful, we come to care about her just like Allan does. And when things go terribly wrong, we still can’t blame Ella for what she’s doing. She does some nasty stuff, but she’s still a cute little animal. She has been driven to this. She has been experimented on. The serum Geoffrey has injected her with over and over has made her a killer. We know she needs to be stopped. But it would be heartbreaking to see her get hurt.
Pankow does such a great job playing Geoffrey, we can’t see the character as a villain for what he has done. We know his heart was in the right place. But he never should have been conducting this experiment on the monkeys in his lab.
With a running time of an hour and fifty-three minutes, Monkey Shines does go on a bit longer than necessary. But the story plays out in an interesting way and the viewer becomes invested in seeing how it’s going to turn out for everyone involved. And it doesn’t go well for several people.
BEST SCENE(S): There are great dramatic scenes throughout Monkey Shines. Beghe does an incredible job playing his character, whether the scene involves Allan dealing with becoming quadriplegic. Bonding with Ella. Getting close with Melanie. Or expressing the intense rage that Ella brings out in him. A deep dive into horror is saved for the film’s final thirty minutes, when there’s an extended sequence set in Allan’s house. Where Ella tries to cement her place in his life by taking out his mother, Melanie, and Geoffrey.
Romero brought an awesome home invasion sequence to the screen in his film Martin a decade earlier. Monkey Shines features another standout home invasion sequence that ranks right up there with the one in Martin. This time the invader is a naughty monkey wielding weapons like matches, syringes, and a straight razor.
PARTING SHOT: Romero would often name Martin as his favorite of his own films and Day of the Dead as his favorite of the zombie movies he made. But he felt Monkey Shines, which he made after both of those films, was his most well-crafted movie up to that point. So it’s a shame that it ended up in the hands of a studio that bungled its release. And hasn’t been seen by as many viewers as it should have been. This is a great entry in Romero’s filmography – and probably the smartest, most unsettling telepathic killer monkey movie we ever could have gotten. So seek out Monkey Shines. Give it a chance. And see if you agree with Romero that it’s a better crafted film than his lower budgeted endeavors.
And for the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie series I also wrote about director Sean S. Cunningham's 1980 classic Friday the 13th. Since the information about the franchise's connection to the Italian movie Twitch of the Death Nerve didn't make it into the video I wrote about Friday the 13th Part 2, I tried to get it into this video as well. And it got cut for time. I'm just not meant to get that info into a video. Since I feel that Friday the 13th doesn't get as much respect as it deserves, I also did a whole lot more gushing over the movie than what made it into the video:
Friday the 13th script:
When director Sean S. Cunningham set out to make the original Friday the 13th (watch it HERE), he was trying to craft a cinematic rollercoaster ride. He wanted the audience to have fun while being scared. He hoped they would jump and laugh, and be shocked by the gory murders. And he was very successful at what he set out to do. His little independent production was such a crowd-pleasing thrill ride, it became one of the biggest hits of 1980. And spawned a franchise that is still going on to this day. So let’s celebrate Friday the 13th by looking back and figuring out What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
Cunningham first got into the horror genre by producing Wes Craven’s 1972 feature debut The Last House on the Left. The film did well, but the negative responses to it were very personal, questioning the filmmakers’ sanity and morals. So Cunningham and Craven spent most of the decade trying to avoid returning to horror. Craven folded first, making The Hills Have Eyes in 1977. But Cunningham had the chance to do something different. For Last House distributor Hallmark Releasing, he directed two Bad News Bears rip-offs. The Little League baseball movie Here Come the Tigers and the soccer movie Manny’s Orphans. Let’s just say that they did not replicate the success of The Bad News Bears. Then the low budget, independently produced slasher Halloween did huge box office numbers in the fall of 1978. And Cunningham saw there was a good reason to give horror another try. But his second horror movie wasn’t going to have the same tone as The Last House on the Left. That was a very raw and painful movie that brought the feel of real tragedies to the screen. This time he wanted to make something that would be fun for the audience to experience.
In the early months of 1979, Cunningham asked Here Come the Tigers and Manny’s Orphans writer Victor Miller to come up with something along the lines of Halloween. The two would meet every morning to go over the details. As Cunningham told Crystal Lake Memories author Peter Bracke, the idea was to set the story in a remote location and put a lot of young people in jeopardy. He said, “Then we went down the list: are they in jeopardy from a real force or an imaginative one? Who’s going to survive, if anyone? Locations were kicked around, too. How about an apartment building, or a funhouse, or an amusement park, or an island off the coast of Spain?” Miller also considered setting the story in a high school. Then he thought of a place he had been afraid of in his own childhood: summer camp. Miller pitched the idea of setting the story at a summer camp before it opens, so they wouldn’t have to bring in a bunch of young extras to play campers. Cunningham loved the idea, so Miller wrote up the script.
Miller’s script establishes that Camp Crystal Lake is a place that has seen so much bad luck over the years, it has earned the nickname Camp Blood. A young boy drowned there in 1957. The following year, two counselors were murdered by an unknown assailant – and we see those murders in the film’s opening sequence. The camp closed down after that, and every attempt to reopen it has been met with sabotage. The water was bad. There were mysterious fires on the property. But now Steve Christy, the son of the camp’s owners, has decided to give the place another try. He sinks a lot of money into fixing it up. He hires the counselors, who gather together at the camp before opening day. And on Friday, June 13th someone starts picking them off one-by-one. Someone who wants to make sure the camp stays closed. In the end, the final surviving counselor finds out who the killer is. Mrs. Voorhees, who used to be the cook at the camp, until her son drowned there in 1957. His name was Jason. Mrs. Voorhees blamed the counselors for her son’s death. Driven insane by the loss of her child, she has been killing people and sabotaging the camp to avenge him.
The title on Miller’s script was Long Night at Camp Blood. But Cunningham had a different title in mind. In the July 4th edition of Variety, he took out a full page ad announcing that he was going to be making a movie called Friday the 13th. The ad promised this would be the most terrifying film ever made. He couldn’t believe that nobody else had used the title Friday the 13th before. He fully expected to hear that he couldn’t use the title because it was already taken… and in fact, there was a movie set for a November 1979 release called Friday the 13th: The Orphan. But the makers of that movie were easily dealt with, and it didn’t get much attention when it was released anyway. So the path was clear for Cunningham to make his own Friday the 13th. Most of the responses he got about the ad were distribution queries and offers from investors. Which he needed, because he had a budget of five hundred thousand dollars in mind. After working with Hallmark Releasing on The Last House on the Left, Here Come the Tigers, and Manny’s Orphans, he wasn’t interested in working with them anymore. But they offered to put one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars into the movie. And after they read the script, they wanted to cover the entire budget. So Cunningham was back in business with them – and they’re credited on the film as Georgetown Productions. The three men behind Georgetown – Phil Scuderi, Steve Minasian, Robert Barsamian – would continue to be involved with the Friday the 13th franchise as the decades went on.
It was Scuderi who hired a writer named Ron Kurz to polish the script and add in more humor. The biggest example of Kurz adding comic relief is the scene where the counselors are visited by a cop on a motorcycle. A tough-talking character who is clearly inept. Miller was appalled by the addition of this scene because, as he said, “The entire point was to create an environment in which there was no way these kids could get any help from the outside.” And here they were being visited by a police officer. But one gets the impression that Officer Dorf wouldn’t be able to help even if he caught Mrs. Voorhees red handed. As the story progresses and the body count rises, there’s a fake-out involving another police officer. Steve Christy has gone to town for supplies and doesn’t know that his counselors are being murdered back at camp. When his Jeep goes off the road in a storm, he has to catch a ride back to camp with the helpful Sergeant Tierney. The counselors are trapped at the camp with no way to reach the outside world – the phone line has been cut, the only vehicle tampered with. So the fact that Steve is with Tierney gives the audience hope. When the police officer arrives at the camp, he’ll stop the killing, right? But that’s not how it goes. Tierney is called to an accident scene and has to drop Steve off before they reach the camp. Hope speeds away in the opposite direction.
While Friday the 13th was chasing the success of Halloween, there was another horror movie that had some influence on it. Hallmark had handled the U.S. release of the 1971 Italian giallo film A Bay of Blood, which was directed by Mario Bava and is also known as Twitch of the Death Nerve. That film features several gory murders, a few of which are quite similar to murders depicted in the first two Friday the 13th movies. Twitch of the Death Nerve had done very well for Hallmark, showing at drive-ins and grindhouse theatres. Someone involved with the production of Friday the 13th felt that Cunningham’s cinematic thrill ride would benefit from showing bloody kills along the lines of those in Bava’s movie. And they knew who could provide gore that would blow the audience away. Special effects artist Tom Savini, who had just provided the gut-munching and head explosions for George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Almost twenty thousand dollars of the Friday the 13th budget went toward the creation of Savini’s effects. When crafting the script, Cunningham and Miller had decided that all of the murders should be committed with bladed weapons. The kills had to be personal, hand-to-hand. No guns, that would be too impersonal. Savini, who sees gore effects as bloody magic tricks, did an incredible job of making those kills work on the screen. The kills are gross and shocking, but the effects are fascinating to look at.
Over the years, it has been suggested that slasher movies are morality plays. That the murders are punishment for characters who have sex or do drugs. That wasn’t on Cunningham’s mind when he was making Friday the 13th. To him, the movie was about untimely, unwarranted death. The characters aren’t killed because they did anything wrong. They’re at Camp Crystal Lake, they’re going to die no matter what they do. As Cunningham said, the idea was to show that “there is a hostile world out there that wants to destroy you”, there’s no rhyme or reason to it.
By making a contribution to the Boy Scouts of America, the production was able to secure a Boy Scout Camp in New Jersey as the primary filming location. And on September 4, 1979, seven weeks of filming began. Cunningham was able to assemble a solid cast of New York-based actors to bring the characters to life. The idea being that he wanted people who looked like real kid-next-door types. The ill-fated counselors in the film are played by Mark Nelson, Laurie Bartram, Jeannine Taylor, Debra S. Hayes, Bing Crosby’s son Harry Crosby, future A-lister Kevin Bacon, and Willie Adams, who was also a production assistant. Robbi Morgan plays a counselor who looks like she could turn out to be the survivor. Then she gets knocked off early on, like Janet Leigh in Psycho. Peter Brouwer, who was dating the assistant director, was cast as Steve Christy. Cunningham considered playing Officer Dorf himself, but ended up casting Ron Millkie. Even though he clearly couldn’t ride a motorcycle. Ronn Carroll was cast as Sergeant Tierney. Rex Everhart plays a truck driver who believes Camp Crystal Lake is jinxed. Walt Gorney plays a character known as Crazy Ralph, who warns that the camp has a death curse. Cunningham wasn’t sure about including the Crazy Ralph character, but he turned out to be a fan favorite.
Fingers were crossed that they would be able to get a known name like Sally Field or Meryl Streep to play the survivor, Alice. But that was a pipe dream. The role went to another New York-based unknown, Adrienne King. Who proved to be quite capable of playing a terrified young woman who is forced to take violent action against an attacker. And Cunningham was able to get a well-known name to play the attacker, Mrs. Voorhees. His first choice was Estelle Parsons, who had won an Oscar for her role in Bonnie and Clyde. That didn’t work out because Parsons wanted a percentage of the profit. So he made an offer to Betsy Palmer. Palmer had a screen acting career that went back to the early 1950s, and was a household name due to her many appearances as a celebrity panelist on game shows. The role of Mrs. Voorhees was the opposite of what Palmer was known for. No one would have expected her to play a character like this. And she wouldn’t have, if she didn’t need a new car at the time. She needed about ten thousand dollars to buy the car she wanted. And Friday the 13th would pay her a thousand dollars a day for ten days of work. It was the perfect deal. And Palmer was so perfect in the role, most people today remember her as Mrs. Voorhees more than any other character she played.
Mrs. Voorhees doesn’t show up until the end of the film. The character is never even directly mentioned until she introduces herself to Alice. Which makes it impossible for viewers to guess who’s doing the killing. Palmer pointed out to Cunningham that he wasn’t playing fair with the mystery. She said, “You’re not even giving anybody a loose clue that I’m on the scene. They should at least have a glimpse of this woman somewhere earlier in the film. You should put me in that little diner Steve Christy visits, or at a stoplight in my Jeep. Whatever, just a flash somewhere.” But Cunningham wasn’t interested in providing clues earlier in the movie.
It has been said that working on Friday the 13th was really like going to summer camp. They were working in a beautiful, although sometimes creepy, location. There was a joking, carefree atmosphere on the set. But that doesn’t mean everything went smoothly. The production ran into some money issues. Cinematographer Barry Abrams begged to have more lights to use, but they didn’t have the money to buy more lights. So once night falls in the movie, it is quite dark. They couldn’t afford stunt doubles for King and Palmer, so the actors had to perform all of their fights themselves. Savini doubled for Bartram in a moment where her character’s corpse is tossed through a window. Crosby was temporarily blinded by a chemical used in the fake blood mix. A real snake was killed for the scene where a snake is found in Alice’s cabin. A scene that was written to show that the counselors could use violence to defend themselves, if necessary. Which it turns out to be. The opening sequence showing the murder of two counselors in 1958 was supposed to be bigger. It was going to take place outside and include a chase around the boathouse. But when it started snowing and the generator died, they had to film the whole scene inside a barn that had its own power source.
It took three tries to film the most famous scene in the movie. The climactic jump scare, which was included because the jump scare ending of Carrie had been so popular a few years earlier. It’s a scene that Victor Miller, Ron Kurz, and Tom Savini all separately take credit for coming up with. The scene where Alice is drifting along in a canoe the morning after defeating Mrs. Voorhees… and Mrs. Voorhees’ son Jason, who drowned over twenty years earlier, bursts out of the water. Grabbing Alice, tipping the canoe, pulling her into the water with him. There’s also disagreement over who deserves credit for Jason’s appearance. Miller had only vaguely implied that the child might have been mentally impaired. Kurz said he was the one who suggested Jason should have physical deformities as well. Savini says it was his idea. And there is no question that Savini was the one who created the makeup effect that was worn by actor Ari Lehman. Cunningham had considered casting his own son Noel Cunningham as Jason. But his wife didn’t want their son to spend so much time in that cold water. So he cast Lehman, who had worked for him on Manny’s Orphans.
That jump scare, presumably a nightmare, was the perfect way to end the onslaught of shocks and thrills Cunningham put together. And the film’s effectiveness was greatly enhanced when paired with the score composed by Cunningham’s old friend Harry Manfredini. Manfredini only had enough money to record the music in a friend’s basement with thirteen instrument players. But he turned in one of horror’s great, iconic scores. And one of its most popular sound effects. Manfredini wanted to create a specific sound to put in the film anytime the killer was present. Letting the viewer know the characters were in danger in that moment. Inspiration came from a scene where Mrs. Voorhees is shown to be talking to herself in Jason’s voice, saying “Kill her, mommy.” Manfredini spoke the first sounds of the words Kill and Mommy into a microphone and ran it through an echo reverberation machine. Ending up with that iconic sound, “ki ki ki ma ma ma,” that has been used throughout the franchise.
A franchise that happened because this little independent production managed to get major studio distribution. When Cunningham screened Friday the 13th for the Hollywood studios, a bidding war broke out between Paramount, Warner Bros., MGM, and United Artists. Paramount, which was looking for independent acquisitions to fill in spaces in their release slate, won the domestic distribution rights with a bid of one-point-five million. Warner Bros. landed the international rights. A marketing campaign was put together that focused on the film’s shocking murders. Murders which made it to the screen largely intact. While future entries in the series would be forced to remove bloodshed by the motion picture ratings board, this one scraped by with only nine seconds having to be cut to secure an R rating. Sensing that there could be a very enthusiastic audience for this film, Paramount decided to give it a wide release. It reached one thousand, one hundred and twenty-seven screens in the United States on May 9th, 1980… and it was a huge hit. A five-point-eight million dollar opening weekend was the first step on the way to the film earning almost forty million at the global box office. Over fourteen million tickets to Friday the 13th were sold in 1980. It was the seventeenth highest grossing film of the year. The second highest money-maker of the summer, behind only the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back.
It’s easy to see why Friday the 13th was such a box office draw. Cunningham and his collaborators had managed to make a deeply unnerving film. The low budget actually resulted in the movie having sort of a documentary feel to it. It seems like we’re really just hanging out with the characters at Crystal Lake. Getting to know them and like them. And then they’re brutally taken out. The darkness the cinematographer wanted to lighten up works to the film’s benefit, making it even creepier. You can feel that the counselors are completely isolated from the outside world. Alone in the middle of nowhere. No one’s coming to help them. And this unhinged woman, who none of them had heard of other than Steve, wants to murder them for something they had nothing to do with. Friday the 13th is often written off as nothing but a Halloween cash-in. Or overshadowed by the franchise it spawned. It doesn’t get as much respect as it deserves, being a classic in its own right. There’s a reason it made so much money: it’s a great horror movie. A crowd pleaser. A rollercoaster, just like Cunningham intended.
With all of the success came backlash from people who found this type of entertainment to be repugnant. The Catholic League of Decency condemned the film. It was named a Video Nasty in the United Kingdom. Some critics were appalled, with Gene Siskel going so far as to spoil the ending in his review. And then encourage the outraged public to send letters to Paramount and Betsy Palmer shaming them for being involved with Friday the 13th. He provided information on how to reach them. Luckily, he gave the wrong address for Palmer, so she didn’t see many letters about it. Later in the year, Siskel and Roger Ebert dedicated an episode of their TV show to discussing films like Friday the 13th. With Siskel suggesting they should be outlawed like bullfights. Of course, seeing people like Siskel and Ebert freak out over the movie just made the public want to go watch it even more.
Friday the 13th raked in so much cash over the summer of 1980, a sequel was soon on the fast track to be released in May of 1981. Second unit director Steve Miner stepped up to take the helm of Friday the 13th Part 2, working from a screenplay by Ron Kurz. The problem was, they had to figure out who would be doing the killing, since Mrs. Voorhees hadn’t made it to the end of the first film. Georgetown Productions’ Phil Scuderi knew exactly who the killer should be. His name was Jason… and we know how that turned out, as Jason would return for many more sequels and even make a trip to Elm Street.
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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