Dissecting Slashers: Friday the 13th (1980)

Cody celebrates Friday the 13th once again.

BACKGROUND

Sean S. Cunningham first got into the horror genre by producing Wes Craven’s feature debut, the 1972 “rape revenge” film 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.

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 500,000 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 a scene where the camp 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 the cop, Officer Dorf, wouldn’t be able to help even if he caught the killer red handed. As the story progresses and the body count rises, there’s a fake-out involving another police officer. The camp owner 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 the owner 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 the owner off before they reach the camp. Hope speeds away in the opposite direction.

SETTING

The isolated setting Cunningham and Miller chose for their film is a summer camp called Camp Crystal Lake – so named because it’s located in a small New Jersey town called Crystal Lake, and also happens to sit on the shore of the lake itself.

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 property 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. 

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. 

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, so the actors had to perform all of their fights themselves. Savini doubled for a female victim in a moment where her corpse is tossed through a window. One actor 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 a 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 production had its challenges, but the camp the filmmakers secured for the primary filming location was absolutely perfect. It’s supposed to be a place where kids can have some fun together during the summer, but there’s an unnerving edge to every corner of this place. It really feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a deep, dark woods. The killer could be lurking behind any of those trees... or inside any cabin...

KILLER

For most of the movie, we only see parts of the killer’s body as they pursue victims and murder people. We see the boots they’re wearing, a hand wielding a blade and slitting a throat, or pushing a tree branch aside so they can get a better view of the people they’re stalking. It isn’t until the climactic sequence that the killer’s identity is revealed... and we discover the homicidal maniac is a middle-aged woman who, at first, appears to be quite friendly. She 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.

Cunningham was able to get a well-known name to play 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 and is never even directly mentioned until she introduces herself to the final girl, 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.” But Cunningham wasn’t interested in providing clues earlier in the movie.

The mystery may be unsolvable until Mrs. Voorhees arrives, but the moment when she reveals her homicidal tendencies is still awesome, and Palmer delivered a great performance as this mom-gone-mad.

FINAL GIRL

Fingers were crossed that Cunningham would be able to get a known name like Sally Field or Meryl Streep to play the last surviving camp counselor, Alice. But that was a pipe dream. The role went to a 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. 

Since the slasher formula hadn’t been fully established by the time this movie went into production, Alice is not your typical mousy virginal final girl. Cunningham may have decided to make a slasher movie due to the success of Halloween, but he and Miller clearly weren’t interested in focusing on a heroine just like the one in the ‘78 movie. Alice may be nice, but she’s no prude. By the time we meet her, she’s already dealing with the aftermath of some kind of romantic dalliance with Steve Christy. She clearly has the hots for fellow counselor Bill, she drinks beer, she smokes marijuana, and she hates Monopoly – but she’ll gladly agree to play a game of Strip Monopoly.

We don’t learn a lot about Alice on a personal level; the Steve Christy issue and the fact that she might have to go back home to California before camp opens is only the focus of one scene and Miller didn’t spell out all of the details in his script, but she’s a good final girl nonetheless.

VICTIMS

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 the counselors to look like real kid-next-door types. The ill-fated counselors in the film are played by Mark Nelson (Ned), Laurie Bartram (Brenda), Jeannine Taylor (Marcie), Debra S. Hayes (Claudette), Bing Crosby’s son Harry Crosby (Bill), future A-lister Kevin Bacon (Jack), and Willie Adams (Barry), who was also a production assistant. Claudette and Barry aren’t around for very long (they were counselors who were killed in ‘58, so they get offed in the opening sequence), but the others did a fine job making their characters seem like decent people who will work hard at their camp duties, then party in their downtime. Ned is the prankster, so he may try your patience at time, but there are no jerks in this bunch.

Robbi Morgan plays a counselor named Annie, who looks like she could turn out to be the survivor. We follow her for a while on her journey out to Camp Crystal Lake and we know that she’s a good person who genuinely cares about the children that she’ll be cooking for when she reaches the camp... but 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 Enos, 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.

Not all of these characters end up being victims, but they could be. Some of them could be considered red herrings as well, if you expect the director to show the killer sometime before the climax.

DEATHS

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.

There’s a throat slashing, an arrow through the throat, an axe to the face, stabbings, a decapitation – and some of these kills still hold up as some of the best kills to ever be featured in a slasher movie. After doing this amazing work, Savini went directly over to providing the gore for Maniac.

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’s probably for the best that it ended up being short and simple, giving the audience a quick shock before we make the jump to present day.

CLICHÉS

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.

The characters do get up to some cliché behavior, though. As previously mentioned, there is some beer drinking and pot smoking (and Strip Monopoly playing), plus some premarital sex and a little nudity. The film also has the clichés of an isolated setting, police officers who are no help whatsoever, the doomsayer nobody pays attention to, and a killer who has to deliver a monologue to reveal their motivation before they attack the final survivor(s).

And it has one of the most famous ending jump scares ever committed to film. 

POSTMORTEM

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 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 1.5 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 1,127 screens in the United States on May 9th, 1980... and it was a huge hit. A 5.8 million dollar opening weekend was the first step on the way to the film earning almost 40 million at the global box office. Over 14 million tickets to Friday the 13th were sold in 1980. It was the 17th highest grossing film of the year and 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. It's extremely underrated.

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.