STEVE MINER:
I can't remember why, but we called him "Ralph the Rat Man." Walt played him very well. I loved the way he looked. He was just so strange. And Walt is really a very dedicated actor. I think that he tends to live his roles—we'd be between takes, sitting around the location, and Walt would be talking to himself. I don't know if he does that in real life, but he did it on the set. Maybe because Crazy Ralph is so strange, Walt felt like he had to act weird all of the time in order to stay in character.
MARK NELSON:
The story was going around that Walt was actually just some guy they cast right off the street or something, but that's not true. I remember going to see Walt in a play called Trelawny of the Wells when I was in college. He played the butler in that. It was a huge cast with Meryl Streep and John Lithgow. And Walt was terrific! It is still one of my favorite plays I have ever seen.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
One character I did have reservations about was Crazy Ralph, and I still do. His function, in the classical tradition, was to be the foreshadower. I know it's effective—like "Beware the Ides of March," right out of Julius Caesar. It was also predicated on the fact that I needed, for at least a while, somebody who might be the murderer. Hopefully I he was able to help set the mood and tone. I can't tell you if I really accomplished my intention.
VICTOR MILLER:
You needed to find a way to keep any adult from being able to materially aide or save the teenagers. I remember in Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis would go around banging on adult doors and say, "Help me, help me, help me!" and you would just hear the adult voices inside saying, "Oh, it's just a kid, don't even open the door." And they kept finding ways of getting Dr. Loomis out of the way. So all of the adults, you had to keep them off the canvas.
The Steve Christy character was necessary to give credibility to the story, a legitimacy. Why else would you have these kids just careening around, 18 year-olds capable of opening up a summer camp by themselves? He also knew the surrounding neighbors, he knew Sgt.Tierney and Crazy Ralph, and he knew the killer, so through him, I could have the audience meet the camp. Still, it was very important to use him sparingly and to keep him always doing something else offstage. I made sure that he was out of the way.
The only scene in Friday the 13th that I did not write was the motorcycle cop. I was told that it was the brainstorm of the man who came up with the cash, Phil Scuderi. And when I heard about it I was just appalled, because the entire point was to create an environment in which there was no way these kids could get any help from the outside. Officer Dorf worked so far against that. With the adult characters, I was not trying to save the kids from buffoons, you know? I like to think that outside their world there were very effective adults who could have helped them, but they were unable to get them or even knew what was going on. That scene with the cop is the only one that I am aware of that has nothing to do with me whatsoever.
RON KURZ:
After writing a couple movies for Phil Scuderi, I heard he was approached by a somewhat down-and-out Sean Cunningham. Sean basically had a great title in Friday the 13th, but what Phil viewed as a rather tepid script by Victor Miller. Before Phil would put up any money he wanted script changes. He brought me in to do the revisions—Phil wanted some humor added, my forte, and he knew the script needed something. He didn't know what at the time, but something.
I have no apologies for any humor I put into the script. Despite Victor's or Sean's sense that it was detrimental, I'm afraid I disagree. If done right, humor and horror can work extremely well together—complimenting one another—often lulling the audience to a point where the horror, when it strikes, is more effective.
Shooting the effect of Annie getting her throat slit was one of the many examples of the wizardry of makeup effects artist Tom Savini. "It really is a magic trick," says Savini. "What do I need to do to make the audience believe what they're seeing is really happening? With Robbi Morgan's death, all you saw was a knife come up into the frame, then the blade go across her throat. So we cast Robbi's neck and built a rubber appliance with a slit in it already, so when she tilted her head back, you'd see the would open. It is a primitive effect today, but still in use. In fact, after Friday the 13th, I think there was a cut throat gag in every movie that was offered to me."
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Back when we did Here Come the Tigers, Victor Miller used a pseudonym. "Arch McCoy," that's the credited screenwriter on Tigers, because Phil Scuderi made him write some stuff that he just hated so much that he took his name off the credits. Ron Kurz? I don't know that I ever met the guy. I think that potentially Scuderi gave him money to write, but he never wrote for me.
Its lighthearted early days spent filming in sun-drenched cabins and on the shores of sandy beaches completed, Friday the 13th would switch to a noctural schedule for its final four weeks of shooting—seemingly unending long nights spent under a cloak of darkness, in dank cabins battered by the howling winds, across vast and eerie woods covered in sheet rains, and with the ever-present ticking clock of the morning's rising sun always looming on the horizon. Having set up their full base of operations in camp's mess hall kitchen, Tom and Taso would also give the cast and crew what was often their first taste of working with complex make-up effects—when they weren't terrorizing them with practical jokes—and it was in these often arduous final weeks of shooting that the tone and visual color of Friday the 13th would be fully realized.
Minimalist, thrifty and occasionally crude, Friday the 13th both suffered and benefited from the limitations of its small budget. Cunningham and his crew had to be inventive with the resources at their disposal—limited equipment, the moodiness of the location, and creative production design. But the result was a dark, sparse, neo-verité nightmare influenced as heavily by the documentary makers with whom Cunningham had rubbed shoulders during his early years as by the more stylized films of the era that critics accused him of shamelessly swiping from.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I wasn't creatively invested in Friday the 13th. I didn't have "artistic" inklings. The style was, "What does it take to tell the story?" And we created technical problems that you wouldn't believe. We were out in this totally remote location in New Jersey. Then, in the script, the storm comes in. And on top of that, the lights have to go out. So I have to shoot this film with no source light whatsoever, not even moonlight. There I am, out in the middle of nowhere, trying to maneuver everyone. Consequently, it takes forever to go from here to there. Anything you want to do is three to four hours of setup time.
There have been criticisms of the way Friday the 13th looks. My poor D.P., Barry Abrams, he begged me for more lights. I didn't have the money. I was like, "Barry, you're killing me! Why do we need all those lights!?" Friday the 13th was almost the definition of minimalist filmmaking at the time. How low can we light it to qualify as a movie that somebody would pay us money to see? And reality is perhaps the most effective method to present horror—"This could happen to me!" That truly scares the wits out of an audience. I had also come out of the documentary film scene in the 1970s, just like D.A Pennebaker and all those guys. I was even in the same building as them in New York—Norman Mailer was downstairs. And at some level, we were looking for an alternative for that bloated, Kodachrome Hollywood crap that we were being fed. I think one of the reasons why the film is seductive in its own way is that the amateurishness gives it a verité kind of reality that a slick movie doesn't create. You feel like you're witnessing a real event, which I suppose is an accomplishment.
PETER STEIN, Camera Operator:
One of the first movies I had shot, a documentary called A Good Dissonance Like a Man, won a Peabody Award. On the basis of that, I got a lot of corporate shooting, and one was a motivational film Strategy of the Achiever, on which the line producer was Steve Miner. We got to talking and I told him I was really interested in dramatic films. He said he was working with Sean Cunningham on this film Here Come the Tigers
, and the director of photography was Barry Abrams, and they were all sort of buddies. So I showed him some of my work, and from there on I was the cameraman and it all worked out pretty well.
We shot Friday the 13th with a very small crew. A gaffer and an assistant cameraman, that was about the size of it. And you've got to figure out where to place the lights so they're not going to be in the shot, but they're going to do the job. And do it all without front-lighting the action, because that is not horror film lighting. You want to edge-light and backlight, and just have a little bit of fill to give it that dramatic, scary look. And for the effects, you want to light them even darker, to not feature them too much. The lighter it is, the more the audience's attention goes to it. So if you keep it dark and in the shadows, it works better. I think it was those considerations that really contributed to the look of Friday the 13th.
RICHARD FEURY:
Barry Abrams was very dedicated. I remember the first night of shooting when we did our first scene inside one of the cabins by the lake. The actors rehearsed, they go to get dressed, then they come back, and still the crew was lighting and lighting. But Sean was really good about this. A lot of directors don't want to deal with the director of photography. But the film is very, very dark. I remember going to take this first picture that night, and looking at my camera and thinking, "The aperature is wide open, and still it's going to be underexposed!" And I turned to Barry and said, "Is there something wrong with my camera?" He said, "Nope, that's right. Nothing wrong with your camera." That dark look of Friday the 13th, it is extreme. It was a real challenge throughout filming.
ADRIENNE KING:
It was like The Blair Witch Project 20 years beforehand. That's what we felt like in the dark, in the woods. It wasn't a handheld camera, but it was close.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
There's a technique that has since become a cliché, which is the stalker POV. I used it extensively in Friday the 13th, and John Carpenter certainly used it before I did. It's the notion that there is an unexplained, unexpected person in the story. And that by switching to that point of view you can create a certain kind of anxiety. Because the camera is in the wrong place and it's telling you, non-verbally, that there's somebody else present. And that we, the audience, have information that the characters don't have. So whereas the character might just wander into the equipment shack thinking everything is fine, we're saying, "No, there's somebody out there, don't ya' see?" That is one of the many devices that we used to try to increase the tension, and it's certainly the main visual dynamic of Friday the 13th.
Another element is the delight when you get the audience to be startled and jump. Which is often done by having an offstage noise and a fake scare, like, "Oh, silly me it's a cat or a bird, and it's safe." Then right after their guard is let down, you'll deliver another sudden movement and a completion of that beat. But I believe that shouldn't happen on a cut, it should be in the same frame. That gives you the best possible shot. The audience has become sophisticated now, and today you have to find other ways to create that misdirection. But I still think in order to get that startling moment, that is the best way to get it, by using the fake scare to lead into the real one, all in one shot.
"I remember Kevin Bacon as being very much an all-around nice guy," recollects co-star Jeannine Taylor of her romantic co-star. "I knew he'd be a star. He had that kind of focus. He was very serious without really seeming to be—in some ways mature beyond his years."
JEANNINE TAYLOR:
As an actress, it was interesting to try and achieve those switches. In the scene when Marcie recounts her dream, I think her fear does come across. That was one part of my performance that I thought was pretty okay. The sound of the storm triggers this happy-go-lucky girl's only real terror. The film changes tone at that point and goes into a darker place. That's an aspect that I can say was interesting to try and do.
The actual scene in the shower room, leading up to my death scene, I'm just goofing around. My character is in love, she's in this great place and has all these neat new friends. She's just read this clumsy little graffiti that the kids left on the bathroom stall and it's put her in a silly, child-like mood. So the reality is wholesome and safe. The safety is broken the second she hears a noise. But then it's back to a childish game as she looks into each shower stall and there's nothing there. The only things that aren't safe and child-like in that scene are the first noise that she hears that might be something bad, and the last split-second, when she sees what's going to happen to her.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Whereas Victor Miller and I had a sense of story, I think it was when Tom Savini came on board, and gave us a notion of what we could and could not do with the effects, that the film really started to take on a visual character of its own. Once production began, he arrived at the camp with his truck, his assistant Taso, a chinchilla and a bunch of makeup. And he didn't leave until we wrapped. He became part of our extended filmmaking family. I remember Steve Miner and Tom and I trying to block stuff out—trying to figure out where a prosthetic would go and how we would make the switch via cuts. It was Special Effects 101.
TOM SAVINI:
It was just me and my best friend, Taso. We decided not to live in the hotel. We were just out there every night in the middle of the woods, in this little camp by the lake, where somebody's supposedly running around killing people. And here we were creating the victims. We had everything at our disposal, and free reign of the kitchen—we even baked prosthetic appliances in the pizza oven at this Boy Scout camp. And in those days I had a Betamax, and we only had two movies, Barbarella and Marathon Man. We watched one of them every night for two months—I can quote you every line from those movies. So, when I think of Friday the 13th, I think of living at the camp, watching the same two movies over and over again and hanging around at night. It was a blast.
Left: "The signature creative death of Friday the 13th is, I suppose, the murder with Kevin Bacon and the arrow," says Sean Cunningham. "And the best example of something that could not have been done or even remotely considered without Tom Savini being there, telling us how to do it. Now everybody knows how to do it, but at the time we had no idea how we were gonna pull it off."
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
I was around the shop all the time. I became pretty good friends with Tom Savini and Taso—or, rather, they put up with me because I was the director's son. They were great. These guys were stuntmen and special effects guys. They'd be fencing and sword-fighting all over the camp. And one night, everyone was eating in the cafeteria and then out of the darkness this big gorilla comes running into the mess hall screaming and flipping up tables. Then Tom jumps up on the table and draws a blank gun—he's rigged the gorilla suit with squibs and he starts blasting. Everyone was screaming and yelling. No one had any idea what was going on. They did stuff like that all the time.
TASO STAVRAKIS:
We set up our headquarters in one of the cabins behind the kitchen, a storage room that they let us use. We had a lot of work to do, but we also had so much fun. The man who ran the camp, he and his wife let us make the latex molds in their oven—and we wrecked it. All the food that came out of those ovens smelled like latex for who knows how long after that. And when Tom and I were first driving out to the camp, I had a little BMW that we just stuffed as much of our stuff as we could into out little car. I remember packing for the movie and saying, "Should we take the gorilla suit? Yeah!" And when you're shooting a horror movie, people are freaked out already anyway. So we would do a lot of sneaking around the camp at night, and pull gags. Like the gun thing—we'd drive girls from a local college down to the main building, start a fake argument, then pull out a gun and shoot them and have all this fake blood rigged. We got a lot of people with stuff like that. Or, at the end of the movie, Adrienne King has to use a bunch of tools and things to fight against the killer. I made a lot of fake weapons, a frying pan and other things, out of silicon and foam, and then painted them. I di
d a killer job! That was one of our favorites—one of the cast or crew would come in, and Tom would throw a fake hammer at them and they'd scream.
BARRY MOSS:
I went out to the set once to see what was going on, and there's Jeannine Taylor's head on a stick. I never went back to the set again.
MARK NELSON:
Back then, working with special effects and make-up was not something you would normally be used to. I had to sit for a long time in a dentist chair in Tom Savini's little studio, being fitted for the latex mold that he built for my death scene, for the slash across my neck. He did a complete mold of my jaw and neck and chest and then made a latex application with a gash in it and a tube the came through the gash that dripped blood. And they had to put straws in my nose so I could breathe through the plaster as he was taking the impression. It is certainly a experience to have your face covered and mold made of you, but it was okay.
ROBBI MORGAN:
After I got the part, the first thing I had to do before we started shooting was go and get right on a train to Connecticut, where Tom Savini had his place set up there to make molds and other things to prepare the effects. They had to fit me with a neckpiece and get my makeup handled. We did it once, in one take. There was no room for mistakes, because it was getting late and they could only set up my neckpiece once and that was it.
I'm the first of the counselors to die in Friday the 13th and it's the first big effect in the movie, and it was so uneventful to shoot it. You can't really prepare for something like this, your own death scene. I just went with my instincts. But I do remember that I did specifically decide not to scream. I thought if my throat was getting cut, I couldn't scream. It would just be pure fear.
TASO STAVRAKIS:
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 8