Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition)

by Peter M. Bracke

  Tom was not an easy sell. The studio had somebody else, a very terrific guy, Greg Cannom, who's gone on to win Academy Awards. He's an absolutely first-rate, class-A guy. But he wanted to redefine Jason in a completely different way that wasn't related to the first film. He didn't want his work to be derived from anybody else. So I thought Tom was the only way to go.

  TOM SAVINI:

  I was doing a haunted house in North Carolina and got a phone call from Joe Zito. He had the last Friday the 13th movie, and he wanted me to work with him on it. They had been "improving" Jason—or making him more decrepit—as the series went. I wanted the Jason of The Final Chapter to be a 35-year-old version of the kid we saw in the original Friday the 13th. I also wanted to kill Jason personally. I gave him birth and it was up to me to get rid of him. That's why I came back. And they paid me a fortune to do it.

  It wasn't until I got to the set that I learned that Greg Cannom had the job first. I went and met the crew and they were terrific: Kevin Yagher, Alec Gillis, John Vulich—they've all gone on to form their own very successful effects companies since The Final Chapter. But it must have been a very frustrating experience for them. They should have started working on the effects three weeks before I got there, but they were only allowed to work on some props and cast the head of Ted White, who played Jason. I think we worked miracles, considering the limited time that we had.

  We didn't work on a soundstage at all. Our effects workshop was in the "war room" at Zoetrope Studios, which Francis Ford Coppola used as his headquarters while he directed a film—where he watched a zillion TV monitors. Zoetrope was exactly what you imagine Hollywood to be—all these people wandering around in period costumes, fantastic wigs and makeup. Mr. T was shooting a commercial there, Loni Anderson was doing a TV special, Kenny Rogers and Van Halen were shooting videos—I'd be whistling "Hooray for Hollywood!" while I worked.

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  Oh, it was very demented. We could have easily been arrested just for the conversations we had about how to kill these people! The deaths in The Final Chapter are harsher than in past Fridays, I think. That was intentional. What's horrifying is that in real life that people don't die quickly. It's the opposite of what I do in action films—I can't stand when people get shot and they start dancing around like this piece of ballet, so I try not to have that "theatre." But in scary movies, it's so much more awful when they don't die immediately. But I find it less interesting when a film dwells on the aftermath of death—what scares me are the things that precede the horrific moment. I'm scared when Martin Balsam is walking up the stairs in Psycho. Everybody thinks all we did in Friday the 13th was show every graphic thing that occurs in a mutilation. We didn't—we showed enough. Once that moment occurs, and once the audience has psychologically accepted it, it is not a kick to continue to stay on that. It's more interesting to get to the next moment.

  BARNEY COHEN:

  Joe Zito is a really smart guy. One thing he said was, "If you scare someone in a theater, that takes about three seconds. But if you creep someone out, that lasts all night." So the goal was to create kids that were real, that it would be a shame to see die, and truly kill 'em.

  I didn't go to Vietnam—I had been drafted, but I got lucky, and I wound up going to Germany. But I did all the training, and I hung out with guys that had those hollow eyes, that sense that they weren't going to make it through the year. I remember in writing each kill that I wanted to play with that brief moment, that look, so that nobody got killed without knowing that it was going to happen to them first, and that they had to make some kind of peace with it. And when I thought of that, it just gave me goosebumps. This ability to, essentially, announce your own death and not be able to do anything about it. Although this was something that, in all honesty, might have been the least well-translated thing from the page to the screen.

  TOM SAVINI:

  When I showed up on the set, there had been a few Friday the 13th movies in the interim, and I had done Dawn of the Dead, which was like the ultimate effects movie going at the time. As soon as I got there the actors were coming up to me, asking, "How am I going to die?" And the juicier the death, the better. They just wanted to die in the most glorious ways, because, to them, that was like their claim to fame, you know? And none of them were a problem. If we had to cast their naked body, it was like, "Great, if it means I'm going to have this big, bloody death!"

  COREY FELDMAN:

  I just loved that whole experience. It was the first time I learned about special effects and prosthetics. Tom Savini was great—a nice, down to earth guy, and obviously a master at his craft. I specifically remember the hand puppet I used in the scene where I'm showing off my character's makeup skills to Erich's character—I was impressed with myself because I did all the animatronics stuff. And after they had to make a head mold of me for the climax, and they gave it to me afterwards. And I kept it until I lost everything, and eventually had to sell it.

  "I used to have it in my contract that I would actually direct the scenes that my effects are in because that is my magic trick," says Tom Savini. "As a magician you have to have the parts needed to make the illusion work. The reason I especially liked working with Joe Zito is because he's the kind of director that knows that these effects are magic tricks, so he'd just ask me, 'What do you need? A shot of this or a shot of that?' I don't just take over, but I do suggest camera angles, and Joe listened. And even if we might at times disagree, or if he has a different vision of the effect, he might shoot it both ways, so he could see which worked best."

  TOM SAVINI:

  I love that Corey's character was named Tommy, 'cause his room, with all the masks and magic tricks—that's my room when I was his age. He's doing what I was doing then. Crewing up his friends, cutting their throats, chopping off limbs, and sending them home with half their hair gone or with burn makeup to freak out their parents. And all those the masks and props in that scene were part of John Vulich's collection. We just populated the set with his stuff to make it look like little Tommy had built it.

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  We tried to play with what was expected. For example, for the death of Doug, Peter Barton's character, I wanted to go against the cliché of the girl in the shower that we all know from Psycho. Instead, it's the prettiest guy with the most chiseled face, the most perfect face. And what does Jason do to him? He just goes right through the glass and crushes his head against the tile. Just smashes his face. It was sort of fun in a way—I mean, not that smashing someone's head in the shower in real life would be fun—but in a movie way. I also think it interested Peter Barton, the actor, not only because it went against the cliché but because, at the time, he was still going through that teen star adulation thing.

  PETER BARTON:

  I already had been hurt on set once before, while shooting an episode of The Powers of Matthew Starr. I fell on a magnesium flare and ended up with third-degree burns and four operations at the hospital. So I was absolutely afraid during my entire death scene.

  TED WHITE:

  I'm sure not all of the kids had a bad experience, but it was just terrible what I had to do to them. A lot of them I had to physically handle. I mean, it wasn't where I could just make some motion—I really had to grab them and do it. Like the kid in the shower, when I crushed his head into that wall. I told him, "I have to make this look like real. I can't tap you. I've really got to push your head into the tile wall. Are you ready for that?" And he said, 'Well, I don't know, you're an awfully big guy!" Eventually I talked to the assistant director and we at least put a pad behind his head. But it just wasn't pleasant for me.

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  People think it is all special effects, but often we are shooting these scenes with real weapons, to ensure that the audience sees the weight of it and feels the force of it. The cast all took it quite seriously—they played it as if they were doing some serious drama, as if they were doing Terms of Endearment. So they did, in fact, become those charac
ters, and their death scenes meant a lot to them. They were all very anxious to know how they would get offed and yet, then they all had the strangest reactions to seeing it on film. It's very peculiar, because you think they know precisely how it's done, how the prosthetic pieces worked, and they were there during the filming of all of it. But because they bought into the reality of that moment, so watching their death scenes was very hard on some of them.

  TOM SAVINI:

  I used to have it in my contract that I would actually direct the scenes that my effects are in because that is my magic trick. As a magician you have to have the parts needed to make the illusion work. The reason I especially like working with Joe Zito is because he's the kind of director that knows that these effects are magic tricks, so he'll just ask me, "What do you need? A shot of this or a shot of that?" I don't just take over, but I do suggest camera angles, and Joe listens. He trusts what I say. And even if we might at times disagree, or if he has a different vision of the effect, he might shoot it both ways, so he can see which works best.

  BARBARA HOWARD:

  The most fun I had out of the entire time making the movie was the day I "died." It was my last day of filming. I had come from a theatre background, where you're so used to that team spirit, and by the time we shot my death scene I had become good friends with much of the crew. So, as if in mourning, they all wore black armbands. I was so touched—it was very sweet. I've never forgotten that.

  I had two different wardrobes for that day. One was just a blue towel, and the other one was the blue towel around this mold they made of my chest with the ax in it. The door exploded, and then they cut to me with the ax, and I had to drop and writhe on the floor. People ask if it is unsettling or sad to act your own death, but I really got into it. It was just kind of fun, and I admired the makeup artists and how they did everything. It's was a little weird, though, to hear yourself screaming over and over. I remember by the end of the scene all I could think was, "Is this really what I will sound like when I'm going to die?"

  LAWRENCE MONOSON:

  I looked at it as, I'm an actor that's working on experiencing pain, and then technically controlling my body a certain way. So when you think about it, I'm not experiencing death, I'm experiencing life. I'm in the middle of creating, and there's no greater lifeforce than creativity. I also remember I was stoned. At that time, I was very, very serious. In my death scene, my character was smoking pot, so I was really interested in, "What would it be like to actually be stoned?" I thought, in a way, that this is the highest form of acting because I won't be acting. So I smoked a little pot in my trailer. And it was the worst thing that I could have possibly done. I was so paranoid. Just freaking out on the set. I barely functioned. I was absolutely horrible.

  Once it faded away, I was like, "OK. Experiment. Failure. Never doing that again." Who says drugs help creativity? They're wrong.

  BONNIE HELLMAN:

  If you get stabbed in the throat, that's one thing. But if you're stabbed in the throat while eating a banana, that just takes it to a whole new level of absurdity. When it came time to shoot my death scene, there I was sitting out in the forest with like 50 people around me, all very serious about what they're doing. Just to get shots of my hand squeezing a banana. And they say, "Okay, we need quivering. We need vocal quivering. Now some small screams. Now, some big screams. Now, a little more quivering. And don't forget, look natural!"

  "Oh, it was very demented," says director Joseph Zito of The Final Chapter's murder methods. "We could have easily been arrested for the conversations we had about how to kill these people."

  TOM SAVINI:

  There is an early scene in the morgue, with the nurse who gets stabbed in the chest by Jason as he's holding her up in the air. We attached some tubing to her thigh to allow the blood to trickle down one leg. Well, the tubing must have came loose, so it became like a penis—the stream of blood came out from right between her legs! Everyone on the set just cracked up. And they didn't even end up using the gag in the movie. We couldn't do it over again, so instead they just did a shot of the blood splattering on the floor.

  ERICH ANDERSON:

  It was so cold and wet the night we filmed my death scene, where Jason kills me in the cellar. I just wanted to get home at the end of the shoot. I had this old Air Force parka that my father gave me to wear, and I just put it on over my wet clothes because I was so tired. Then, here it is, six o'clock in the morning and my car starts behaving badly, and I get pulled over—with blood all over me. The look on that cop's face was priceless.

  After three films and nearly three dozen murders, the makers of The Final Chapter knew that audiences would be out for blood—Jason's blood. They also knew that, if nothing else, they had to sustain a level of intensity during the film's climax that would top the three previous Fridays combined. But despite having a trio of past successes and their attendant mistakes to learn from, the filmmakers' greatest asset was also potentially their greatest liability: audience familiarity. Now that the Friday the 13th "formula" had been all but perfected, there was little option but to both honor the shopworn clichés of the genre while making at least some attempt to subvert them—and all without the crutch of self-referential irony, postmodern pastiche or, most dangerous of all, campy humor. Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, lay in the moment the filmmakers knew the audience had ultimately paid their money to see: Jason's demise. It had to be grand. It had to be gory. It had to be shocking. And it had to bring the audience to their feet.

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  One thing I really struggled with, and had a number of conversations about with key people, was that I thought we needed to keep Jason dead long enough in the beginning of the film. I knew that anyone who was seeing The Final Chapter had, in great likelihood, seen Part 3. So I felt that there was no reason to go ahead and thrust our film years into the future. Instead, I wanted it to feel as if this was all one big, continuous movie. Of course, Jason's alive, but he's not just lying there and then suddenly turns around and starts chasing everybody. That's the reason there is the opening sequence to the movie that starts with the tracking shot of the helicopter. We go through the mud with the emergency workers, finding bodies. And there is Jason, lying there with a hockey mask on, and they throw the tarp over him—which is ridiculous, but nonetheless, he's Jason. Then we take him to the morgue and we hold off on the moment of him coming to life.

  I wanted people in the theater to start shouting, telling him to get up, trying to bring him to life. In essence, making the audience co-conspirators with the filmmakers. Because if he just gets up, the audience would groan. This way, they would want him to get up.

  JOEL GOODMAN:

  Early on, we made a conscious effort to establish Jason as an object of fear. We wanted to show the really awful things that this creature does so we could give the audience a reason to be afraid of him. And it was a very conscious decision to keep Jason in the shadows more. Because let's face it, a bogeyman in a hockey mask is ridiculous. It's the context that makes it frightening, and not funny. That's why the less of the guy you show, the better off you are. If you imagine him, he's going to be scarier.

  In a way, these movies play peek-a-boo—they're going back to very primal experiences. There's either drawn-out anticipation, or the out-of-left field scare. We were very much aware of that when we constructed the movie. The classic Friday the 13th dynamic is the interaction, where you want the audience to say, "Don't go in the room!" Like the moment when the main character, Trish, steps over Jason's supposedly lifeless body—you know he's going to get back up to grab her. It's a horror movie staple. What we were trying to do was not to talk down to the audience, but still do the best job possible within the conventions of the genre. Because, really, we'd be cheating you if we didn't give you those moments, wouldn't we?

  JOSEPH ZITO:

  The audience has, in these films, a very rare opportunity to be smarter than the characters. They know that the people they are wat
ching are deliberately doing dumb things. But it empowers the audience. It involves them in it. A friend of mine, who is a film director, said, "Yeah, the movie was all right, but in that scene where Jason busts through the door, and the characters used those little nails—that was really stupid. Why did you do that?" We made that dumb on purpose. It's a pathetic thing for these characters to try and do, hammering with these tiny little nails, trying to hold down this door. That was exactly the point. We wanted the audience to think that those little nails aren't going to keep Jason out of this house. We did that specifically so you would feel that moment.

  KIMBERLY BECK:

  I tried to make it as real as I could. I had to say dumb things and I had to do dumb things, but I tried to find a reason why I was doing it, so it made some sense. I tried to approach it realistically. I remember working with my acting coach, finding ways that were emotionally very true for me. I figured that this was great exercise and a great way for me to grow as an actor.

  It helped that it was really miserable conditions. They'd wet me down before every take, and I'd have to run forever in the bitter cold. So it wasn't hard to use that anger to whack Jason over the head with a hammer.

  Filming the death of Doug (Peter Barton).

  COREY FELDMAN:

  The most intense moment of the entire shoot was during the final chase sequence, when Jason grabs me through the window. It was shot in one complete take—a two or three page scene. Joe Zito said to me, "This dead body is going to crash through first, and then you'll freak out, scream, move from one mark to another, then back towards the window. And wait. Then, at some point, Jason is going to come through the window and pick you up." So we go through the timing of the scene. Then Joseph yells, "Action!" Kimberly Beck and I run around, I back up to the window… beat, beat, beat… and… beat, beat, beat… no Jason. I'm thinking, "Oh, okay, the stunt didn't work right." And then, boom! Jason smashes through. This huge man comes from behind me with such force and impact that he takes me straight up seven feet in the air. And I'm only two feet tall at this time. I was losing it. It scared the shit out of me. That expression you see on my face was not acting, folks.