TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
I had a lot of little genre references in there—Karloff's Market, Cunningham Road, Carpenter Road. And Sheriff Garris is a reference to my friend, director Mick Garris. The self-referential touches I put in, like with No Exit as the book the kid is reading, or a rat stuck in a cage—they were little metaphors for what the kids were going through. Things like that seemed to hit a right note. And the humor, like when the two kids looked at each other and said, "What were you going to be when you grow up?" Things that an intelligent critic would look at and say, "They're having fun with it." But at the same time, all the elements are still there so that the fans would be screaming and yelling just like they would with any other slasher movie.
I also had to somehow make it seem that everybody wasn't stupid for going back yet again to Camp Crystal Lake. It was a long time ago, they've changed the name, Jason is dead, and maybe it was just a legend. I really enjoyed working that into the script—that somehow this was a legend that became bigger than life. That even why I wrote that scene with the little "Camp Blood" card game that the girls played in the cabin. It was all about the mythology.
KERRY NOONAN:
My favorite stage direction in the script was for the scene with the sheriff, when he is shooting at Jason: "Nothing stops this undead super-killer." I thought that was hilarious.
TOM FRIDLEY:
To be honest, I'm not a huge horror fan. I saw the one Friday the 13th that was in 3-D, and it scared the crap out of me! After seeing that, when Jason Lives came my way I thought, "Why am I doing this!?" That kind of adrenaline, I'd rather get from humor—I'd rather laugh myself to death than scare myself to death. But that's why Tom McLoughlin was one of the most fun directors to work with. Because I've been kind of humorous my whole life. People would often say to me, "Why aren't you a stand-up comic?" And this is just my thing—it's nothing against comics—but it's no fun trying to be humorous and then trying to repeat it. I think jokes are for people that aren't that funny. I'm more like, let's just hang out and let it happen. It's like a song lyricist—you don't know where the words are going to come from. You just get on a roll, and it's a natural high and you can't be stopped. And that's how Tom was on the set—he just let me go.
There is that scene early on at the camp, with the two boys, where I try and teach them about Indians and rocks or something. We went short on time, and Tom was basically like we need to shoot some more stuff. So he went, "Here you go," and threw me a rock. Just make it up. That scene turned out to be a total improv. And it was a one-take deal. The camera was shooting once from the kids' POV looking down at me, and once from my POV looking up. That was it, no editing. But it ended up turning out to be one of the funniest scenes in the movie.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
One thing I was very aware of when I did my Friday was the sex equals death thing. I always had a problem that kids have sex and then they get killed, whether it was for moralistic reasons or just coincidental. Personally, I never thought there was any moral conspiracy at work, whether by past Friday filmmakers or otherwise. I always thought it's just that these two elements have always been attractive. And then it just sort of developed out of that, and someone at some point said, "Wait a minute, that's now the rule—have sex and die."
I much preferred to make fun out of that whole thing. I only had one sex scene in mine and it was played for laughs. Having those kids be in a motor home bouncing up and down, and then having Jason look at this thing and think, "What the hell is going on in there?" Then by the end of the sequence it all turns into a big stunt. I wanted to take it to a whole different level. The humor was that this girl was having sex to this song and trying to get the guy to last long enough to get to the end, then when the power went out, so did he. And if you listen really close, after his big moment, we put a sound effect in there—you hear him take his rubber off. It was subtle little joke we played when we were mixing the movie. Safe sex!
KERRY NOONAN:
The Friday the 13th movies are morality tales—the people who get killed are the ones who do bad things. Tom is very Christian and he didn't want that stuff. We're not all doing drugs, and our one sex scene is comical. There is even that scene at the end of the film, when little Nancy prays to bring Tommy back to life—that religious influence is definitely in Part VI. Paradoxically, that means the violence is that much more unexplainable. It's more random. We're not being punished for anything—we're just getting killed because we're there. It's an interesting twist to the normal Friday formula. But it's a paradox because here the movie has a Christian influence, yet people are being killed for no reason! I find that very interesting.
DARCY DEMOSS:
I love Tom McLoughlin. And Nancy. They're great. But interestingly enough—and this is moviemaking—while we were shooting the love scene, Tom said, "I think we're going to lose your top." I went, "Excuse me?" It's not in my contract, which is why contracts make or break careers. The scene didn't need it anyway. It was what it was. So I said no. I don't remember there really being a choice. I think the producers probably said, "I think we need to lose her top, we need more sexy stuff in here." Because there wasn't any nudity in Tom's film at all. There really isn't. So much more is left to the imagination when you don't see everything.
Storyboard gallery: paintball massacre.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
I know I had made a conscious choice not to have nudity, and I'm not sure if that is because it was purely the "easy" thing to do. And not that every good actress won't do nudity, but I felt like I was going to get a better caliber of talent if I did that. If it said "nudity required," there are a lot of actresses who say, "This is the beginning of my career. I'm not going to start this way." I know from working with Phoebe Cates. She told me she was upset that she made that choice in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She looked gorgeous, but every time she did another picture, there was an expectation that you were going to see Phoebe strip. And as I said, I was trying to break some of the clichés and have a sense of mythology about it, so that it wasn't all about having sex and dying.
TOM FRIDLEY:
I didn't know who was going to play Nikki until the actress was gonna show up on set. And because my character was already at the camp, I had already been shooting a while before it came time to shoot our sex scene. And when I was in junior high, Darcy DeMoss was like one of the sex symbols of the school at the time. There was like three girls that were like unattainable, and she was one of them. And she was a year older than me, so she was way out of my category as far as that went. So here I am on the set, waiting in bed, and who comes flying in? I couldn't believe it. I'm like, "Oh my god, it's Darcy!' It was hysterical.
DARCY DEMOSS:
Tom Fridley and I got along great. We had a lot of laughs, a lot of fun. I remember during our sex scene, I was doing my back and forth grinding motion on top of him, to the music, and Tom has got his can of beer in his hand and is acting all cool and getting into it. Then Tom McLoughlin says, "Um, Tom, you're going to have to take your underwear off." And Tom's face just goes pale! Suddenly, all that confidence and bravado went away. I just laughed and thought, "Well, not such a big man anymore, huh!"
THOM MATHEWS:
Tom could be very ambitious in ways you wouldn't expect. The toughest scene I had to do in the entire film was all dialogue, where I am in the phone booth making a call and I have to explain all this exposition to Jennifer Cooke. I remember that shot was like one continuous master with all kinds of tricky camera movements, and what seemed like tons of dialogue. It took 10 takes just to get it right.
My role was very physical—I had to do a lot of running and jumping. Just battling Jason, and the water, and having to focus on so much. It was hard work. One night, we were shooting close-ups in the jail cell and, around 4:00 a.m., we start hearing this snoring from somewhere. It turned out one of the grips had fallen asleep. We went ahead and tried to shoot the scene, but this guy kept snoring away. I tried to keep it t
ogether but, as I was looking at Tom, I couldn't anymore. And neither could he, and we both burst out laughing.
KERRY NOONAN:
Thom was very nice, but he was very focused and very busy. He was in almost every scene. I really didn't hang out with him at all. He probably had a lot more homework to do than I did. Jennifer Cooke, too… it was hard to hang out with them because they were in so many scenes that they were usually just working. And Jennifer had this age thing going, "I'm only 21!" That kind of annoyed me. But she was a nice person.
VINCENT GUASTAFERRO:
This is what I liked about Jennifer—her ego was so huge that she didn't need anything else. I remember she was on the dock and Thom was in the water, and she had to dive in and act like she's saving him. And somebody said to her, "Are you okay?" And she goes, "Just make sure my hair looks good." But I say this because I think she had a great attitude toward the work. She didn't take it all that seriously. She knew her job in the movie was to be the hottie, and if her hair looked right that's all she needed to do. She was a very practical girl.
NANCY MCLOUGHLIN:
We all got along. It wasn't intense. In many ways, on a movie set, you can be a child, and you don't really have to be emotionally invested in the games people play. In fact, we used to play this one game by the fire, Truth or Dare, where we would ask, "If you could hook up with someone on the set, who would it be?" It's dangerous, and I think people can get very hurt by the answers, but it's so much fun.
KERRY NOONAN:
We used to have this saying: "It's not love—it's location."
"The daytime chase was one of the first days we filmed," recalls actor Vincent Guastaferro. "But because we were shooting at a local cemetery, which was historically preserved, we weren't allowed to leap over the graves. Tom McLoughlin had to block the whole scene out to look like it was a game of Pac-Man. But that's another example of what a great director Tom is—he took a limitation and turned it into something interesting."
TOM FRIDLEY:
My favorite joke was the one we played on Ron Pallillo, who had a small part at the beginning of the movie. Ron had worked with John Travolta, who is my uncle, as Horshack on "Welcome Back, Kotter." And at the time, as I remember, it was hard for Ron, for him to go from being a star on this big series to now be playing this little guy who gets killed at the beginning of a Friday the 13th movie. Now, if you are old enough to remember "Welcome Back Kotter," you know that Horshack used to wear this long red and white striped scarf—it was like his trademark. So a bunch of us were hanging out in the wardrobe truck, to get out of the freezing cold, and the guy that was the costumer had copies of that scarf. So we go to Ron's trailer, and we hang the scarf on his door. Then he sees it, and slams the door and is totally pissed off at us. So, of course, we go back and do it again. And this time when Ron saw it, he just grabbed it and held it over his head, and screamed, "I am not Horshack anymore, dammit!" That was not very nice of us, but hey, we were bored and it was the middle of nowhere in Covington, Georgia.
THOM MATHEWS:
Before Jason Lives, I hadn't seen any of the Friday the 13th films except the original. Then after I got the part, I went out and rented the video of Part V. I thought I made a terrible mistake. It was awful. It was like a porn movie. Suddenly, I felt uneasy—and I had already committed myself. But I liked the script so much, and Tom so much, that I had confidence that he was going to make a good movie. He seemed to have a real, genuine affinity for it.
I'm not really a horror buff. I never really understood them, and they never really held my attention. But after we made Part VI, I started to realize what filmmaking was about. It had its limits. It had the story and it had to have so many kills, but within all of that, I thought Tom made a really good movie. He tried to make the best movie he could with what he had. By the time we started shooting, any fears I initially had about making the movie were gone.
In keeping with the tradition of the previous Friday the 13th films, the sixth installment would again see a new actor take on the role of the indestructible Jason Voorhees. But this time, the decision to build a "new Jason" would not only come down to one of cost, or even expediency, but of genuine creative concern. The Jason that Tom McLoughlin conceived, the Jason "born of hatred and electricity," was now a member of the walking dead. McLoughlin's Jason needed to move differently, react differently, kill differently—and so, too, did the professional stuntman who played him. But as with Friday the 13th Part 2, a last-minute replacement needed to be brought in when the original performer that had been cast as Jason failed to live up to the expectations of the producers. And though the stuntman they ultimately chose was not a stuntman at all, but rather an ex-military "grunt" with no previous acting experience, the decision ultimately proved inspired. The Jason Voorhees of Part VI was more feral, methodical and single-minded than ever before.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
I'm gonna let out a little secret I don't think many people know. When we started Jason Lives, we had a different Jason. Initially, he was played by a stuntman, Dan Bradley. He did the first day or two, all the daylight stuff and the paintball scene. Then Frank Mancuso, Jr. calls and says, "You have to replace Jason. He doesn't look right." Dan is a terrific guy and was doing a great job, but it was a studio mandate. So I had to quickly shift gears, shoot a bunch of scenes without Jason, and cross my fingers that we could find somebody else real quick.
BRIAN WADE, Makeup Effects Artist:
We did just one day's shooting with Dan, and the next day, I heard that some people had seen the dailies and there was just something about the way he carried himself. He didn't look big and muscle-y and terrifying, he just looked a little… thick. Kind of husky. Don Behrns told me he was a little "flowery" to be Jason. I don't know if it was his physical presence combined with how he was moving, but the producers lost faith in him.
NANCY MCLOUGHLIN:
All Dan did was eat, apparently. He gained 40 pounds or something in a few weeks, enough that every day they had to take out his outfit. And the dailies were coming back and Frank was livid.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
It was vital that Jason be truly scary. When I first got the job and asked Frank, "Can I add humor to Friday?" all he said was, "Fine. Just as long as you don't make fun of Jason." I didn't want this to be just a person hiding behind a hockey mask anymore. I wanted Jason to be a monster born of hatred and electricity. He's unstoppable, and anything that gets in his way—male, female, old, young—doesn't matter. So that is one of the reasons why I put in that whole thing with Tommy Jarvis, where he goes to the sheriff and warns him about Jason—"It's still Camp Crystal Lake to him!" It was about animals and territory. I have coyotes around my house that walk up and down the street at night. It's their turf. It has been for generations. And the fact that we're here doesn't stop them from coming and eating our cats and dogs—they even got a baby a few years ago. It's those same sort of feral tendencies that I wanted to give Jason. The moment where Jason's watching the RV go up and down and he kind of cocks his head like a dog—that's exactly what I wanted.
One of the things I also needed to do was somehow arm Jason with every weapon imaginable. The paintball scene was devised in part to accomplish that. In the mid-1980s, the game was just starting to catch on. So I thought it would be cool that there were these big executive types out there in the woods, just having fun and playing this game, unaware that they were being stalked by a real killer. And then I could conveniently get Jason all the gear he needed.
Tom and Nancy McLouglin's photo album. Top left: Actor-turned-director Tony Goldwyn (with co-star Nancy McLoughlin) made his screen debut in Jason Lives. Although the then-23 year-old thespian's screen time was limited to only a single scene, his creative death rates as one of the most memorable in the film. The actor has no regrets."I got skewered through the chest with a spear after uttering about three words," says Goldwyn. "But I'm very grateful to that film, because it gave me my SAG card!" Top right: Acto
r and musician Tom Fridley stars in Jason Lives as Cort (seen here playing around with co-star Kerry Noonan).
CJ GRAHAM, "Jason Voorhees":
My story is not so much "A Star is Born" as "A Goofy Person is Born." I had no experience. Zero. Nada. I ran a nightclub in Glendale called Excess. We had a hypnotist there named Jack Laughlin, and he brought in the crew that had done Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter to do the special effects for this $10,000 production he was doing to promote his show. And in the show, when the subjects are under hypnosis, there's a scene where Jason slashes through the screen to scare them. And the late Martin Becker, the effects coordinator on Jason Lives, saw it. He was looking for somebody physically big to play Jason, and I am 6'3" and 250 pounds. He said, "CJ, do you want to do this?" And I said, "Why not?" I didn't even know what a SAG card was.
I originally went down to interview for the part before they had hired anyone else, and I met with the stunt coordinator, Michael Nomad. Michael was comfortable with my military background and that I could, in fact, complete the mission. However, Frank Mancuso, Jr. was a little hesitant because I had no background and I'm not a stuntman. So I didn't get cast. But I still thought it was kinda cool to get on the Paramount lot and meet Frank Mancuso, Jr. And I didn't think about it again.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
We didn't know who we could get, then Marty Becker says to me, "Well, there is this guy I've met, he hasn't acted before and he just got out of the Marines. He's a real, 'You tell him what to do, and he does it' kind of guy. And a really nice guy." So I said, "Well, if you feel he is right, bring him down to Georgia." And in comes CJ Graham, this fairly attractive-looking, tall guy—nicest guy in the world. I said to Marty, "Are you sure?" And he says, "I'm telling you—this guy is great!" And he was. He was like a machine. He had this almost Terminator, machine-like quality, from being a marine.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 46