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

by Peter M. Bracke

  It was a lot of work. I ended up doing significantly more on the show than I originally thought I would—that is not to say I didn't intend to, just that it represented a large commitment of head space. I didn't have a staff of 10 writers out there doing their stuff. We'd hatch a season of episodes just out of my head. Some ideas would be two pages long, others five paragraphs, but we'd outline what the basic concept of the episode was, what it was about, the setting, and who was in it. And for 26 episodes a year, it was very challenging to keep it going and keep it fresh. It was also when we began to utilize Canadian talent, as we shot the show up in Toronto because of costs. It was certainly a different experience than the Friday the 13th movies had become for me. I enjoyed the process and the freedom of The Series. I always had fun doing it.

  LARRY B. WILLIAMS:

  From the beginning when I walked in the door at Paramount, I told them I wanted to do a series that was like a recurring horror film, and that would appeal to young boys and girls and could get them hooked back into the genre. I pitched it as a "softer horror," like the way it was done back in the 1950s and early 60s, when you could still generate an audience with things like ghosts and vampires. And now, looking in the rearview mirror, I was absolutely brilliant because then The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer came along and proved that, indeed, the horror genre could work that way, and on television.

  An accomplished makeup effects artist before becoming a director, John Carl Buechler earns high praise from his cast and fellow filmmakers for his work on The New Blood. "I really liked working with John," says Heidi Kozak, who played Sandra, one of Part VII's ill-fated campers. "He was so much an actor's director, and he took such good care of all his kids. He really is very detail-orientated and always had a very clear vision about what he wanted and what he saw." Michael Sheehy, one of the Hometown Films executives involved in the development of The New Blood, recalls being impressed with the easy-going manner Buechler had with his cast. "I visited the set once, and I remember being struck by how laid-back Buechler was," says Sheehy. "John is sitting in his director's chair with his shoes off. He spent a lot of time sitting and overseeing, as opposed to pacing around and yelling like a lot of other directors might be when working with young actors."

  The first episode of Friday the 13th: The Series debuted in national syndication on September 28, 1987. The premise of two cousins who inherit an antique shop in which all of the inventory carries a curse from the devil bore no connection whatsoever to the film series that shared its name, but that did not prevent the show from being an immediate hit. By the end of the 1987-88 season, Friday the 13th: The Series ranked as the second highest-rated syndicated television series, right behind Star Trek: The Next Generation. But the success of Friday the 13th on the small screen only exacerbated fears among diehard Jason fans that the fate of their favorite hockey-masked anti-hero might be permanently sealed. Would the popularity of the Jason-less television series spell the end of his big-screen exploits, or worse, inspire a radical—even homogenized—change to the familiar formula?

  But cursed antiquities were the least of Jason's problems. Since Michael Myers had taken a sabbatical after 1981's Halloween II, Jason Voorhees had not faced a genuine challenger for slasher supremacy until the arrival of a horribly scarred, razor-fingered dream stalker named Freddy Krueger. In 1984, Wes Craven—who more than a decade earlier had teamed up with Sean Cunningham on the groundbreaking Last House on the Left—gave life to a new cinematic terror: A Nightmare on Elm Street. Produced by a then-fledgling distribution company called New Line Cinema for just over one million dollars, A Nightmare on Elm Street tells the story of the "Springwood Slasher," a reviled child murderer named Freddy Krueger, played with sadistic glee by Robert Englund. After being freed on a legal technicality, Krueger is burned to death by the parents of his victims, only to return with the power to terrorize and murder the next generation of Springwood's children in their collective nightmares.

  Freddy struck an immediate and resounding chord with horror audiences, eventually spawning six sequels of his own and officially putting New Line on the map as "The House that Freddy Built." Though certainly sharing many of the tried-and-true conventions of the standard slasher film, A Nightmare on Elm Street dared to break new ground by being scary, imaginative, well-acted and surprisingly literate. Filled with surreal and often startling dream imagery coupled with fantastical special effects, the Nightmare series took the low-rent "Karo-syrup-and-latex" approach to slasher films past to a new level, employing such cutting-edge techniques as matte paintings, rotoscoping and elaborate physical effects to go along with the requisite blood and gore. What's more, Freddy, unlike the mute Michael Myers and the thoroughly un-jocular Jason, could not only kill—he could talk. Krueger's witty banter and clever one-liners became such as staple of the Nightmare series that one critic labeled Freddy "the Henny Youngman of horror." And unlike Paramount Pictures, who had never put much stock in the idea of mass marketing Jason, New Line wasted no time cashing in on their newfound golden goose. By 1988, Freddy was everywhere: on T-shirts, posters, lunch boxes and bed sheets. He even hosted his own "Guest VJ" hour on MTV, and it wasn't long before he had his own television series—Freddy's Nightmares, a return to the weekly horror anthology format popularized by The Night Gallery and The Twilight Zone (with the irascible Mr. Krueger standing in for Rod Serling). One thing was now certain: if Jason was going to retain his title as King of the Slashers, no longer could he be content prowling the woods of Crystal Lake for more unsuspecting camp counselors to kill—he had to beat Freddy.

  Although an idea was already stirring in the mind of Frank Mancuso, Jr. to pit horror's reigning terror icons against each other in one movie, complicated rights issues would cause those plans to be indefinitely put on hold. In the meantime, Jason would have to find another foe to battle first.

  FRANK MANCUSO, JR.:

  Tom McLoughlin was the first director I had talked with about doing a "Jason vs. Freddy" movie. That was something that would have gotten me excited. It would have been like going back to Dracula vs. Frankenstein and updating it. But New Line would never agree to let Paramount release it domestically, which was the big stumbling block. The idea was that Paramount would distribute it here and New Line would distribute it overseas, but they just wouldn't go for it.

  TOM MCLOUGHLIN, Writer/Director, Part VI:

  Right after I did my Friday, there was discussion about combining Freddy and Jason in one movie. I said, "These guys exist in completely different universes." But Frank came back, still asking if you can come up with an idea. I said, "Let me think about it." This was around 1987 or something. And I thought about it and thought about it—I really tried—but eventually I just said, "I'm dry."

  COREY FELDMAN, "Tommy Jarvis," The Final Chapter & Part V:

  This is a funny and absolutely true story. When we were on the set of The Final Chapter, Joseph Zito and I sat down for about three or four days and, for hours at a time during our breaks, we line by line mapped out a "Jason vs. Michael Myers" movie, because in those days Freddy wasn't around. We thought how great it would be, like the old Godzilla movies, with the two battling demons. Neither talks, but they are menacing, scary. We completely mapped it out and were totally serious about it.

  DARYL HANEY, Screenwriter:

  I was a really explosive kid. My parents used to mock me: "Oh, you're so dramatic!" I lived in Charlottesville, the most boring town in the world—all these kids with money and I didn't have any. I actually never really wanted to be a writer because it's a very lonely thing to do and it's not where the excitement is. I wanted to be an actor. It was much more social and better for me. So I eventually moved to New York City.

  Right before Friday came along, it was Easter weekend in 1987, and I had just gotten fired from a job waiting tables on Wall Street and was crashing on the floor of a friend's place. Then me and my friend decided to go out and drop acid. So I'm coming down off this acid trip, and on that Sun
day I get a call from a guy named Joe Minion, a filmmaker I knew from L.A. He asked what I was doing, and I said "I just got fired and I'm coming down off an acid trip." He says, "Well, I'm at Roger Corman's house and he wants me to do a movie." So I flew to L.A. the next day and as it turns out, they didn't even have a script. Joe and I and the writer went out that night and basically came up with a whole new concept for the film and I wrote scenes that night. It was eventually called Daddy's Boys. Then Roger came to me and said, "I love what you wrote and I'd like to hire you for more things." My luck literally changed overnight—I go from not working at all in the movie business in New York to becoming a screenwriter and moving to L.A. That was one magic tab of acid.

  So Roger Corman's assistant at the time, Anna Walsh, had a friend that was working at Paramount. Her name was Debbie Walsh. And I guess I made quite an impression on her, because Debbie knew this big producer at Hometown Films, and she told Anna: "This guy is looking for a young writer to revitalize the Friday the 13th series and I was thinking about Daryl." I was the last person in the world who should have done a Friday the 13th movie. I'd never seen one. And there was a perception in the industry that anybody who works on any of these movies is an enormous hack, an assumption that is probably largely grounded in truth. But the money I made on Daddy's Boys was barely enough to keep myself up—it was either take this assignment and accept what went with it, or I could go back to poverty and retain all my integrity. But where was my integrity getting me?

  At the time, Freddy didn't need Jason because Freddy was much bigger than Jason. By that point, the Freddy movies were doing so much better at the box office, and I think they were generally better respected. They ultimately named this thing The New Blood for a reason—that's what they were hoping. Creatively, it had run out of steam. Part VI made just enough money to justify making a sequel. My guess is that the feeling was, "We can still make a profit off these things and they're cheap to make and they have a built-in audience. They're a sure thing." By this point, it was a franchise.

  Michael Sheehy didn't even meet me—I think I talked to him only once. Barbara Sachs, an executive at Hometown Films, was the first person I had contact with. I didn't even have a phone or a car at that point, so I walked up the street to a payphone at the local market and I pitched her a few ideas and she shot them all down. I only had one more. I said, "I notice that at the end of these movies, there's always a teenage girl who's left to battle Jason by herself. What if this girl had telekinetic powers?" Barbara immediately said, "Jason vs. Carrie. Huh. That's an interesting idea." Then we talked once or twice before I had to go back to New York. The next day, I had literally just flown in and walked up the stairs of my old apartment, and the phone rang. It was Barbara saying, "You got the job."

  Playing the telekinetic Tina was emotionally exhausting for actress Lar Park Lincoln. "I wanted to make Tina and her problems real, instead of comical and stupid," says Lincoln. "Many actors will draw on very bad things to play a character like this. But I drew on very happy things—tears of joy instead of sadness. Otherwise, those negative feelings can stay with you over a long shooting period. It also would have made Tina a depressing character, which she definitely was not."

  MICHAEL SHEEHY:

  At the time I was with Hometown, I still aspired to make art films and indie movies. I remember not really wanting or asking to have my name on any of the Friday the 13th films. I was afraid of the way the industry would perceive me. They were extremely popular movies that were just on the cusp of being truly popular, mass-market films, but next to James Bond, there was no franchise more financially successful as Friday the 13th. The first seven Fridays cost an aggregate of about $15 million to produce and, with television and video factored in, grossed over $250 million domestically, and even more in foreign.

  I did get a kick out of being involved with the story and development meetings because the franchise had gone on so long. But I wanted to inject more humor into the movies at the time, and Frank really was opposed to it. He felt that humor didn't really work in these movies. And he had already done April Fool's Day. Why mess with something that works so well? It was hard to argue with the success. But Barbara Sachs had been there a while, and when I was first brought aboard my title was VP, and she was a Senior VP. She became Associate Producer on Part VII, as well as Part VIII, and really became the driving force of the Friday movies for Frank.

  FRANK MANCUSO, JR.:

  We were doing the Friday television series and I was doing a lot of other movies. It was important to be able to have some people to take over the Friday film franchise. Part of the reason was because we had enough productions going on that I needed help and I also really wanted somebody to sit in on these things, to be sure we, as a company, were maintaining a close watch on what was going on. I wanted people who would be up at four o'clock in the morning and have the energy to go ahead and make the right decisions. I also knew that if they ever got into difficulty, they would call me. My reference point was that these movies made me. These movies introduced me to moviemaking. These movies taught me how to do this more complicated stuff I was doing now. There is something to be said for that.

  DARYL HANEY:

  Hometown always had a ton of notes. And this was 1987, so I didn't have a computer. Barbara would call and tell me to come over to their offices, and I'd be sent to this trailer on the Paramount lot and have to sit there all night, hammering out yet another draft of this thing. And then I'd give it to them, and four or five days later they'd call up and demand another draft. I went through this so many times. Her whole thing was that she wanted it to be unlike any other Friday the 13th movie. She wanted it to win an Academy Award. I wanted to do it very by the book and she forced me to get involved with what would become this whole stupid disaster.

  Barbara had already done this preliminary outline for Part VII, this whole concept that it was going to be like JAWS. There was a corporate guy who was going to build these condos at Crystal Lake. The community was saying, "You can't do that because all these murders happened here and Jason will come back." And the corporate people were like, "No, we don't care. We just want money." And it was great to take some jabs against capitalism and all that, but I never believed in it. It took a long time for Jason to appear. And the climax she came up with had this girl trapped in a boat or helicopter while Jason closes in. I was just thinking, "Why does everything have to be so overdone? Does there have to be condos and motorcycles and a helicopter and all this shit?"

  I got the job in June, started working on the thing in July, but it wasn't until the fall that Barbara finally showed a copy to Frank. So Frank reads it, and he hits the roof. He said, "What the hell is this? This is horrible—this is not what I want!" So I got called into a meeting with him. Frank tells me to take The Final Chapter—which he considered the best of the series—and basically knock off its structure.

  After that meeting with Frank, the first thing Barbara said to me was, "Ready to paint by numbers?" And I thought, "You're acting like this was such a creative process before this, but I wish Frank knew that I'd wanted to do something much closer to the original." But I couldn't really express anything to Frank because there were all these political games. I was just a tool, which is what writers are to these people. So I executed a bunch of drafts of this thing, utilizing The Final Chapter as my template. My script was originally subtitled "Jason's Destroyer." And we were getting close to Christmas by the time they brought in the producer and needed to hire a director.

  MARTIN JAY SADOFF, Co-Editor:

  There were talks, especially with Part V and Part VI, of bringing in a major director to really make it something special—it was actually spoken to bring Fellini in to do a Friday the 13th movie! He would have made something really macabre. But after it was batted around for a while, it came back that this is a franchise, and people who are used to the franchise want more of the same.

  Screen vets Terry Kiser (top right) and Susan Blu (top left) a
s Dr. Crews and Mrs. Shepherd. In addition to The New Blood, Kiser has appeared in over 50 motion pictures. But he is perhaps best known for his acclaimed performance as the titular "living corpse" in the hit comedy Weekend at Bernies (1989) and its 1993 sequel, Weekend at Bernie's II. Bottom right: John Otrin stars as Tina's father, Mr. Shepherd. The actor is seen here with Jennifer Banko, who plays the Young Tina in The New Blood's opening prologue.

  MICHAEL SHEEHY:

  I think the formula was bigger than what we thought somebody like a name director could bring to the table to elevate it. When I was going after directors, I was going after people who had demonstrated some expertise in the horror genre—major filmmakers certainly weren't approaching us about directing a Friday movie.

  I'd seen John Carl Buechler's movies Troll and Cellar Dweller and I thought they were pretty good. And I liked that he had a background in effects. The guy was just passionate about horror movies. John seemed to be a logical candidate. Then Frank met with him and liked him, too.

  JOHN CARL BUECHLER, Director:

  I always wanted to be a director since I first came to Hollywood, but I knew that nobody was going to give me a shot just because I made some student films. So I negotiated my way into the director's chair by way of effects. I had a knack for sculpting and painting, and Rick Baker was kind enough to allow me the opportunity to apprentice with him and Stan Winston. I began to make a name for myself by doing effects shows, working on a lot of movies, and developing screenplays. And the special effects discipline— It's not like just renting a fog machine, a fan, and some pyro—you are there at the beginning of the entire process to help develop the look and the concept, and create characters that live and breath and move a certain way. You must think logistically and aesthetically, about how you are going to achieve an effect and how that is going to be presented in a motion picture format. Makeup FX is total immersion in the filmmaking process. I don't know of any other discipline that allows the artists to get his fingers into so many elements, You find a lot of good directors have come from that discipline because it is so extremely immersive.