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

by Peter M. Bracke

  ELIZABETH KAITAN:

  Kane Hodder was so incredibly sweet that after you got to know him it was really hard to play being scared of him. He was just so nice to everybody. He was the perfect Jason. All of us, we said to each other that he should have been Jason from the very beginning. He should have done all the movies.

  Although it would take another 15 years for Jason to have his day in the ring with Freddy Krueger, the makers of The New Blood were determined to make the climactic showdown between Jason and Tina just as satisfying. The final 20 minutes of Part VII still rank as some of the most visually dynamic of any Friday the 13th film, with Jason being put through the kinds of tortures usually reserved for his victims. Whether being clobbered by a decapitated head, electrocuted in a puddle of muddy water or flattened by an entire porch, it seemed that, in the character of telekinetic Tina, Jason may have finally met his match.

  JOHN CARL BUECHLER:

  My argument on set was that Jason was like a tornado. You don't confront him, because you're going to die, unless you have the telekinetic ability to kick his ass. I think Tina gave the audience an opportunity to do something they hadn't done, really, in any Friday the 13th movie since the first one: to live vicariously through the poor damned girl who's going up against Betsy Palmer. Now the audience is Tina. You're facing the biggest, baddest monster that ever was, and it's Jason Voorhees, and you're kicking his ass. That's fun! You can't stop evil forever, but you can stop for now. In and of itself, it made for a more interesting movie than just the other standard elements of the series.

  Even during production I knew the MPAA was going to be hard on this film. So the only thing I really had to fall back on, to ensure the film was still dynamic, was the over-the-top mechanical effects—the big moments in the film that were not makeup-oriented. And one of the main reasons I wanted to do the film was because Tina's telekinetic abilities allowed us to stage big events that hadn't been seen in previous Fridays. That's also another reason why I really needed Kane for the role of Jason, because he could give me that amazingly powerful, dynamic motion, and he understood stunts.

  KANE HODDER:

  I think Jason went through more damage in Part VII than in any other Friday movie. There is a scene during the final chase that, as written, has Jason follow Tina and Nick up a flight of stairs but the door at the top is locked, so she makes the light swing and hit Jason in the chest and he tumbles backward down the stairs. I told John I thought that was weak, that the light should hit me in the face and I should fall back and crash down into the staircase itself. So we manufactured balsa wood stairs, and I remember falling backwards—I wanted to be like a tree—but because the landing area was so small, I smashed my head right into the very last balsa wood stair.

  During filming of the scene where Tina drops the porch on my head, we didn't really know what that roof was going to do. The idea the effects crew had was to make the middle six or eight feet—the portion that was going to clobber me—out of balsa wood, but the rest of it would be all real structure. But if you really think about it and you know anything about balsa wood, depending on how it is positioned, it's almost as strong as regular wood. So when it came down, it fucking drilled me into the stairs. I think it weighed 700 pounds. The funny thing is, if you look at the scene again, watch what appears to be Tina—it's not her. It's a stunt double named Paula Moody. It's an over her shoulder shot looking at me. Then the roof falls in and she goes, "Ooh! That was harder than I thought!" You can totally see her jump. No one expected that, least of all me.

  LAR PARK LINCOLN:

  Some of the mechanical effects shots were done later, so John would talk me through what was going to happen—how quickly to move my eyes or my head so that later they could cut it accurately to something He was really helpful with that. I did sometimes have a hard time with that, technically, so I wasn't understanding him a lot of the time but he would always let me retake that. And because you're shooting out of order, I kept as good of notes as the script person. Literally, I used three-ring binders with little tabs, and I divided up the script like a storyboard.

  Physically portraying the "psychic" moments that Tina has was a real challenge. I met with some psychics, and they were mostly concerned that I not play a "fake psychic," where you go into some silly trance or body-shaking thing. I was told that when you have a vision, it just comes over you. So I really tried to make Tina a real person who wasn't crazy—she's just this normal girl who had something strange happening to her, and within her.

  And Tina just never stops running, screaming and crying. That girl is a major migraine! At the time I was Method, so I really did cry a lot. I ended up swelling my eyes shut with my contacts several times, because I could keep crying take after take. Not realizing, of course, that I could have just used glycerin drops…

  JOHN CARL BUECHLER:

  We all were aware but accepted the uncomfortableness of what Kane had to do, because we were every bit as concerned about Jason looking real and being authentic. This was truly a co-production between myself and Kane—two people coming together and really trying to make something work. And the fact of the matter is that we tried things that were very difficult and painful. He was a guinea pig. For example, I don't think anybody had previously done a dental piece like the one Kane had to wear, and I didn't know many stuntmen, period, who could wear something like that over their teeth and on their face for that long a period of time. I had done makeups that were similar before, but I wanted to make this richer. I had a girl working for me whose father's was a dentist, and we cast Kane's teeth on the inside and then we built a new set of teeth for the outside. It formed a ridge all the way around into his mouth, then it's filled out on top of his face, and then blended to the side.

  "The night we shot my death scene, I had one of the worst colds I'd ever had," laughs actress Susan Blu of her character's bloody demise at the hands of Jason Voorhees. "It was also my last day of filming, so I was already hoarse and raspy from running around and screaming through the whole movie. But The New Blood was my last hurrah to on-camera acting before I switched over to doing voice work full time. So what better way to go could you ask for than being killed by Jason?"

  KANE HODDER:

  I loved working in the makeup but it was very difficult. The full body makeup, with the spine showing and the bones and everything else, that was the longest process, about three hours. On Part VII, I was either in the water or had to look wet all the time, so they were constantly spraying glisterine water on my costume. I was soaked through, and we were in Alabama where it was very cold. Foam latex, all it does is absorb the cold water—It is like a sponge. It is like having soaking wet towels on your face and trying to breathe. And my lack of vision in Part VII was just ridiculous. Because of the dentures that were outside my cheek, I had to wear the full prosthetic every day whether the hockey mask was on or off. One eye was completely covered, and on the other was a yellow lens, so already your depth perception is lost. Then, with the hockey mask on, it had to go on top of the makeup, so the eyeholes are not close to your eyes but farther away. It made doing even simple things very difficult, not to mention stunts. Like when I break through the window at Tina during the final chase, the window was not all that high and I'm not short. That's why, in the movie, you can see that I had to do a sort of crouch-and-jump through it, yet all without looking uncoordinated. My head cleared the upper real window frame by like an inch. I would have been upset if my head hit the top, but only 'cause it would have looked bad.

  JOHN CARL BUECHLER:

  You'll notice in the movie that there's a lot of lightning, but not a lot of rain—that was a creative decision I made. That way we didn't have to bring fucking water towers out to Alabama. I didn't want to do that. We also didn't have to drench people with water every time they walked in from outside. I shot all the interiors first, in L.A., but everyone was saying, "It's really stupid what you're doing here, John, because you're not shooting your exteriors. Yo
u don't know whether you're going to change your mind, or if there will be days when we have to shoot in the rain." But it only looks like rain if you photograph it properly. If you backlight the rain, you'll never see it, anyway.

  KANE HODDER:

  In Part VII, there are shots that are so quick but they are incredibly powerful. There is a shot when the kid is going into the kitchen to get something to eat, and as he walks through the dining room there is a crack of lightning. And most people didn't realize it, but you can see me standing in the corner. It was totally John's idea, and it is still one of my favorite shots, because it takes people five times watching the movie before they go, "Oh wait, did you see that!?"

  JOHN CARL BUECHLER:

  Barbara Sachs was a pain in the ass. She was a little Hitler. She made comments like, "Isn't this couch too yellow?" But the thing she hated the most was my Jason makeup. She hated his look. She said, "It looks like a frog. It doesn't even look like a human being." I really got in trouble for showing Jason's face when his mask cracked off, and then he stayed without his mask until the end of the movie—he didn't just put it back on again. They didn't want me to do that. I said, "You're going to take his mask off anyway, so let's make it a dramatic moment! Make the mask pop off because she's using her telekinesis!" It's Part VII, for God's sake, it's about time. But Barbara wanted me to wait until the very end, when he was on the dock, and you saw his face for only a moment. But I thought that then you don't have a real, solid confrontation, unless you can see the eyes glaring back at you. So I did it anyway.

  MICHAEL SHEEHY:

  I have to admit, I also lobbied with Barbara for the delay in the revealing of Jason's makeup. Because once you do that, the cat is out of the bag. If he remains enigmatic in the mind of the viewer, he's scarier than whatever maggot-infested makeup you can conjure up. People project all their own fears and insecurities onto whatever is behind the mask. Sometimes less is more, and I think that character proved it.

  LAR PARK LINCOLN:

  I'm so breakable. At first I only did one stunt, after I unmask Jason and fall through the floor into the basement boiler room. I land on a mat, so that didn't hurt. Then I was doused with fire retardant, when there's gasoline pouring out of those cans right by me. That was scary—you can't fake fire. Kane really worked with me on that scene.

  After that, the crew gave me a T-shirt that said "Stuntwoman," so of course I'm like, "Oh, I can do that fall on the pier, too!" Well, after sliding on the pier about eight times later, I was like, "What was I thinking?" It was shot in one long, continuous dolly, like two minutes long, and then in the end Kevin and I run and jump on the pier—chest down. And there was no mat. After hitting that pier 20 times in a row, I think I lost a whole cup size. I was so bruised and beaten up. That scene was hell. I thought I was going to die shooting that.

  Storyboard Gallery: John Carl Buechler's original storyboards for Tina's telekinetic unmasking of Jason in The New Blood.

  KANE HODDER:

  I still have burn scars from a fire stunt I did when I was in my first year in the business. It almost killed me. But I think that the fact that I was still so you and excited, and wanted to stay in the business, it actually helped me to overcome that injury. I didn't do fire stunts for a while after that, but now I do them all the time. I have never had flashbacks back to that injury. This will sound so ridiculous, but now when I do a fire stunt it's almost calming. It is the weirdest thing. Even guys who do fire stunts always say, "Wow, you're really comfortable on fire."

  Back in 1988, fire stunts like this were done pretty routinely, but you almost never saw the ignition of the flame on camera—it was done through editing. Because the character of Tina had the power to cause objects to burst instantly into flame, we wanted to see it all happen live, on camera. So our mechanical effects coordinator, Lou Carlucci, rigged an actual cannon to blast fire out of the furnace right at me. I ended up being on fire for a full 40 seconds. It was the most difficult fire stunt I have ever done.

  SUSAN BLU:

  I had to do my last scene that was going to be shot, one that was in the house that blows up. Well, the crew had already wired it, and I walk in to prepare, and I see all these little fuses sticking out. I asked, "What are those things?" And of course, people are smoking close to the set, too. And they're like, "Oh, those are just the explosives for the house to blow up tomorrow night." And I went, "Are you nuts!?"

  JOHN CARL BUECHLER:

  We built both those houses specifically to blow them up. There were cameras all over just for that one shot—at least five or six. I was actually out on a boat in the lake, getting the master. I was peering over the edge when the explosion hit, and I felt warm and wet at the same time—at first I thought it was my blood. Then I realized it was just the heat over the water, and the impact throwing it on me. It was astounding.

  KANE HODDER:

  It was such a tremendous explosion—the only explosion I've ever seen in all my years in the business that was actually so fast, so powerful and so immediate that your eye couldn't actually follow it. It was gone before it registered in your brain. It was an amazing sight.

  JOHN CARL BUECHLER:

  I'm not extraordinarily happy about the ending, the last scene where Tina's dad comes out of the lake and grabs Jason. We created a whole mechanical head that's eyeless but has teeth and flesh clinging to it—it was brilliant. I wanted this ghastly vision to come up, grab Jason and pull him under the water. It would have been great, it would have been dynamic, and that's exactly what the movie needed—a visual effect. But once again Barbara Sachs vetoed it. It was decided that it was too monstrous for this picture, too fantasy-oriented, so what we ultimately ended up with was the actor who played Dad coming up from out of nowhere. He'd been under the water now for 10 years and somehow he looks exactly the same. I think fans still laugh at that today.

  DARYL HANEY:

  The character of Tina's father was always there from the beginning—in the very first draft, there was something about the father being trapped in a condo or some shit. And the only remnant of that in the finished film was the father popping out of the water at the end. To be honest, to do that was probably a mistake on my part.

  I wrote so many drafts of the script, and so many things were constantly being taken out and put back in again, I don't even remember it all anymore. I had forgotten Tina had the gift of prescience as well as the gift of telekinesis. And she can raise the dead. This was a very gifted girl, obviously—one serious psychic babe! Realistically, it probably shouldn't have had precognitive sequences in the first place. John added that later on—that sort of Eyes of Laura Mars touch. It may have also been put in to ensure that there was always something happening on screen, that it wasn't just a lot of kill scenes.

  LAR PARK LINCOLN:

  The hardest part about finishing a film, and being an actor, is you have to return to the real world after it's all done. Because you live in such a controlled environment that when you leave and you feel like someone is still guarding you. That the police won't let people onto the set, and the food is going to show up at a certain time. You catch yourself walking right across the middle of the street, like somebody's going to stop the traffic. I nearly got killed a few times after that movie ended.

  If production of The New Blood ended with a bang, its rushed post-production schedule would end with a collective cry for help. Few films—even Friday the 13th films—have come under such harsh and unrelenting scrutiny from the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board, who demanded that Paramount resubmit Part VII no less than nine times before granting the film an R rating—prompting director John Carl Buechler to publicly fume that his film had not just been edited, but eviscerated. Scoring of The New Blood also proved troublesome. Despite the presence of not one but two composers, the new music for Part VII, while integrating many of the familiar Friday the 13th motifs, pleased few.

  BARRY ZETLIN, Editor:

  I went to USC Film Scho
ol and kind of fell into editing, and I was also into animation. Then after I graduated, a friend who was working for Roger Corman on Battle Beyond the Stars, which was this big Star Wars rip-off at the time, said they were looking for somebody to be involved with animation to do special effects, and boom, I was suddenly doing all the laser beams and stuff for the movie. Then I started cutting for many of the B-movie greats, including Roger and Charlie Band, at the old Empire Films—that's how I met John Buechler. When he got involved with Friday the 13th, he roped me in and I was like, "Wow, a big studio movie!"

  I suppose everyone who works on a Friday the 13th movie has a different experience, but for me, having never done a studio picture, it was fun. I have fond memories of everybody on the set being a close, tight-knit group, and because of the quick production schedule, I was already editing while they were shooting in Alabama—instead of driving to work, I'd just go downstairs to John's hotel room and screen dailies. And I have no Frank Mancuso horror stories—I think his involvement was, "We have to get this done." He didn't think it was trash, he just thought it was business. And the business is that it has to be an R-rated film and you have to meet the deadline and you have to have so many prints.

  The real horror? That was the MPAA.

  The fiery climax of The New Blood set a record for the longest onscreen "burn" in cinema history. "Back in 1988, fire stunts like this were done pretty routinely," says actor Kane Hodder, who also served as the film's stunt coordinator. "Because the character of Tina had the power to cause objects to burst instantly into flame, we wanted to see it all happen live, on camera. So our mechanical effects coordinator, Lou Carlucci, rigged an actual cannon to blast fire out of the furnace right at me. I ended up being on fire for a full 40 seconds. It is still the most difficult fire stunt I have ever done."