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

by Peter M. Bracke

MICHAEL SHEEHY:

  The Series ended because Donald Wildmon and the Moral Majority approached a number of stations, and Paramount, and complained—having never even seen the show. He assumed it had something to do with the movies. So some sponsors started having problems with it, and slowly but surely support evaporated. I remember being upset, because my perception at the time was that this group wasn't even familiar with the show. They weren't familiar with the content of it. They were creating this uproar just based on the title.

  FRANK MANCUSO, JR.:

  I was always interested in The Series being on late at night, like the last thing you see before you go to sleep on a Friday night—it could be my own late-night monster series. But what happened was, because the show was very well reviewed and received, Paramount started upgrading it to primetime in numerous markets. And I was always concerned that we may be venturing into areas that were no longer appropriate for the content of the show. But Paramount was a big company, and Star Trek: The Next Generation always moved around the schedule, too. They'd use that Star Trek and Friday the 13th block of programming as a way to control aspects of the market. Plus, advertisers will pay significantly more for spots in primetime than they will in late-night.

  In any event, as the show started to get more popular and got better time slots, that's when this Wildmon guy started to get agitated. I thought it was a joke at first, because he kept talking about Jason—I was never convinced he ever even saw a single episode of The Series. Except suddenly, his group started threatening the advertisers on our show, telling them, "We'll tell your constituents that they should boycott your products because you're supporting this evil show." The fiscal viability of The Series was always related to advertiser support. Then I started to get calls from these advertisers saying, "We love the show, we love the demographics—but what we don't love is being on this guy's hit list. We don't need these headaches." And we started losing sponsorships.

  If it were Cheers, and generating hundreds of millions of dollars for Paramount, it would have been different. The studio might have had a more energized appetite to fight it. But it's the same thing that happened with Warner Bros. and rap music. Warner Bros. is making a lot of money and then somebody comes out with a song called "Cop Killer" and all of a sudden Warner starts to get picketed and you're answering questions at stockholders' meetings like, "How can you take money from this when they advocate killing cops?" That's why Warner sold off Death Row Records. It wasn't about money—it was about being able to live without that headache. That's why Paramount just said, "We had a good run. We made a bunch of money. Let's not fight this."

  LARRY B. WILLIAMS, Co-Creator, Friday the 13th: The Series:

  The title was both the thing that sold the show and the thing that killed the show. I was so offended when I'd read the stuff they were saying about it, because it was apparent that the people on the religious right did not watch a single episode. The truth is that this show dealt with people who were reversing evil. And what is more in the vein of the religious right than that? And what you got was someone who built his own career as an evangelist upon this tirade.

  So my apologies to the people in power at that time, but you had complete cowards at Paramount. It was the only time I had any anger towards Frank Jr., because I was long gone from the show by then. But I would have been out there confronting these people, saying, "Point to it! Take any script in there and point to where it condones evil." These were morality tales. And that was the major difference between the Friday the 13th films and The Series, which was an argument I made when I first presented my ideas to Paramount.

  This was, in my humble estimation, the beginning of the religious right moving into the public eye with their righteous censorship. They had no business here. Paramount only decided not to continue the show because they anticipated more flak. And when they made that decision, Friday the 13th was the number two syndicated show in the nation. There was no refusal from any affiliate to air the show because the ratings were still good. Paramount folded. That was my judgment. And I'm not angry about it because it was "my show" at that point—only my name was still on it—it was Frank's show. But it was the beginning of the end for the creative community in many ways, because from that point on, the religious right, encouraged by that success, has stomped all over this industry.

  9. Nine Lives

  From May 1980 to August 1989, a period of only nine years, Paramount Pictures released eight Friday the 13th films, each of which met with varying degrees of box office success. Nevertheless, the series helped alter the language and business of the independent film industry and introduced the world to a new kind of movie monster and a new kind of horror film that pushed boundaries and stirred controversy, particularly through innovations in the art of special effects make-up. Going to see a Friday the 13th film had also become a rite of passage for many adolescents who would sneak off with their friends to the films—despite their R ratings—whispering the oft-heard teenage words of caution, "We better not let our parents find out." Surviving a Friday the 13th film without hiding behind their eyes or cowering beneath their seats was a sign of maturity, a ritual among peers that involved laughter, a sense of camaraderie and, perhaps, a show of bravery in the face of death—all within the safety zone of the local multiplex.

  The horror landscape, though, was changing. A glut of slasher films had been released in the early 1980s, brought on in no small measure by the success of Friday the 13th. The genre's popularity had significantly waned by 1984, the year that saw the release of what was intended to be the last Friday the 13th film, the deceptively titled The Final Chapter. By the turn of the decade, horror movies, and not just Friday the 13th, were in need of a serious change in direction. As Hollywood producers scrambled around in search of the next big thing to capture the imaginations of the ever-changing youth culture of America, Jason and his teenage-slashing brethren seemed, at long last, destined for retirement. By the beginning of the 1990s, Paramount Pictures had grown tired of Friday the 13th, as had Frank Mancuso, Jr., the ambitious young producer who had largely guided the series to success throughout its decade-long heyday at the studio. Although Paramount never officially announced a definitive end of their association with the franchise, after the lackluster box office of Jason Takes Manhattan, and the subsequent cancellation of the syndicated television series, it was probably a safe bet to assume that, at least as far as Paramount was concerned, there would be no return for Friday the 13th.

  But if the past had taught audiences anything, it was "never say never" when it comes to Jason Voorhees. A notion was stirring in the imagination of Sean S. Cunningham. Although it had been nearly ten years since Cunningham had taken a hands-on role in the franchise—and the monster—he had helped create, he decided that now was the time for Jason, like Frankenstein before him, to return to his maker. With the job of producer now officially vacated by Frank Mancuso, Jr., Cunningham saw for himself an opportunity to discover and shepherd fresh new talent while using the profits generated by Friday the 13th to pursue more diverse and meaningful projects for himself. It would be a decision that would not only set into motion the rebirth of Jason and the Friday franchise; it would also bring about a union between Cunningham's master creation and a new studio partner.

  SEAN CUNNINGHAM, Producer:

  I look back on the movies I made and I wish I liked them more. All I see are mistakes and what I could have done better. I tried to make the right decisions but it was very difficult. It used to be, after Friday the 13th, that if Hollywood wanted to get kids mutilated and killed, they said, "Call Cunningham." Then after Spring Break, they said, "If you want to get kids mutilated and killed, or drunk and laid, call Cunningham." So in 1985, I wound up directing a movie called The New Kids, but I was very unhappy while doing that. It was ugly material—it was just watching two nice kids getting fucked over. So I said, "I'm not going to do this anymore. I don't want to retire, but I don't want to direct dark stuff, so I'll produce."
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  Between 1984 and 1987, my recollection is that it seemed that you could sell damn near any movie. You were still able to put a project together as an independent producer and sell foreign rights and everything. This was also around the time that Cannon Films made its big push and they were writing deals and back-ends to just about anybody who wanted to make a movie. But then that bubble burst. Suddenly, everything changed. If you were an independent producer you could still sell your movie, but not for the amount of money you needed to make it. Buyers and distributors just became much more sophisticated. And this was when home video started to emerge. Much like TV did in the 1950s, it started to pull people away from actually going to the movies. And when people went to see a movie in the theatre they're not going to walk out after 20 minutes, because they can't change the channel. You could hook them in the first 20 minutes and then ride it out. So the market for low-budget pictures and horror was constantly evolving, and seemed to be shifting away from theatrical and towards home video.

  At that time, I still wanted to make nice movies. But those types of films—think of them as the John Hughes scripts—I simply couldn't get hired for those jobs. And because of the way the market was changing, in order to make the movies I wanted to make I would have had to utilize a studio. And if I could do it again, I would have worked inside that system more, simply in order to know it better. In 1985, Bob Raimi was running a production company at New World Pictures. Out of nowhere, completely out of left field, he offered me a job running the studio. I was incredibly flattered, and maybe I was qualified on some level, but I had no actual experience running a studio. So I decided not to take the job. I look back now and it was just a choice—I don't know whether it would have been right or wrong, it just would have made my career go in a different direction.

  ETHAN WILEY, Writer, House/Writer & Director, House II: The Second Story:

  By the time of the mid-1980s, sequels were only supposed to be cookie-cutter copies of the movie before. All the studios and production companies wanted was the movie to be exactly like the other one. Yet, at the same time, there were still some of us that were still willing to take some risk, like Sean Cunningham. In 1985, I wrote a movie called House, which was a comedy-horror film. Sean produced it and Steve Miner directed it.

  House is more of a fantasy film than a horror film, and a blending of horror with humor. Going away from, quite frankly, Friday the 13th. The Friday films had set the tone for what a horror movie should be at that point in time, but all of us, Sean, Steve and myself, we were like, "We want to go in a different direction." We wanted House to be more like, for lack of a better term, a family horror movie. Where an older audience could laugh and have fun on a nostalgic level, yet it would still be scary for kids. I think that Sean, in particular, at the time raised the question of, "Gee, is this going to be hard-edged enough?" Because he'd had this incredible success with hard-edged horror, that's what he was known for. But Steve was really adamant that we do something that didn't have gratuitous sex and violence, and that something geared more toward the fantasy and the humor and the visuals could be successful.

  The concept for the House films was a little ahead of its time. Today, with movies going into direct-to-video, I think that idea would fly much more now. At the time, the response from the big studios that all passed on it was that nothing could be considered more lame than a haunted house movie. No one wanted anything to do with it. Amityville Horror had been released a few years prior, but no one had any interest anymore. I think that was part of House's success, was that it was time for a new one of that type of movie. We got lucky that the timing was right. I think the House films were really Sean combining his real interests, of trying to create the kind of horror-fantasy stuff that we had all grown up with.

  Left: The creative nucleus of The Final Friday at work—Sean Cunningham (left) and Adam Marcus. Right: And Marcus alone (with head).

  DOUG CURTIS, Producer, Freddy vs. Jason:

  It was really the success of the home video market in the 1980s that were killing the kinds of movies that the early Friday the 13th and other slasher films were at the time. What we had called the drive-in or exploitation movie was now what we called the direct-to-video movie. That alternate avenue of distribution, the drive-ins and the grindhouses and the B-movie circuit, it worked until the Blockbusters came along and said, "We are not going to handle stuff like that." And then the studios started creating big tentpole pictures with huge budgets and big special effects. So the public got used to seeing the best, and those little cult and exploitation movies just didn't satisfy anymore.

  It is a shame, because there were a lot of talented filmmakers who came up through those ranks, a lot of very good directors. A company like an Avco Embassy or a New World Pictures was successful because a Bob Raimi brought in people like John Carpenter and Joe Dante and Steve Miner. Then Raimi ends up running Universal for a couple years. Many of those directors were eventually eaten up by the studios. Was there a conscious effort to create some sort of indie film movement on our part during that time? No. All we were trying to do was to make a decent film that would get us another film. But that era created a whole industry that doesn't exist now.

  NOEL CUNNINGHAM, Associate Editor:

  It really wasn't until the '80s, with Friday the 13th and Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street—with the horror genre—that the idea of these long-running franchises, of putting a 4, 5 and 6 after your movie title, was really born. Hindsight is 20/20. With Friday the 13th, Sean made a little potboiler and it made a bunch of money, but nobody thought it would spawn seven sequels. That kind of longevity in film just didn't exist at that time, except for maybe the Bond films.

  KANE HODDER, "Jason Voorhees":

  I remained in touch with Sean Cunningham over the years while I was doing my Fridays. We used to talk about Jason all the time. I'd tell Sean that I'd just done another Friday the 13th and he'd ask how it was doing at the box office. It did feel a little strange. Sean was not involved in the later Paramount Fridays but he always seemed to keep a watch on them.

  SEAN CUNNINGHAM:

  I did House with Steve Miner, and we had a hit. I was then able to get through some difficult financial times with the House sequels and "Johnny Zombie," which became My Boyfriend's Back. By the time we did DeepStar Six in 1989, I had actually already hired a director, Robert Harmon, but at the last second he bowed out and I had to come in and direct the film. I don't regret doing it, but that experience only underlined the fact that I had to learn more about scripts, and I had to find ways to get better material to direct. And while I was doing that, if I had to produce horror films, well, that would be okay.

  The Freddy franchise was dead and, as far as I could tell, so was the Friday thing. It was only then that I reapproached Phil Scuderi and the original backers from Boston about getting the rights back to Friday the 13th so I could control the property, and I could control the money, and I could go to New Line and try to make Freddy vs. Jason. I could control all the rights and the cash flow, but subject to paying New Line, rather than them controlling the rights and paying me.

  ROBERT SHAYE, Co-Chairman, New Line Cinema:

  At one time I was actually jealous of Sean and Friday the 13th because they had sold their film to Paramount. We had, with lots of aggravation, just made our first little film, A Nightmare on Elm Street. And we had shown our film to Frank Mancuso, Sr., at Paramount>—and they passed on it. So Sean had made it, and we were still stumbling around.

  Paramount did, at one point back in the late 1980s, approach us with the idea of doing a Freddy and Jason movie. But they basically wanted what we wanted—to license them the rights to Freddy Krueger and go off and make their own movie, which we were not anxious to do. Eventually, Paramount lost whatever rights they had, and that's when Sean, who has since become a friend of mine, approached me and asked if a Freddy vs. Jason was still something we wanted to do.

  FRANK MANCUSO, JR., President, Hometown Films:<
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  Phil Scuderi mentioned to me that they were going to make an arrangement with New Line, and I said I had this exclusive arrangement with Paramount at the time so I couldn't do it>—I couldn't work for another studio. I didn't really want to go back to Friday the 13th anyway. I didn't have an awkward moment about it at all. And I never saw any of those other Friday movies, but I was happy for the fans if they turned out to be good. The only thing I felt bad about was when I saw Freddy vs. Jason—I wish we could have done that. That was something that could have been great.

  To be honest, I really don't know anything about Sean's experience with Phil and the backers from Boston. Look, these guys were not savvy movie guys. They were business guys, and they were stretching themselves into an area they weren't familiar with. And I'm sure that comes with a certain price. But Phil, God bless him, as I was moving up, if I had a movie opening up—because he was a theater owner>—he would call me and tell me I was their shining star. Were it not for him, I don't know where I would have been, but I know I wouldn't have gotten there as quickly. To give a kid as young as I was the break he did, that took a lot of guts. He may have had 75 different reasons for doing it, I don't really know. What I do know is that he gave me that opportunity and he was always very kind and generous to me. So I am thankful for that opportunity.

  The opening sequence of Jason Goes to Hell went through numerous incarnations. "I read the opening of the very first script, and it was really hardcore," remembers effects supervisor Howard Berger. "It started off with a flashback of Jason as a little kid, and he and his mother are having sex! It was intense, and certainly different, but then of course things changed along the way." Director Adam Marcus continues: "I think we all came to our senses. I can't believe I'm saying this, but we were actually trying to go a bit more 'family-esque' with Jason Goes to Hell. Then we said to ourselves, 'We need to be true to the roots of Friday the 13th.'" The film's eventual opening sequence featured the uncredited writing contributions of Lewis Abernathy, who worked previously for Sean Cunningham on such films as House IV and DeepStar Six.