Original subtitles

Chop.

Poke.

Slice.

Rip.

"Halloween is making a lot of money. Let's rip it off." That's a direct quote.

Well, yeah. That's a movie I could sell.

Well, rip-off or not,

Friday the 13th springboarded into its own…

"No."

…unique monster.

I was the king of gore. The wizard of splatter.

Thanks to a novice filmmaker…

I didn't know what could and could not be done.

…and a team of budding actors.

I had two or three tokes of a large joint.

Like that.

And while expectations were, low…

What the heck is this? Nobody is going to see this thing.

…this eager and unlikely team…

We were all kind of flying by the seat of our pants.

…blindly bumbled their way…

My eye just started to completely melt down.

…into accidentally making…

The most terrifying film ever made.

This is the raw…

Somebody had come along and used the toilets.

…and candid tale… They were not working toilets.

…of the making of a slasher classic.

It was magic.

Told by those willing… Okay.

…to spill their guts about…

The violence. And…

The gore. And…

The sex.

Who told you that?

That's a fucking lie.

These are The Movies That Made Us.

There's nothing…

…more horrific…

…more dangerous…

…than…

hockey.

So, it's no surprise

that one of cinema's most notorious,

mutated boys gone bad,

Jason,

keeps himself safe from pucks and the like,

movie after movie after movie.

But this iconic symbol of horror,

well, it's got nothing to do with the very first Friday the 13th movie.

In fact, the movie that spawned this horror franchise was based around…

a summer camp,

where the aforementioned Jason drowned as a boy…

He wasn't a very good swimmer.

…due to untrustworthy, preoccupied camp counselors…

We weren't doing anything. We were just messing...

…leading to a vindictive trail of vengeance…

…and a decades-long reputation…

This place is cursed.

…that's pooh-poohed by this new group of camp counselors…

Get out of here, man. …who arrive…

Welcome to Camp Crystal. Thank you.

…only to be systematically slaughtered

one by one.

Leading to a... Yeah, I forgot about her.

Leading to a showdown with the killer, who turns out to be the mum…

Jason was my son.

…who's swiftly disposed of by this one very tough girl,

who, after her ordeal, retreats to this canoe for a nap.

He was clearly very annoyed about his mum.

The end. Or is it?

And the man responsible for this slasher classic

is the bloodthirsty filmmaker,

that's a tin of blood right there, named Sean Cunningham.

So, what are we doing here?

And he came from one of the scariest,

most grotesque art forms of them all.

In Broadway, in stage management.

But the bright lights of Broadway

weren't enough for Sean Cunningham.

I just didn't see myself doing eight shows a week on Broadway.

So, instead… Friend said, "Why don't we make a movie?"

But being a theater guy…

I didn't know anything about it.

I had never really seen a film camera in my life.

Well, that would very soon change,

because it just so happened,

where Sean lived, New York City in the early '70s,

was the perfect training ground.

There was a renaissance of documentary work.

They had just come up with something called Tri-X film,

which allowed you to shoot a lot without lights and there was

a sense of possibility.

And so, Sean blindly fumbled about…

I was kind of learning film by Braille.

…until he created a thought-provoking documentary of his own,

called The Art of Marriage.

We theoretically had a doctor in a white coat,

who would speak directly to the audience and tell them

the value of certain sexual positions.

Well, it turns out there was quite a bit of value in it.

That movie played on Times Square for 26, 27 weeks.

Suddenly, I was a successful film producer.

And Sean's next movie came together…

Called Together.

…very easily with the help of…

This kid down the hall who had just come from teaching.

…this young kid down the hall was named…

Wes Craven, who ever heard of him?

Well, eventually, a lot of people,

on account of him going on to become the father of Freddy Krueger.

But at that point, the only one who'd heard of him was the guy up the hall.

Wes and I, together, really learned how to glue film together.

Which is exactly how they made…

Together.

…which, for those wondering, was about the... Well…

There was this very handsome stud, and the lady comes in to see him.

Yes, they get together. Now, speaking of studs…

My name is George Mansour.

I'm a film booker, buyer. I get paid to go to the movies.

And to pick the movies that were shown on the screens

of Boston-based chain, Esquire Theaters.

They had everything, from X-rated movie houses

to drive-ins where they played exploitation and horror.

But it was George's gut instinct for movies…

It's all right here. It's all right here.

…that led to an outpouring of praise when Sean Cunningham arrived

with his movie Together.

I said to my boss,

"This is a movie we could play, not necessarily in X-rated movie houses."

"We could play it in our class movie house."

And together, Together made quite a bit of money.

Almost a million dollars.

And that's where I got my first little piece of success.

Success that continued

as Sean worked with his new collaborator, Wes Craven.

The whole idea of doing a horror film never would have occurred to me.

Sean said, "You know, the backers want a scary movie."

"Ever write something scary?" " I said, "No."

He said, "Go write something scary, and if they like it, you can direct it."

Wes Craven and I came up with a notion of doing Last House on the Left.

Produced by Sean and written and directed by Wes Craven.

It was, um…

That was a very sensational movie.

With the aim being…

…that it would be so sensational

that you couldn't not want to go and see it.

Well, in theory, anyway.

It wasn't an enormous hit,

but it had an enormous amount of notoriety that went with it.

Which, then, left Wes and Sean with a question.

"What are we gonna do next?"

What do you want to be? A frog.

Looking to exploit their success,

Sean Cunningham made the most shocking movie of all.

A baseball film. Okay, let's go get some ice cream.

I'll pass your ice cream this time.

It was a very poor man's version of Bad News Bears.

Striking out, Sean stepped up to the plate once more,

this time, going in a decidedly different direction with Manny's Orphans.

It was sort of like The Bad News Bears play soccer.

It was bad news, all right. But anyway,

it was clear that Sean was going to have to look to something other

than the Bad News Bears for inspiration, and his attentions turned westward,

where filmmakers Irwin Yablans and John Carpenter

had won the jackpot with a movie called…

Halloween.

I thought that John did some wonderful, imaginative, small moviemaking things.

Yes, certainly small when it came to the budget.

Halloween was a $300,000 movie that made millions.

Because of that, every producer in town suddenly wanted to make horror film.

Well, every producer except the one that actually made Halloween.

Sean Cunningham, whom I did not know,

he came to me and wanted to do a horror film.

But not a direct rip-off of Halloween or anything.

I came up with the idea of a film entitled Friday the 13th.

And I said, "Friday the 13th, now that's a movie I could sell."

But not to the Halloween guy.

I didn't wanna do another horror movie right away.

I wanted to move on.

And so, Irwin did just that,

leaving Sean Cunningham with no deal.

No.

Luckily, when it came to financing Friday the 13th…

We're going to play strip Monopoly.

…he was willing to try a variety of techniques.

Really, what I did was, created an ad for Variety,

and it was a great big full-page ad

with the block letters "Friday the 13th" breaking some glass.

It said, "Friday the 13th, the most terrifying film ever made."

And despite not having a script or even a premise,

the power of advertising worked.

I got some people in Germany and people in Japan

and some other places that said they were interested in buying it.

And I said, "-ha! Let's see if we can actually make this movie."

"How are we gonna do that?" I said, "Jeez, I don't know."

Well, there was one way,

and it involves our old friend George and his boss.

Phil Scuderi, who is Italian…

Same as the guys from Boston.

And Phil from Boston, well…

He was…

He was... He was... George'll tell you.

He was the kind of person who would carry around big roll of bills

and would peel off money to you.

Yeah.

And Phil had peeled off money to Sean before.

For the baseball movie. So…

He wants to put up 25 percent of it.

Okay, great. I'm gonna... I'm gonna raise the rest of the money.

So, thanks to Phil from Boston with his lovely big rolls of money,

Sean could get started on the other missing elements of his movie,

those being a premise and a script.

But for that, Sean kicked the ball to Victor Miller,

the guy who'd written those failed sports movies, and he said…

What do I do?

"I've never made a horror movie."

I said, "Don't worry about it. We'll figure it out."

Here's Victor explaining how they did.

"Halloween is making a lot of money. Let's rip it off." That's a direct quote.

Well, yeah.

So, I went to see Halloween, and I figured out the format.

Basically, you start with a prior evil that happens before the movie opens.

We were just messing...

Well, how about a senseless murder in a quaint summer camp?

That would set the stage for terrifying future events.

But there's more to the formula.

You have a bunch of randy teenagers

who are outside the help of formal authority.

Meaning… Adults cannot come and save their asses.

Certainly the case in Halloween,

and certainly the case in Friday the 13th.

There's probably some stupid explanation for all this.

And then, the most important part of the formula…

You knock them off one by one, especially the ones who fornicate.

So, in Halloween…

And in Friday the 13th…

But let's be honest.

For as much as Halloween and Friday the 13th have in common…

You wanna show the audience something they haven't seen before.

And what no one had seen in the essentially bloodless Halloween…

…was gore.

But… None of us had done special effects.

And so, as usual, Sean looked at somebody else's work for inspiration.

George Romero had done…

Dawn of the Dead.

And he had some kind of cool special effects in there.

Sean asked himself…

Who did those? And the answer?

Yeah, Tom Savini. I was the special makeup effects artist on Dawn of the Dead.

And Tom had an interesting job description.

I make pretty people ugly. I kill people.

I can create beauty.

But there's more of a call for ugly, okay?

And so, Sean called Tom. Yes.

He walked in the door, and that was it.

But every wizard has an apprentice.

Hi. My name is Taso Stavrakis.

This recognizable face and stomach…

There he is.

…went way back with Tom.

He and I became best friends mostly because we did a lot of sword fighting.

We'd go out to the woods with capes and swords, a couple of geeks.

But when it came to non-geek, pretend killings,

that's when Tom and Taso were really on point.

Tom told them he could definitely take it to a new level, you know,

all the stuff Carpenter didn't show, we could show.

That being blood and lots of it.

But not the cheap Dawn of the Dead stuff.

Dawn of the Dead was like a comic book.

Lots of blood. The blood came from Germany. It was horrible.

And Friday the 13th, we immediately went more realistic.

I have a reputation for realism,

because it has to be anatomically correct for it to be good to me.

And surprise, surprise, there was a formula for that, too…

That's correct. …which Taso will now reveal. Start with…

Karo syrup. And add a dash of…

Food coloring. But to nail the viscosity…

Not just the right color, but the right texture.

…you'll need this secret ingredient.

Kodak Photo-Flo.

Then, give it a mix to create that picture-perfect ooze juice.

And that's what we gave 'em.

While Tom and Taso brewed blood,

Sean got to work finding his cast,

picking up Robbi Morgan along the way. Hi.

I went, "Sean, watch this." And I tumbled for him.

A skill that would come in handy.

I was like, "Sean, I could do this."

"I could do that."

I was like a little hummingbird.

But Sean, well, he'd seen enough.

Okay, kid, let's move it.

Her innocence made her kind of the perfect candidate

for somebody who you would never wish any harm.

Yeah, spoiler alert.

And so, we built her into the opening.

How far is it to Camp Crystal Lake?

Meanwhile, someone else who'd been looking for direction…

"I'll follow this path and see where it takes me."

…was Jeannine Taylor, and, like Sean, this thespian at heart…

So, I went to New York, studied singing and acting.

…would be wading into unfamiliar waters.

I read the script and I thought,

"Gee, you know, I'm gonna have to do a sex scene."

And the second thing was, "There's gonna be an ax."

Taking a hack at such material…

"No."

…wasn't exactly the career choice this cultured ingénue felt confident about.

I've gotta do this embarrassing, naughty stuff.

But after meeting Sean…

He put me at ease.

Which made her decision… Okay.

…easier. All right, why not?

And besides…

I thought, "Well, doesn't really matter. No one's gonna see it."

But Jeannine's on-screen sizzle would need bacon.

Kevin Bacon, of course.

Who?

Kevin Bacon?

You know…

Kevin Bacon!

Having worked in theater, well, who hadn't?

Kevin Bacon had a few on-screen credits to his name.

All is well!

And he was happy to get a job, and I was happy to hire him.

But they'd need way more teenagers to kill than just three.

Here's another one with an appropriately irrelevant backstory.

I went to London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.

Kind of theatrical study. And music, which I loved.

And also on his résumé… I'm named after a singer.

Who? You, Daddy.

He is Bing Crosby's son.

"You, Daddy."

A lovely, nice, young man.

Whose on-screen death would be the opposite of lovely and nice.

But Harry wasn't the only cast member with a showbiz family.

No. Take Peter Brouwer, for instance.

He was married to my longtime assistant, Cindy Brouwer.

While being married to the director's assistant

got Brouwer the audition,

it was something else that convinced Cunningham to cast him.

Cindy would've quit if I didn't cast him, so it was pretty simple.

Well, what do I owe you?

Just a night on the town, Steve.

And, along with Mark Nelson, Laurie Bartram, and Adrienne King…

This one survives. Yeah.

Sean had his cast of teenagers.

But finding theatrically trained young actors

looking for a big break is one thing.

When you've had a dream as long as I have, you'll do anything.

But for this movie to really work…

The whole movie is gonna turn on us discovering

this person who you would want to trust at first.

Well, I... I'm Mrs. Voorhees, an old friend of the Christys.

She was more than that.

One of the most trusted women in America.

Or at least someone who once was.

Who? It's Betsy Palmer.

And upon getting a script to this icon…

I read it and I said, "What a piece of shit."

The same description that could be given to her car at the time.

She needed money for a new car.

She took the gig just because her car broke down.

Besides, Betsy thought what everyone thought.

It's probably not gonna go anywhere.

"Nobody is going to see this thing."

"And I'll have a new car."

But when it came to trusted faces behind the scenes,

well, as always, Sean used the crew that he'd been trusting for years.

Like production designer, Virginia Field.

We had to create a place that felt safe

and warm and welcoming

in order for what happens later to be so scary.

Finding a camp in New Jersey,

Virginia got to work, prepping the location.

I really like set dressings, so there's a lot of detail.

And I kept the use of red in the film fairly constant.

That was my way to try to underline the danger.

But as shooting began in a matter of weeks,

the real danger weren't these flourishes of red.

Bill!

We'd been out there for about two weeks. We'd already built the building

that's the shower-toilet room.

So, along one side of the wall, there were the sinks.

On the other side of the wall, toilets, only one of which was practical.

Come on. You can do better than that.

We'd done quite a bit of building and painting.

And then… And then, Sean called and said…

Um…

"Sorry. We don't have enough money. You have to leave and close up shop."

Close up shop? But the formula.

And the other formula. And the classically trained actors.

Well, it turns out that Sean was starting to have some regrets

about getting into bed with Phil from Boston…

Yo, yo, yo, where are you going?

…who'd now changed his mind about their initial deal.

He's decided he wants to put up all the money.

Five hundred thousand dollars.

Sean was worried that would put a limit on the film's profit.

I said, "I can't do that. I'm sorry. I guess it's just not gonna happen."

Flushing all that good work down the toilets.

And they were not working toilets.

It looked like Friday the 13th was over.

And I was sort of heartbroken, but this is my third film with him,

and every time we didn't have enough money.

No, I had a lot of faith in him, I really did.

A pressure that was continually bearing down on Sean,

who now lost all his financing.

We were getting pretty far down the line. It was probably late August at this point.

And I'm surrounded by a bunch of people that are depending on me

to make this thing happen.

And I remember early that morning,

I got up and I went jogging around, I don't know,

five-thirty, six o'clock in the morning,

and I'm jogging, thinking, jogging, thinking.

I come back and I picked up the phone.

It's about quarter to seven. I call him up, I said, "Phil…"

"I thought about it. I changed my mind."

"You know, you still want to do it, we'll do it."

Would Phil Scuderi, the godfather of Esquire Movies,

pony up the cash, or was the damage done?

He says, "I was just on my way

to put that money in a shopping center, but all right."

"We'll make the movie."

They're opening that place again?

There was another phone call, and we were back at it.

Just like Virginia knew they would be. That's right.

I didn't take sets down. I left up what was already up.

However, the relief was somewhat short-lived.

Emphasis on "relief."

We came back to the set and we're going to the cabin, there's Virginia and Sean,

and maybe couple of other people standing around, shaking their heads.

And they're having a quiet but intense conversation.

And Tom and I walked up.

We said, "You know, what are we waiting for?"

And Virginia said…

Somebody had come along and used the toilets.

And they were not working toilets.

It was up to Virginia and the art department to clean that up.

That's when you're glad you have assistants.

They were all relieved just to have a script.

They did have a script, didn't they? Come on, let's go.

Nah, not so much, you know?

Well, to be fair, they did have a script, but…

There's barely a story and there's barely a character.

There's not very much, besides a little bit of tension.

Then, what's the point of all this?

But there's kills, and so you end up just waiting for the kills.

Well, it was a kind of sentiment

that was relevant to the way they shot the movie as well,

which began on September the 4th, 1979.

The first day we were shooting.

We were just kind of doing all those walking scenes.

And so I had my backpack on and Sean said, "Okay, Robbi, um…"

Um, Sean? Any ideas?

Well, the notion of being a film director,

the world thinks it's somebody who comes out

and looks at what other people present for them.

And he's there with his arms crossed, making judgments.

But not director Sean Cunningham.

It was the kind of thing where Sean said, "Taso."

Yeah, here we go.

"You're gonna drive the jeep." -…

The special effects guy? Are you crazy?

In the moment, very loose like that.

The jeep had almost zero steering, but I was sweating that one out.

Steering to a loose script, the ideas on set were flowing free.

They were like, "Boy, it would be great if she could jump out of the jeep."

"I could jump out of the jeep."

I did it.

The things we do for our art.

Having survived that stunt, it was now time for Robbi to die

in a gruesome manner.

You'll never come back again.

Shut up.

Okay, we're gonna run Robbi Morgan through the woods.

An excellent start to a death scene.

"Let's kinda, like, walk out here." And then?

Sean was saying, you know, "Robbi, trip."

"Robbi, fall."

All improv. And then?

I don't know, what could you do? What do we see?

Well, what's the script say? "Annie has her throat cut."

So, Tom and Taso cooked up the details.

We had a room just off the kitchen which became our shop, which was great.

I know when we killed Robbi Morgan, it was late in the afternoon.

The sun was coming down.

Sean really wanted to get that effect done.

And he said to me,

"Look, it's four o'clock, the sun's going down."

"How long is it gonna take you to rig her up?" I said, "Half an hour."

Wish I had more time to do it.

But Robbi got on the back of my motorcycle. I drove her to the workshop.

Taso and I put the appliance on and copper tubing for the blood.

So primitive, okay? And I had her back at 4:30.

They put the piece on my neck.

You glue it on and you paint it. Nobody knows it's there until the effect.

But who would do the killing? Taso.

Of course. Yep.

Where would the murder take place?

"Let's, let's do it against this tree. Taso, get the knife."

It was all very quick like that.

And I slashed her throat and all she had to do was tip her chin back,

and it would open up like a gaping wound.

There was a moment before the blood comes out.

There she goes.

It's a doozy.

Next up, it was Jeannine Taylor's turn.

But it wasn't her grisly on-screen death she was worried about.

I was dreading the sex scene, just dreading it.

Sex all you ever think about, Ned? Hey. No.

Flummoxed by this young actor's inability

to easily do the most difficult scene of her life,

it was Kevin who saved Jeannine's bacon.

Took me by the hand, said, "Here, let's take a little walk."

Got us into a little shed and he said,

"Here, I'm gonna toke up a little bit. Do you want some?"

Why don't you see if Marcie left any of that grass?

So, I did. I had two or three tokes of a large joint.

And before she knew it, Jeannine was hungry.

She had the munchies for love. On-screen love, that is.

And it did take the edge off.

But anyway, what was she worried about?

Doesn't really matter. Exactly.

No one's ever gonna see it.

But, just in case they did, they were about to see quite an eyeful.

And then, she has to pee.

I gotta pee. You're lying on my bladder.

So, she gets up and Kevin rolls over in bed, and…

Where did that come from?

No one has ever seen an arrow come… you know, from the back.

From the front, sure. And Tom was the one who'd done it.

We're gonna do it, but do it backwards.

Do it the opposite. Coming from the back to the front.

But for Kevin Bacon, it was more top to bottom.

From here down is a plaster chest.

Once the arrow pierces through the latex rubber,

there's a hole and there's no going back. You can't do it twice.

But this is the master of gore. He'd only need one shot.

I was the king of gore.

The wizard of splatter.

All right, calm down. But as it turns out,

he was also the executive of extinguishment.

Tom had this gigantic brass fire extinguisher.

But instead of life-saving fire retardant…

We unscrewed it and filled it with blood for the blood pump.

I was pushing the arrow through the fake body.

And I pumped fiercely with the brass blood pump.

Well, the first pump,

the tubing shot off and I'm kneeling in a huge puddle of blood under the bed.

Sean says, "Where's the blood? No blood."

I grabbed the tubing and I stuck it in my mouth and I blew…

…like that, and so, now you get arterial spray.

And that's what made... Blood just was gurgling out of him, you know.

Right. But speaking of gurgling…

And then I ran down to the lake and washed my mouth out,

because part of the formula's Kodak Photo-Flo,

which is some kind of chemical poison.

Yeah, well, at least you didn't get any in your eyes.

That's right. Anyway, on to the next death.

Must be my imagination.

This is insanely creepy.

Well, in that case, maybe we'll come back to this one.

And besides, they were shooting things other than just death scenes.

I know what we can do. We're going to play Monopoly.

See? The Monopoly scene.

That's what happens when you're just running out of ideas for a scene.

You have got to be kidding.

And you've got to have kids say something.

Before you kill them. Right. Okay. Point taken. Now, where were we?

It's funny. You know, so, my death scene,

we really kept Adrienne off the set.

She freaked. That was genuine.

And a genuine Savini masterpiece.

I created the metal piece that went over his head,

so the arrow would stick out. Tom may have created it…

I wasn't there when they shot it.

I had to go home for a weekend. Girlfriend problem, okay.

Give me another chance.

I guess it was Taso pumping the blood.

And I pumped fiercely.

So blood was constantly flowing out of the eye.

Out of and into Harry's eye.

The liquid was actually between the latex and the... And my eye.

When the shooting was over and they ripped the latex off,

my eye just started to completely melt down.

I couldn't see anything.

That's serious.

I was scared to death.

They took me to the local hospital

and they put a light on me to see about pupil contracting and stuff.

And,

I didn't see the light.

And he wouldn't for about six months.

… Show business.

Harry regained full vision in his eye and…

Today, when you buy eye blood,

it's perfectly safe, it doesn't have that stuff in it.

Well, we didn't know that back then.

Now, speaking of things we didn't know,

as they approached the end of shooting,

the great twist of the ending revealed itself…

in the form of Betsy Palmer…

I'm Mrs. Voorhees.

…who arrived on set, possibly in a deeply unimpressive car.

She came in and she was like, "What the fuck? This and this and that."

Betsy Palmer swore like a sailor.

"Yeah, I smoke, but only the pot that I grow myself in the greenhouse."

"Not this shit off the street."

Well, being off her head was surprisingly relevant

to what Tom and Taso had planned.

Kill her, Mommy. Kill her.

We're gonna decapitate her.

Which wouldn't just be the end of the villainous Mrs. Voorhees.

It would also be a wrap for Tom and Taso,

for what would be the very final special effect of the movie.

So, what we came up with was that it wasn't going to be her.

We would use her until the moment and then we'd swap her for a stunt double.

A stunt double? Well, finally something Taso didn't have to do.

Who was me. Of course.

Tom mounted the plaster shoulders and the head.

Taso was wearing it on his shoulders with his head way down.

And I attached it with toothpicks.

So, it was there precariously.

And it was me that swung the machete, because I knew where to hit it.

It couldn't have gone better, except for the hairy knuckles.

Which, I don't know, again, nobody thought about that.

Picking himself up and removing his severed neck nub

and his lovely blue sweater,

Taso and Tom hit the road…

We were done.

…leaving Sean and the rest of the crew

to shoot the fight scene that led up to the decapitation.

Yes, we had this… fight.

Well, I remember Taso and I were leaving to go home.

Not for long. They were on the side of the hill

shooting the fight, and we stopped to watch.

And she takes the knife out and she just…

And, um, it wasn't going well.

"My God. What are… What are we going to do?"

So, you know, Taso and I are…

We're members of the Society of British Fight Directors.

We took our test together. I was Zorro and he was the commandant.

So, Zorro and the commandant heroically swooped in and saved the day.

They break the oar.

And she uses it to try to stab her.

And it worked out perfectly.

So, yeah, I thought it was a pretty good fight.

Which then concluded shooting for Friday the 13th.

And they all wrapped.

The script ended in kind of a traditional way…

where the heroine has finally become victorious,

and she's covered in blood and it's sad, and we see the lake and…

That was the ending such as it was for the material that we had.

But there, lurking in the lake,

but not sleeping with the fishes, was not Jason,

but Phil, the money man,

who'd been largely silent during filming.

He was never on set, but…

Now had some opinions to share. …kept saying, "Yeah, we gotta have

one of those Carrie endings, you know?"

The hand comes out of the grave. Well, they couldn't do that.

So, instead, Tom had an idea.

I said to Sean, "Why can't we make Jason come back?"

"What if, like, she's in this boat…

and Jason comes up out of the water?"

I said, "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard of."

We ain't gonna stand for no weirdness out here.

That's got nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

How could we do that? He says, "It'd be great."

And so, to create this one last effect for Phil, Tom turned to Bill.

I kept thinking about this guy when I was a kid, Bill Bailey.

He had one ear lower than the other and his eye was kinda messed up.

And Sean loved it, you know?

What's not to love?

And for the lucky actor who got this gig,

Sean dredged up one of the little orphans from Manny's Orphans

to turn into this ghastly-headed lake dweller.

And I'll tell you what, man. He nailed it.

Must be my animal appeal.

And in many ways,

this scene unlocked the potential for many more Friday the 13ths to come.

For Sean, it was really more about…

Is she dead? What happened? …tying up loose ends of the story.

So, I came up with the notion of cutting to her in the hospital.

And she says something about the boy.

Is he dead, too?

The cop's line was, "Boy, ma'am?"

We didn't find any boy.

You know, it was like, "What the hell is that?"

It's actually the end of shooting, that's what.

And after just less than a month, they all went home,

leaving Sean to work out how to edit a movie.

You shot all this film, and you go to the cutting room,

and you're trying to put it together,

and you're trying to figure out, why doesn't it go together?

So, for help, Sean turned to the guy who used to live down the hall.

My friend, Wes Craven, I asked him to come to the rough cut.

And he said, "This thing's not gonna work. It's so slow."

"And boring."

Leaving Sean flummoxed.

Why doesn't it go together better? Well, to be fair…

We were all kind of flying by the seat of our pants.

But as always, Sean kept his composure.

Don't worry, we'll figure it out.

And it was his composure that saved the day.

No. Sorry. It was the composer.

And we were having dinner at his house,

and he looks at me and he says,

"I'm gonna make the scariest movie ever made and you're gonna score it."

I never had such conversation in my life. Who would have told you that?

Harry said it. In that case, it's true.

And like all of Sean's past collaborators…

I'm not a big horror fan.

The first time I saw the picture, I was just…

I'm the messenger of God.

"What the heck is this?" His problem, that's what.

How do I tell the audience that this is not the cameraman

just wandering around through the woods?

And Taso…

It's the killer.

But Harry hatched a plan.

Only the killer is going to have music, whenever the killer is present.

And when the killer wasn't present?

There are long stretches of silence.

I needed something that made it really obvious

this is the killer, and I had to do it in that amount of time.

And Harry found inspiration in the killer herself.

So, when Betsy Palmer is revealed…

Kill her, Mommy. Kill her.

And I'm going, like, "She hears voices."

One specific voice, to be fair.

So, I took "K-I" from "Kill."

Kill her.

And "M-A" from "Mommy."

Kill her, Mommy.

And I went up to the microphone, and I just went…

Ki! Ma!

And with that new killer score…

Holy shit! This might really have worked. Who'd a thunk it?

It was magic. Well, let's hope so, because…

My guy from Boston wants to screen it for a friend of his.

This very handsome stud.

No, no, no, no. At Paramount.

With a legitimate shot at distribution,

assistant editor Jay Keuper gathered the reels.

The film was boxed up, I took it over.

And awaited news of the screening.

Sean called me and said,

"The last reel of the film never made it to the screening."

So they couldn't see the end of the film.

You know, I mean, what are you gonna do?

Well, not buy and distribute it, maybe? But hang on.

Paramount must have been impressed enough with the first nine reels

that they were able to watch it one more time to see how the film ended.

And boy, did they like that.

Especially at the very end, when Jason comes out of the lake.

They were shaking their head. They had such a good time.

And Paramount decided…

To take this movie with no stars and no real plot…

And release it nationally.

At, like, a thousand theaters.

Which is impressive, compared to Friday the 13th's,

shall we say, inspiration, which only premiered in one.

When we started, if we had a big hit,

we were thinking maybe 50 theaters, but never a national opening.

The kind of thing indie filmmakers can only dream about.

Great! Let's go for it!

Friday the 13th, rated R.

The film hit theaters on May 9th, 1980.

But seemingly right out the gate, the film was caught in controversy.

The critics took aim at the sex and the violence, the gore.

This is yet another film connecting sex with violence.

Gene Siskel even published Betsy Palmer's home address.

Urging fans to write to her to tell her how they feel.

I'm not afraid.

But Jeannine was afraid

that her initial misgivings about taking the role

of "Scream Queen" were well-founded.

That did not go over well with a lot of the people I knew in New York

who were interested in my career.

Saying, "You were in that?" Shaking their heads.

And though neither the critics or the New York theater establishment

were impressed with Friday the 13th,

it seemed that audiences were,

because the movie made $5.8 million on its first weekend,

more than ten times Phil's 500 grand.

It was just like, "Holy smoke!"

We're waiting in the lobby to go in the theater,

and we hear everybody scream their lungs out

when Jason came out the water. That was a big thrill.

Audiences couldn't get enough of the scary summer camp romp.

Friday the 13th struck a chord. Sean was absolutely right.

Over the course of its run, the movie pulled in nearly $60 million,

placing it squarely among the top five most profitable horror movies of all time.

It became the movie that everybody wanted to see, you know?

I knew that I had been very lucky, and I was grateful for it.

All the major studios,

eager to work with this despicable filmmaker,

began asking him what he wanted to do next.

"I'd love to do a musical."

Yeah. Yeah, maybe. Or maybe something else?

Paramount wanted to do a sequel.

Yeah, right, because of the bubbles.

From that point on, with all the sequels, you get Jason, which is a whole nother…

Hockey player? …monster.

But there's something different about Jason.

He had a growth spurt, apparently.

No, that's not it.

It's not until Friday the 13th Part III

where we get the Jason that we associate with the most,

who's got the hockey mask.

There he is.

I had nothing to do with the hockey mask.

The franchise did though, cranking out a total of 12 Jason movies.

Did I think back then that there'd be 12 Friday the 13th movies? Hell no!

And there were equally as many not-Jason movies.

You had a hoard of knockoffs.

So, you get Sleepaway Camp.

Gore fests like Chopping Mall.

It started a whole revolution.

And for Tom Savini, the opportunities started flowing in.

The '80s was the splatter decade.

And that's when I did all those splatter films.

Though, Tom isn't the only one still getting attention.

Why would anybody want my signature, and why would they want to pay for it?

Well, because after 40 years,

the legacy of this fright show franchise refuses to die.

It is as strong as ever, just based on the letters and pictures still.

It's still very much alive.

And as for Jeannine, who thought…

It's probably not gonna go anywhere.

Must be my imagination.

Well, she was dead wrong.

I did not want my husband's parents to see the movie,

and I begged them not to see it.

But the first thing they did was go see it.

My father-in-law said he'd been in World War II,

and this was worse than that.

But come on. It's not like Jeannine's death was...

Actually, what was Jeannine's death?

Well, okay, when the ax goes into the girl's head…

Yeah, that would do it.

Well, after a prosthetics head malfunction…

Tom and Taso hot glued the fake ax directly onto my forehead.

It was kind of a DIY kind of an atmosphere.

Which is really something to be proud of…

because all these years later, those reservations Jeannine had…

Well, they've changed a bit.

Unlike the camp in New Jersey which, well, hasn't changed much at all.

This is Crystal Lake.

And it's like a time capsule. It really is.

It's just…

exactly as it was,

just imagine leaves on the trees.

And the float looks the same.

So, for a young actress who thought…

"I'll follow this path and see where it takes me."

Well, it's led her right back here.

My God, I never would have dreamed

that I'd be standing here forty-some-odd years later,

looking around, but I'm glad I am.

This might have been where I… where I slid down the wall.

For as brave as you need to be to watch the horrors of Friday the 13th…

This is Brenda's cabin,

where all the romance happened.

It's worth remembering

that at the very beginning of these young actors' careers,

they were brave too, in a different way.

It was made really clear to me that I had done something really bad

that was really going to hurt my career,

and maybe, you know, probably happened, to be honest.

But bravely taking on a role is one thing.

This guy, he put it all on the line, hoping to land a hit.

And that's pretty brave, too.

I knew so little about making movies

that I didn't know what could and could not be done.

We didn't have careers or reputations to protect.

We were just trying to, you know, trying to do this thing

called making a movie.

And Sean's humble pursuit to make a movie

with this ragtag team of cinematic killers…

That was me in the '80s. I was that guy.

…created a decades-long legacy that, for everyone involved,

is here to stay.

This was a shoestring,

fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants endeavor

all those years ago, and I never would have thought

that generations now revere this.

And I have to respect that. And I do.

And be grateful for it. And I am.

I am.