Original subtitles

By the end of 1987,

the idea of pitting "Friday the 13th's” Jason

against “A Nightmare on Elm Street's" Freddy Krueger

was already quietly circulating around Hollywood.

Due to complex legal issues

involving the two characters, however,

it would be another fifteen years

before fans would see Freddy and Jason battle to the death.

But that didn't stop executive producer Frank Mancuso, Jr.

From finding Jason a formidable foe.

I got kind of energized by 6 a little bit,

and I really wanted that to tell people,

"Okay, we got your back.

We got Jason back so it's going to be okay."

And 7, I sort of backed off again.

I mean, inevitably it had to do with what else

I was doing at the time.

I was about halfway into the first season

of "Friday the 13th,” the television series,

when I got a call from Frank Mancuso

asking me if I'd like to come down to Los Angeles

and discuss with him

the possibility of producing "Friday the 13th Part 7.”

And Frank was in discussion with John Buechler

to come and direct the film.

Basically I said, "Why?

Didn't they just make 6 of them?

I mean, why would you ever want to do a “Part 7?”

And I said this in front of Frank Mancuso,

and my agent was in the room and both their jaws dropped.

And I think it's because I didn't want to do it ultimately

that I got the job

because I did want to push it in a slightly new direction.

John had been a makeup effects artist.

He directed “Troll” and a couple of other movies.

He'd come out of the Charlie Band Empire world

of low-budget horror films.

So he was kind of a perfect candidate.

Because of my particular effects background,

I think I was considered as being

the helmer of the project

because I could bring that to the table.

Even when it got to “Part 7,”, I mean,

they weren't costing any money.

So there wasn't any real risk.

Originally titled “Jason's Destroyer”

the screenplay written by Daryl Haney

would see Jason face off against a powerful

though unlikely, new adversary.

Well, obviously the main difference

in this "Friday the 13th" was that there was a female foe.

A girl that could just come in and stand up to Jason.

The synopsis of this movie would be Carrie Meets Jason,

and, you know, this is a girl

who's got these incredible telekinetic powers.

The first thing I remember about getting the script

for "Friday the 13th" was the fake name on it,

“Birthday Bash,”

and my husband was a huge "Friday the 13th" fan.

And, he goes, "This is Friday the 13th.

This is not “Birthday Bash.” You've got to do this.

Please do it."

And he just begged and begged and begged for me to do it.

Lar was wonderful,

and I don't think anyone had really seen Lar

in anything before that.

But she was terrific.

One of the visual inspirations for me

was an old Hammer film called “Hands of the Ripper”

where you basically had a beautiful, little blonde girl

who was Jack the Ripper's daughter.

That kind of iconistic image

stuck with me and that became the template for Tina.

I idenfified with several things of Tina

right off the bat.

She was very vulnerable,

and she... a lot of people are.

They might have an exterior,

but they have a vulnerable underside.

So Tina evolved from what was basically a Carrie clone

with different baggage, of course.

"Part 7" once again opens at Crystal Lake,

where a young Tina Shepherd

first unleashes her powerful telekinetic abilities.

My daughter, played by Jennifer Banko,

had these special powers,

and my husband, John Otrin, would beat me up constantly,

a horrible alcoholic.

Please, don't drink anymore!

Don't tell me what to do! (slap)

That's all I knew.

It was an abusive father.

And my little daughter was able to cause his demise.

One day she just, she's had enough,

and she accidentally with her telekinetic powers

kills her dad.

She goes, "I hate you, Daddy."

I hate you! I wish you were dead!

You know, I remember I did that little

And the next thing I know,

the pier falls right into the water, and I die.

But it was amazing

because we had to do multiple shots,

and the bridge would shake and it would collapse,

and then it would put itself back together,

and we'd start from one.

After spending years in a mental hospital,

17-year-old Tina returns to Crystal Lake

to face her past... and to exorcise her demons.

You didn't know what Tina was capable of,

and she didn't know what she was capable of.

I always had a sense that what if she got too upset

and hurt someone that she loved around her again.

Because you weren't really sure what she was thinking,

and she couldn't control it.

Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't happen!

And you're lying to me!

Her adversary, up until the end, is not Jason.

It is her doctor who is trying to exploit her.

Terry Kiser played the doctor.

Terry did “Weekend at Bernie's” where he played the corpse.

He became huge, never said a word.

He wants to do a research document on her.

He takes her to the one place, Crystal Lake,

where her father was accidently killed by her

to make her very agitated.

Instead of taking her anger out on kids at the prom,

basically she takes it out on the lake,

and she focuses her anger at the lake,

and the lake starts to bubble,

and it jump-starts Jason.

Ch-ch-ch-!

Never before had Jason been played

by the same actor/stuntman more than once.

All that was about to change.

Enter Kane Hodder.

I had worked with Kane Hodder on a couple of other films,

one was called "Ghost Town,"

and the other one was called "Prison,"

and I thought that this might be the kind of guy

that I would want to play Jason

because he is a coordinator, he is a stuntman,

and he could perform under tons of prosthetics

and makeup.

I had been a fan of the movies for a long time,

a horror fan in general.

Loving the character of Jason,

never having any clue that I might have a chance

to do it myself.

I kind of went into it without any real plan.

I wanted to just do what felt natural.

You don't get the performance.

You don't get the visceral one-on-one confrontation

if you don't have an actor,

if you don't have somebody who can perform

through a ton of foam latex without a single word

and make you know what he's thinking.

And obviously Kane Hodder came through with flying colors.

Although the film's exact timeline remains unclear,

at least 10 years have passed since the events of "Part 6"

when a supposedly-dead Jason

was left to decompose at the bottom of Crystal Lake.

Buechler's thoughts were that he's kind of a rotted corpse,

and the makeup was real extensive.

Every scar, every rip, every tear

that Jason ever had was in the Jason

that we created for “Part 7.”

I looked at things in the past,

and it just kind of seemed like he was too much of a zombie

for what I would enjoy myself.

And so I tried to just put subtle things in there

to make it a little more human,

like the breathing thing, and the head turn

where I turn my head first and then the body follows.

It just was something that felt right

and felt kind of imposing.

And we all thought

he should have been Jason from the beginning.

He should have been every single Jason, you know.

He's the guy that ended up playing Jason most

in the "Friday the 13th" movies

because he did bring something to the role.

While Tina is subjected to Dr. Crews'

unethical experiments,

the house next door is overrun

by another lively group of teens,

including the handsome yet sensitive Nick,

ugly duckling Maddy, and the bitchy Melissa.

Played by the late Susan Jennifer Sullivan.

I remember Susan Jennifer Sullivan.

A fun little girl, not at all like her character.

She was sweet as can be.

In many ways, she was playing against type

because even though she looked, she had the package

of that kind of privileged snobby princess

There goes the neighborhood.

She was really humble and very nice.

It's a matter of some curiosity that at this point in time,

the fan base knows it as "Fri-Gay the 13th Part 7."

We were kind of aware

that a large number of the male members of the cast

and nee, indeed some females, were indeed gay,

but it never had an effect on making the show.

I know possibly one of the reasons it got the name

Fri-Gay the 13th, Kevin, the love-interest

of Lar Park-Lincoln, was, I believe he was gay,

and maybe some people thought there was no chemistry,

and you know, she might not have been terribly attracted to him.

There was a little bit of a rumor on the set

about that they didn't really get along that well

which I thought was pretty tough to have to be able to,

you know on film, appear like they're hitting it off,

and they're having a connection.

It's a big pink elephant.

I was a little bit oblivious to the fact

that their chemistry wasn't all that good.

I kind of remember now

that Lar would say a couple of things to me

that they weren't jiving,

but they never said a bad word about each other.

The film worked just fine,

all the romances, all the drama.

I'm not sure sexual orientation gets involved

with who Jason wants to kill.

He's an equal-opportunity slasher.

While the Friday the 13th films

were never greeted with enthusiasm

by the Motion Picture Association of America,

no one felt their wrath more harshly

than director John Buechler.

I've said it often, and I'll say it again,

the ratings board raped my movie.

The MPAA was the true horror of the film.

They sent us back many, many times

to re-cut the film,

to take out, you know, pieces of gore.

The favorite Jason kill that I've ever done

is the sleeping bag just for the creativity of it.

OK you big hunk of a man, come and get me!

Jason picks up the sleeping bag with the young woman in it.

She's screaming, and he bashes her against a tree.

They shot various versions of the sleeping bag.

It had a heavy dummy in it

and about twenty gallons of blood,

which is not light.

So, of course that was a big no-no with the ratings board,

so I would cut it down, cut it down.

And finally, in the final version,

he picks up the sleeping bag,

hits the tree once and throws it down.

One of the rare cases where I thought

maybe the edited version ended up better than the unedited.

Every kill in the film,

they shot footage that was very, very graphic.

The kid who got killed at the lake

when his girlfriend was skinny dipping,

and there was far more detail to what happened to him.

Jason, like a golf pro, swings the axe upward

and slashes up through a guy's jaw,

splitting his face forward

and a spout of blood goes straight up.

In the movie, unfortunately,

you out away before any connection is made.

For me it's like telling a joke without the punch line.

I think Billy Butler's kill was also kind of great

because you didn't really see it happening,

but you saw Tina's vision.

William Butler and I

actually did “Texas Chainsaw” together as well.

A lot of our fans, you know, they bring up

that him and I did two horror films together,

very close, a couple of years apart.

They seem to think that's really neat, I do as well.

We were filming “Friday the 13th: Part 7”

in February in Alabama.

We had a guy with a gun with us all the time

to shoot alligators.

He was a rather older man and he was very slow,

so I don't think he could have shot that alligator

if it came out of the swamp at me,

so that was strange.

Oh, get real, Maddy. You're not his type.

You need a little touch-up work first.

Thanks!

I remember Diana Barrows.

She played kind of the ugly duckling

who gets the makeover.

Need a little touch-up work, my ass.

We actually did reshoots in Topanga

to make the deaths kind of longer

and that was the scenes with Maddy smoking grass

for the first time with David,

and more versions of my death scene.

[scream]

And my ex-boyfriend confessed to me years later,

after I broke up with him,

that he would rewind my death scene a million times and go,

"Get her, Jason! Get her, get her."

[scream]

Yeah, right, happy fucking birthday.

I certainly remember how Jason killed Ben,

my boyfriend in the movie.

L'll bet it's Michael

I'm thinking Michael is shaking the van.

It's actually Jason. I hop out of the van.

For some reason I don't want to have sex anymore.

I want to find Michael.

I don't think I've ever seen a killing like that

where he just takes, you know, his head,

one hand on top and one under his chin,

and just smushes it to a pulp.

Actually in the script my death is described

as "Ben's head gets squished like a ripe pimple."

They had made a dummy head.

They had filled it with cottage cheese

and a bunch of gook.

After my head is squished,

Jason picks up the party horn, and she gets plugged again.

After the horn went in,

which I didn't realize until I'd actually seen the movie,

there was a little toot noise.

When we were in Alabama,

we filmed a scene where they made a kind of prosthetic body

under my nightgown,

and he took a big sword and chopped me in half,

but the fake body underneath

had shifted, and it looked really phony so...

but they didn't see that until we got back to LA.

So that's why we re-shot it.

A new death scene for Robin

was filmed in the same Topanga Canyon house

which previously served as the Jarvis residence

in "Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.”

So he picked me up by the neck,

and he threw me out the window,

but the funny thing is, is they hired a stuntman

to be my body double.

So when you see the body going out the window,

it's this guy with these big giant legs

and this kind of pretty bad red wig.

You know, so I remember people going,

"Your legs are so muscular."

Push comes to shove,

we discover that not only does Tina

have this psychokinetic ability,

but she can also clairvoyantly see things before they happen,

but not exactly as they happen.

She gets an image that is kind of a surreal version of it.

Once in a while if one of the characters

was particularly bad,

then I might want to come up

with a little bit more violent way of killing 'em,

like Dr. Crews.

Terry's character, he was not a good doctor.

You have deliberately turned my daughter

into an emotional wreck.

That's not true.

In fact, in my death scene, when we're out in the woods,

and I'm running and the whole thing, he sees Jason coming.

And he literally puts my body in front of his

so that he's safe for a second.

That's the kind of guy he was.

That guy's gotta die in a creative, violent way,

more so than some of the other people.

The psychiatrist's death was another one

that was just gutted by the MPAA.

I was surprised when I went to see the movie,

so much of the gore had been cut out.

That was a real tool.

I've never seen it since then.

I hadn't seen it before,

but it was like a weed whacker with a circular saw blade on it.

Great weapon.

Didn't see much of it in the movie unfortunately.

They shot all sorts of angles,

cutting into a prosthetic body and blood and guts and... gone.

[screams and buzzing]

Everybody loved watching Melissa get the axe in the head.

She was just such a horrible character.

She was such the quintessential bitch.

Melissa was a bitch.

You were already waiting for her to get it.

Tina and myself and Melissa

are in the cabin kind of waiting things out.

Don't go out there.

She says, "Fuck you. No..."

Fuck you both!

Turns to leave and guess who's at the door?

Jason's sitting there with the axe,

and he splits it right in her head.

Whack!

We did a reverse pull-away gag on her with a hatchet,

which didn't end up in the movie at all.

I remember we watched this stuntgirl...

fly across the room with this axe in her...

It was extraordinary.

That was a fun day, actually, watching that scene.

We were in a very small space when that was shot.

And, of course, Kane takes up half the room.

We acted scared and ran upstairs

because that's what you do.

You don't run outside, you run upstairs.

I thought from the very beginning

it should be more of a stunt movie

than it would be a makeup effects movie.

And we have that great street scene

where she goes right up to him.

Jason?

I loved the twigs coming around his legs

and taking him down that way.

I had to really take a lot more abuse than I was expecting,

but I was glad to do it

because I think it made the movie look much better.

The battle continued.

It just continued and continued, and we shot it forever.

For me it was difficult

because my character was in a constant state of upset.

I would have to constantly keep myself very tense

to keep the tears rolling and flowing,

and the anger, and the disbelief and the craziness.

Going into it we relied heavily on other mechanical effects

like the roof falling on Jason.

As soon as that thing hit me, man, there was no acting.

It hit me so hard and with such force

that it just drilled me into the stairs.

We had special effects in that movie

that were actually kind of in competition

With the killing.

And we had TVs flying across the room

and explosions and the pearl necklace breaking,

and all this great magical stuff that didn't typically happen

in a “Friday” film.

And we really wanted that over-the-top aspect

with the makeup effects, with the stunts,

with the physical effects, everything.

Every time I turned around,

she was doing something else to him.

I loved the nails, and the gas in the basement.

I loved that scene. That was really fun.

And he's like fed up with all the stuff she's doing to him.

And I can vividly remember Buechler saying,

"Go like this, really move your face around."

He was talking through the whole thing.

I was always amazed and just in awe of him

because as a stuntman he had an accident

and was burned in a stunt

and has scars on his chest and his neck.

It really was a case, you know, conquering your fear

and just moving on saying, you know,

this is not going to stop me.

They truly blew up an entire house in that movie.

It was wild.

You know, putting pryro in in special places

so it would go boom, boom, boom, boom.

And the grips, everybody smoking cigarettes,

and up in the eaves inside the house

are these little ropes hanging everywhere.

And I went, "What are those?

And they went, "Oh, we're going to blow up the house."

And I went, "You mean it's all set to blow up,

and everybody's smoking!?"

Eventually the word came down that, yes,

we were ready to go.

The countdown started happening. We tensed up.

This was going to be great.

And as the button got pushed,

the whole building went up within a split second.

I was there when they filmed the cabin exploding,

and I don't know,

something must have gone wrong with something

because you could actually literally feel the heat.

There was not a piece of wood

larger than a matchstick available

to be seen the following day.

It was Apocalypse Now. It was just too big.

Lenses were smashed on the lmo's.

You know, filters were melted.

And eventually, I think the longest piece of film

of the explosion was about 20 frames, less than a second.

And eventually we created at least something

that you could say,

"Okay, there's an explosion there."

But on the day, we were heartbroken.

From the earliest days of production,

John Buechler found himself at odds

with a key member of Frank Mancuso, Jr.'s executive team.

When you're working as a director on a movie,

you have a vision.

The producer's interested in the money,

and the director is interested in the product.

In this particular case...

I kind of went head-to-head with my associate producer.

Barbara Sachs worked for Frank Mancuso

across a broad range of his development.

She was responsible for developing

“He Said, She Said,” “Permanent Record

so she was a very big part of Frank Mancuso's company.

There was occasional tension between her and John

because she was probably giving her input,

and John had his own vision, and John knew what he was doing.

This was not a new genre for him.

The "Friday the 13th" series of films

was a little bit outside her wheelhouse.

This was not in her sort of

intellectual and emotional direction.

She didn't like horror.

If you're going to be an associate producer on a film,

or even a producer, you gotta love it.

One of the things I really lobbied for

was to show Jason mask off

for the better part of the last reel of the movie.

She hated the look of Jason.

She said, "He looks like a frog. He's so unbelievable."

She vetoed the idea for me to do it at all.

And I was busy working,

and I couldn't really go over her head

and talk to Frank and get approval.

So I did it anyway.

And ultimately Frank Mancuso loved popping Jason's mask off

the way I did it.

She always just seemed to be somebody in the way.

There was, I believe, a conflict about the very ending,

about how the father would look.

The ghost of Tina's father was to be realized

as a fully animatronic thing.

I'm decaying after 7 to 10 years of being in that water.

I look as ugly as Jason looks.

And we did this makeup on John, and we did the animatronic,

and, of course, Barbara vetoed that

because I'd gone against her will.

We actually put the makeup on,

and we started shooting some of it.

Actually I came out at the end with that outfit on

and brought Jason down, and it was never used.

And so what you see at the end of the film

is John Otrin coming up with a dirty face

and pulling Jason down.

I think when people view the film they say,

"That's kind of lame."

I felt bad really for John because he had done

so many really great things in that movie,

and it was never... It was never seen

and some of those scenes were lost and deleted.

For years, fans have demanded a home video release of the film

in its fully-restored form.

Unfortunately, a truly uncut version

of "Friday the 13th Part 7” will never be seen.

It would be terrific to be able to go back

to "Friday the 13th Part 7”

and put it back together in a form

that had more, sort of, creative coherence.

Unfortunately that footage has been discarded.

Paramount destroyed all the outtakes of the film

which it's... it's pretty unfortunate.

Without the elements, without the outtakes,

there's really no hope of ever making a director's cut

or alternate version of those scenes

because the footage just doesn't exist.

Like so much of, you know, great American cinema,

it's now lost to the world.

Not that I'm saying "Friday the 13th Part 7”

was great American cinema,

but great American cinema of a certain kind.

Though it wasn't per se a studio film,

it did have many of the trappings of a studio film.

And it made me ultimately very dissatisfied

with too many cooks.

Sometimes directors can get kind of snippy.

John never did that, and he had a lot of external forces

that could have certainly made him go crazy.

We were fighting all kinds of different battles

within producing the film.

And um, he was always very kind to me,

and I'd go home at night and say,

I'm gonna look like an idiot in this franchise,

and my career is going to be over.

But I trusted him, I believed in him and it worked.

Jason... ls Back.

But this time, someone is waiting.

"Friday the 13th: Part VII The New Blood"

Little more than six months after the start

of pre-production,

"Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood”

debuted on May 13, 1988.

While its final take of $19.2 million

was respectable, it paled in comparison

to the late-summer release

of "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master,”

which took in a then record setting $49.1 million.

Although Jason may have been temporarily unseated

by the competition,

he was still a long way from being dead.

It opened at the Chinese Graumann Theater in Hollywood.

How awesome is that?

So here we are, we're in the movie theater,

the 8 o'clock show or something, and we're counting the deaths.

This is a sold-out crowd.

Every time Jason killed somebody,

the whole audience would go...

1!

2!

3!

Every time somebody got killed, they'd count 'em.

It's just amazing, the movie magic,

and the way things really come to life.

I was scared, I screamed, I jumped, I moved, you know,

I was hiding, and I knew what was coming,

I'd read the script, I'd seen a lot of the scenes being done,

but when they actually put it together, you know,

it's real!

I was very happy to see in the "Hollywood Reporter"

that "Friday the 13th Part 7”

was the highest grossing movie at the box office in May 1988

when it was released.

That says something about the enduring legacy

of "Friday the 13th

Although Tina would not be seen again,

fans have long envisioned a sequel

that would bring together the surviving characters

of "Friday the 13th" for the ultimate showdown with Jason.

Well, I'm waiting for "Friday the 13th Part 13”

to come out and it would be terrific

if the surviving girls get together

and that would be a script.

Hell, yeah. I would definitely do it.

It sounds like it would be a great time.

Charlie's Angels vs. Jason, Jason's Devils basically.

We'd get all buff, We'd get all strong

and then maybe I could run as fast and jump as high

as I did before.

He's always only fought someone one-on-one.

He's never had a group fighting him at the same time.

I would, I mean I haven't forgotten how to do it,

it's like a bike, I don't think I could ever forget.

We'd just have probably really great lives

with this terrible memory.

I would probably do another film

that would reprise that role, you know,

the years later, as long as it was done in, you know,

a good light.

I think what Tina would be doing today

is trying to help others

but still dealing with her own demons and being pulled back,

I think she would be pulled back to the lake again.

Tina being fully realized as who she is

made the movie work,

and the fact that we could pay it off

with the special effects and so forth

really contributed to the success of the movie.

Even if Jason's machete blade

had dulled slightly at the box office,

all seven films in the series

remained highly-profitable ventures for Paramount.

But with its fan base growing up

and dream demon Freddy Krueger

now taking on pop-icon status,

it was time for Jason to venture out of the woods...

and step into a much larger world.

There were seven before, obviously,

and they all took place in Crystal Lake, right?

And so the first question I asked them,

was, "Does it have to be in Crystal Lake?

Can I take Jason out of Crystal Lake?"

Rob Hedden is an infectious personality, first of all,

so he's a very upbeat guy.

He has tons and tons of energy.

Frank Mancuso Jr. Who was producing it,

I mean he was the one, he just said,

"Well, if it's a big city, it's got to be New York."

I said, "That works for me. That's a great idea."

So that's how the whole

"Jason Takes Manhattan" thing came about.

But there was fun that we hadn't seen before

about the notion of a Jason in a big city.

The notion of what would happen

if Jason got into the subway, you know all those things.

My first draft of the script had a big chase scene

across the Brooklyn Bridge.

There was a lot more stuff that we just couldn't afford to do.

He certainly had ambitions

that we didn't have the budget to allow for.

Production reality set in and it was like, okay,

instead of, you know, 75% of the movie

taking place in New York, we'll do 50%.

And then it was, well, we can't really do 50 either.

So then the concept, well,

let's do some mayhem on the cruise ship

while they're getting to New York,

and we'll make, you know, maybe the last third of the movie

will take place in New York.

Among the sea of new faces,

at least one familiar passenger was back on board.

Kane Hodder's enthusiastic and always menacing

portrayal of Jason Voorhees

ensured that the graduating class of Crystal Lake High

would be in for the voyage of their lives.

So for me it was like I looked at 7. How did he die in 7?

Okay, that's where we're going to find him. He's underwater.

He's going to get shocked with electricity.

In the film's opening sequence,

an amorous couple anchored at Crystal Lake

inadvertently awakens Jason from his watery grave.

Perhaps in retrospect

we probably shouldn't have anchored our boat

in Camp Crystal Lake

where there was a corpse of a murderer down under the water

waiting to be reanimated.

He really doesn't even need the electricity.

He could come back just because he feels like it.

Having Kane Hodder on board was really helpful

because he had done PART 7, and he knew what had been done.

And also Marty Becker was our special effects guy.

And between them and our makeup people,

we decided let's tweak Jason a little bit too.

People ask me,

"Why does the makeup change so much from movie to movie?

And the hockey mask changes and everything else."

You know, basically it's because

it's a different makeup effects person who designs it,

and they don't necessarily stay true

to the previous movie.

Plus he starts out underwater

at the very beginning of the movie,

and so he's pretty much just gooey the whole movie.

They put slime on me every single shot

so I was wet the entire movie.

Goo. Goo is great.

The moment where I get almost shot by the spear gun

was the scariest moment of the whole shoot for me,

out of the whole week,

because they did have to aim the actual spear gun

really close to my head.

And they were like, "Don't move and get it right

because we're going to damage the wall behind you."

I didn't think there was really any danger,

but it was definitely scary because it did whiz by my ear,

and it was very loud when it shot into the wall.

It also probably wasn't really smart to hide on the boat

where the murderer is coming to get you

instead of jumping into the water

and at least trying to swim for your life.

We were doing my death scene, and I saw the fake torso,

and it originally had really, really large boobs

on the fake torso which I was super excited about.

And then they were like, "We might have to rethink this."

I know they made some adjustments,

and she had really nice nipples, I remember that.

Kane Hodder was on the set one day,

and he came out with a strap-on in full garb you know,

Sounds like something I should check out.

Once again, fans have been quick to point out

inconsistencies in the timeline

and the logic of Part 8.

As far as the logic on how that ship

got out of Crystal Lake into the Atlantic,

I have no idea.

It's a tough one because it had to be Crystal Lake,

and we had to get him on a cruise ship to New York.

And so we tried to do a little smoke and mirrors

and it maybe didn't quite work.

I have a theory.

I think we were all so frickin' happy

to have a paying gig and for most of us,

it was our maiden major movie and it was like,

"This damn boat could come from the Sahara Desert

and get into the Atlantic."

I'm not going to challenge the concept.

And we ultimately just said, "Let's just forget it,

you know. People can... people may get mad at us for that,

but let's go for it."

Our graduating class I'd say it's easily, what,

about 100 kids on that boat,

and it's like only 5 of us get killed

but yet everybody's wiped out.

At the very beginning there were so many extras

and then as the shooting went on there was less.

And that was probably a budget issue.

They might've got a little scared and jumped overboard.

And Julius is like, "Hold it down."

School is out, McCullough.

I think that's the assumption, right,

is that Jason basically,

behind the scenes, was eliminating everyone.

A number of young hopefuls were initially considered

for the role of the film's smart yet aquaphobic lead.

Rennie had a special connection to Jason

because her evil uncle

was trying to teach her how to swim

when she was a little girl.

So I unfortunately,

because of an Old School understanding,

I tossed her into the water

which was a not very nice thing to do for an uncle.

And she saw Jason under the water.

My character is terrified of the water

but she decides to go on the boat anyway.

One by one the classmates are killed off or missing.

There's nowhere to go.

They can't escape from him and that claustrophobia

gave me a lot of ideas in how he could trap them

and kill them.

In 7 and 8 I was sort of absent.

I was there in spirit,

but I wasn't there actually scoring it.

Fred Mollin, the composer to the TV series,

took over writing the music to those two films,

although they dropped in a few pieces of mine

from previous films and, of course,

k-k-k...

TCH-T CH-T CH-JA-JA-JASON

As production of "Friday the 13th Part 8:

set sail in Vancouver, British Columbia

under the code titles "Ashes to Ashes,"

and "Burial at Sea,"

a last-minute change was made to a key member of the cast.

Originally when we got to Vancouver to shoot

there was this really hot guy playing my boyfriend.

That's all I remember about him. He was really hot and buff.

We shot the first day with this other guy, great guy,

really nice guy.

It was my first major film but I had done some other things,

so I shot the first scene of that day

which was like well into the script

when the ship was flooding with Peter Mark Richman.

This is Jason's fault!

Not another word of Jason, do you hear me?

No, I don't. And it's time you listened to me

if you want to get off this ship alive.

Let's get to the lifeboats.

He seemed a little uncomfortable.

The chemistry with him and the Rennie character

wasn't quite there.

I thought there was chemistry. Whatever.

Thank God for the producers because they really said,

"You know, there's a problem here,

and if we don't correct it right now,

we're going to have a problem... A bigger problem."

I think the day after that, one of the PA's came to me and said,

"The producers want to see you tomorrow night."

And I knew without them even saying it,

I'm going to be let go.

And so it was the toughest thing I've ever, you know,

had to do was to basically to replace an actor,

and that's what we ended up doing.

But, again, it was for the benefit of the movie.

And Scott Reeves came in.

And Scott Reeves was so sweet and fantastic,

and he's hot too.

Also on board were Martin Cummins

as film school geek Wayne...

Kelly Hu, best known for her roles in "X2"

and "The Scorpion King,"

and Saffron Henderson

as head-banging rocker J.J.

There was one girl in the movie who's a rocker,

and she's got the Flying V.

This place is achin' for a video!

She's got to get her head bashed in by a Flying V.

I mean, it just was like that's a no-brainer.

[Scream and splatter sound]

This is actually J.J.'s guitar

and right here you'll notice

that there's actually some of J.J.'s blood

after almost 20 years.

Forensics evidence.

I think every "Friday the 13th" has to have the promiscuous girl

who is caught doing something naughty.

And she pays.

Come and get it.

She was the Queen Bee.

She made everybody buzz around her.

And she did that by going in there

and being the edgiest, the coolest,

the one that was always doing the riskiest stuff.

I mean, seducing the teacher.

Hey.

There's a scene where she paints body organs on her.

I didn't mind the biology project so much

because it was kind of funny,

This girl comes on to me, and I was getting turned on.

I was really mmm

having it affect me.

Peter was a much older man when I was doing that,

but he definitely helped me with the scene

and made me feel comfortable.

What do you think you're doing? I'm your teacher!

- And cut it. (laughter)

I was a little nervous about, you know,

some of the revealing shots.

That was my issue really.

Rob Hedden wanted to make me feel comfortable,

so he just stripped down at the same time.

He goes, "Look. I'm doing the same thing."

And he was so awesome that way.

I did not feel exploited.

Then, again, I was the good girl

who was fully clothed throughout the entire movie.

Not only did I have a shirt,

I had a shirt and a vest

and baggy, horrible pants, macho shoes.

It was bad. It was very bad.

"Friday the 13th" has so many '80-isms in it

with the camcorder being this huge, huge camcorder,

the cocaine, and just the dress and the hair

because it was big hair, lots of backcombing

and definitely an '80s movie.

I think that a lot of creativity

rightfully has to go into modes of murder,

you know, and you know,

how is he going to dispatch his victims?

We had Kelly Hu and it was one of her first movies, you know,

and she was great.

And she was totally up for it and I thought,

"Well, okay, let's figure out a way to kill them

that doesn't involve a knife or something else.

The disco scene was one of the hardest scenes

I've ever had to do as Jason

because we did like 14 hours of work.

We decided to do this big dance thing and she's circling around

and his face is popping up here and there.

And then at the end, I had to pick the actress up

and choke her to the ceiling.

I had to say, "Well, now I have to hold you up to the ceiling,

and then throw you down hard, and you're dead.

So you can't break your fall.

Not easy to do, and the girl did a great job

because she just hit the deck hard.

That was actually one of the, at least from what I heard,

you know, one of the more satisfying deaths in it

because even without any blood or, you know, gore.

Despite its attempts to feature more fantastic effects

than outright bloodletting,

the film still had to pass muster

with the stringent MPAA ratings board.

I always thought of "Friday the 13th Part 8"

as sort of the Disney version of the "Friday the 13ths."

It wasn't quite as gory.

Well, I don't really know about the censor boards

and what they allow, or what they didn't allow,

but I'm sure they probably didn't like

"Friday the 13th" so maybe that's why the,

you know, blood situation sort of diminished.

It just seemed a little tame.

I mean, the 1980's, at the height of the success

of these movies,

there were multiple cases made that he was kind of

the modern Reagan-era killer

because he was making those kids that didn't "just say no"

and were having premarital sex, pay.

It's just sort of, watch out, young people.

Be careful what you do

because Jason's gonna come to you.

There were various things like, "Okay,

we gotta electrocute one kid, gotta electrocute somebody.

A lot of sparks. That'll be great.

Another one we did,

and this was done after the fact,

it wasn't shot during principal photography.

We decided let's put a sauna on the ship.

I actually put the Panaflex on my back

to shoot that sequence of the hot coals.

You start asking yourself is there something wrong with you

when you're spending your day

thinking up ways to murder people.

L'll never forget when I was shooting the shower scene

because when he comes in, even though you know it's a movie,

and you know you're just acting, it was scary.

You know, you shoot all night.

You shoot all night in these movies and you're exhausted,

you're freezing, you're being hosed down all the time.

You're in the same clothes for 3 months.

It was somewhat dangerous.

We were rather miserable through that period.

I had to be drowning in the ocean,

and we were in this huge oil tank

on the sound stage,

and I just remember going under the water

and coming up and just being covered in oil,

and on my face and thinking,

I think I've just taken 10 years off of my life.

One of the takes that's in the film

where Julius comes up out of the water,

the water was so violent

I'm losing the boat here. I'm losing the boat.

The boat was closer than I had anticipated,

so when I came up, the top of my gums

hit the edge of the boat.

There were so many times where I just hoped

that I wasn't going to end up in a cast

at the end of the night.

But, you know, it's show biz, baby, you know.

You keep it moving.

When the remaining cast members abandon ship

in a final bid for survival,

it appears that Jason had been left behind on the Lazarus.

Leaving fans to ponder another question...

How did Jason get to New York City?

We went through all of these, you know,

scenarios of how did he get there

and then we ultimately decided

let's just let the audience wonder

and let them try to figure it out.

He'd been doing all these other things during the movie

that defy any kind of human logic.

One image I had in my head

that really pertained to the New York thing

was having Jason rise up out of the water

into the harbor in New York,

and the first thing he sees is a giant billboard

with his face on it,

and he gives, just this little cock of his head like, what?

Operator, this is an emergency. Get me the police.

[Glass My death scene, the fans

and just the letters and stuff that I get,

it really, it really made an impact on people.

Just a great scene because it had really never been done

to try and box Jason.

Initially they had planned to have that boxing match

take place in Madison Square Garden.

His character thought, you know, l'll just wear him out

with my punches and ended up wearing himself out.

We just really went for it.

I, you know, to ask Kane. I said, "Hey, dude.

Can I really hit you?" He goes, "V.C., give me all you got."

He was punching me for real on every shot to the body.

Like 66 punches each take.

And like even at the end of that scene

where you see my knuckles very swollen

and with blood and stuff all on them,

that was real, baby.

It was, you know, it was toe to toe.

So I did, you know, I took a little abuse myself

so by the time it was time

to knock the head off the dummy, I was ready to do it.

You know, everybody else can see what's coming but Julius.

You know what I mean? So he's just standing there.

And just a classic line that he gives right before that.

Take your best shot

Motherfucker.

If you are going to sort of tire yourself out

trying to take Jason on,

don't pause and say "Take your best shot, motherfucker."

Run because he is going to knock your head off into a dumpster.

They made three. One was for close-ups.

One was heavier that actually hit the garbage can,

and then there was another one that was lighter

that they tossed up in the air.

Yeah, but I kept the one, the money shot one.

The one that was for close-ups.

It was an adventure.

It was really, really an adventure.

For veteran character actor Peter Mark Richman,

best known for his roles in episodes

of "The Twilight Zone" and "Dynasty,"

being killed by Jason was hardly the high point

of his prestigious acting career.

One of the most awful things that I had to do was my demise.

Jason picked me up and carried me over to this barrel,

and there was a rat on top of the barrel.

It was so nauseating.

We shot in some miserable street in Vancouver.

That was supposed to be New York, right?

So there was a joke running around.

It was Jason Takes Vancouver

instead of Jason Takes Manhattan,

but we were able to make a lot of parts of Vancouver

look like New York.

Let's be honest. That's not Manhattan.

I've been to Manhattan. That's not Manhattan.

You don't understand, there's a maniac trying to kill us.

Welcome to New York.

It's kind of like trying to make a nice steak dinner

on a ham sandwich budget.

Not since "Rumble in the Bronx"

has a less accurate depiction of New York been presented.

And then not only that,

they were only going to let me shoot

for one week actually in New York.

We put a 40-foot crane in the middle of Times Square,

and we did some big stuff

that none of the Fridays had been able to do before.

It gave us a different kind of engagement

with the, with the audience.

The single most amazing thing that I've ever done

as the character was shooting the scenes in Times Square.

And there were hundreds of people on either side

of the streets behind barricades watching the filming.

So I had the mask on,

and just stood there knowing there's hundreds of people,

and I just turned and looked at them.

They went nuts.

It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen.

Screaming and cheering

just because I had given them the look in the costume.

But when I was standing in Times Square

looking at this giant crane with all these extras around,

Jason walking through.

This is a real movie. This is big.

I felt like, like a rock star or something

because the way people reacted.

You didn't get me in the lake.

And you're not gonna get me now!

I felt very empowered playing the part,

especially at the end when, you know,

I was the only one surviving

and there we were in the sewers, and I felt like,

Alright, this is a nice, tough, accurate portrayal

of a girl's strength.

You know, he's chasing after our heroes

at the end and he gets hit with toxic waste

and melts to the point where it is supernatural ending

where he finally reverts to the child,

which seemed like it had more closure than the other ones

as far as Jason coming full circle.

And what was supposed to happen is that

young Jason comes out of this giant skull,

and it just looked funny.

And so it was on the famous cutting room floor.

Were I submerged in toxic waste,

I'm probably not emerging as my 8-year-old self,

particularly if I was already a mongoloid,

mentally handicapped person.

Clearly the government needs to be investigating

the healthy byproduct of toxic waste.

Part of it is that he is just a supernatural kind of being,

that keeps coming back.

You just can't kill the guy.

And I couldn't kill him either.

He-he-he-he.

The never-ending battle

between Jason and the Motion Picture Association of America

continued to make headlines

in the weeks leading up to the film's release.

The ratings board wasn't amused

by the image of Jason

slashing his way through the film's teaser poster

with a bloody knife.

And neither were New York City officials.

I remember some controversy as far as like

with the "I Heart New York" poster.

It did piss off the Tourism Board in New York.

In other news, after New York officials threatened to sue,

Paramount Pictures agreed to remove

the original promotional posters for "Friday the 13th Part 8"

where Jason is slashing through the "I love New York" logo.

As far as like capitalizing on being in New York City,

I think one of the, another way that they did that,

that was really kind of brilliant was the trailer.

They set it up with the skyline

that we all know to be New York City.

You know, Frank Sinatra's playing.

You know, you're thinking it's going to be

some beautiful, sleepy, you know, date movie

and then all of a sudden Jason's ass pops up in there.

Now New York has a new problem.

Even if you are not a genre film fan,

you're just a marketing executive,

that is a home run marketing concept.

And then shortly after we did "Jason Takes Manhattan,"

(I was asked to do "The Arsenic) Hall Show,"

in costume as a guest.

And I walk out, and he pulled the whole interview off

by talking to someone who doesn't speak.

I got some great titles I put together...

Jason and the Three Babies. What you think of that?

(laughter)

Despite its clever ad campaign,

the film opened to scathing reviews

and earned a new series low of $14.3 million.

I don't know if "Friday the 13th Part 8"

was the best episode.

I think the first one was probably the best episode,

in my humble opinion.

But we gave it our best. We really tried.

One of the things is that some of the fans,

it kind of rubbed them the wrong way,

the fact that they went expecting to see

all this slashing and the things that you typically associate

with a "Friday the 13th" movie taking place in New York City,

and, you know, it took place on the boat.

For producer Frank Mancuso, Jr.,

who would go on to produce such films

as "Species," "Ronin" and "Stigmata,"

the time had finally come to hang up the hockey mask

and bid farewell to "Friday the 13th."

The "Friday the 13ths" had a lot of negative connotations

that came along with it from a societal point of view,

and I think that that was very much a concern to me.

And if a kid got shot in a Friday the 13th movie,

it was the movie's fault,

it wasn't the fact that the kid was there with the gun.

You know, so, I can't keep on doing this

because on some level this is going to get to a place

where I can't get away from it.

So I've sort of made a conscious decision not to do it anymore.

I got along so great with Frank and just,

he just had such a great attitude.

And I was just amazed at how much creativity

and certainly insight into what was going to work,

what wasn't going to work,

and how to handle people.

I was lucky enough to be on that ride,

and I appreciate the fans

because as far as I'm concerned,

the fans are what made this movie what it is.

A cultural sort of phenomenon.

And that doesn't happen one way.

That's a two-way street.

They sort of brought a life to it

that it would have never had without them,

without any doubt.

Although Paramount Pictures never officially announced

the end of their association

with the "Friday the 13th" franchise,

after the disappointing box office returns

of JASON TAKES MANHATTAN,

there was little interest in moving forward

with another sequel.

For three years, Jason would lie dormant...

until producer Sean S. Cunningham

decided that the time had come

for the monster to return to his maker.

You know, I was away from FRIDAY THE 13TH

for several years

because they were making the same movie over and over again,

and I'd been associated with it,

but I had moved on to do other things.

I think probably after "Part 8,"

Paramount figured the franchise had gone its run.

The whole reason to come back

was I wanted to do Freddy vs. Jason.

I thought that was going to be so cool,

and it was a way to sort of breathe the life into it.

As it turned out, I was able to get the rights back

from Paramount and Warner Brothers

and set something up at New Line,

but we had to wait for a long time

before we could do FREDDY VS. JASON,

and that's when we wound up doing FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 9.

Paramount kept the rights to FRIDAY THE 13TH

and the other partners had Jason Voorhees,

Which is Why PART 9 is a FINAL FRIDAY,

not FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 9.

With the sequel rights now secured

and New Line Cinema officially on board,

Cunningham turned the director's chair

over to an ambitious young filmmaker

whose passion was matched only by his inexperience.

When I started directing the film I was 23.

And at that point I was the youngest director

New Line had ever hired, and I was a year out of film school.

And I won Best Picture when I was there for the short film

that I had made.

He had just graduated NYU,

had a script written with a friend named Dean Lorey

Called JOHNNY ZOMBIE.

It was a fun little kind of horror comedy

that started getting more and more attention

and eventually became a film called MY BOYFRIEND'S BACK

which was a major production for Disney,

and they didn't want a first-time director helming it.

So Adam kind of got bumped off the project.

Our feeling about Jason

was we can't take it too seriously.

It's got to be fun for us.

And we were huge geek fans.

We loved the series.

And it was like, 'How do we make a movie

that we want to see?'

I think when JASON GOES TO HELL was conceived

it was coming off the ill-reception of PART 8

which was not very positive.

So we tried to kind of change the formula a little bit.

The plot was actually dictated by Sean.

Basically what he said was, 'I want that damn hockey mask

out of the movie.

So whatever you come up with, let's make that movie.'

Rightly or wrongly, maybe Jason needed a little shaking up.

So we decided to go in and mess with the mythology a little bit.

Much like in HALLOWEEN 3.

They just threw out Michael Myers entirely.

Sean wasn't involved with the hockey mask.

That wasn't Sean's movie.

Sean's movie was about a mother

avenging the wrongful death of her son.

So Sean always wanted to kind of go back to themes of family

and those ideas so we were really turned on by that.

He wanted to create a mythology

out of these previous eight films

that really weren't in any way leading to a mythology,

so he had to kind of create it from scratch.

We thought how fun would it be to play with

the audience's expectations and start the movie

by killing Jason.

Incoming!

And once he's been killed,

we started to reveal a more sort of interesting,

or at least from our point of view,

version of the Jason myth

which is that Jason is ostensibly Hell's assassin.

I didn't have a clue as to what the plot was.

And we got this hodge-podge of a script.

There was something about Jason

transferring from body to body to body.

So Jason is not a hockey mask wielding maniac,

even though that's his favorite form,

but that his evil can go from person to person to person.

This was one of the first films where

the idea and the essence of Jason's evil

sort of manifesting itself physically

was really the first time they'd ever done that,

and it was definitely a departure from the other movies.

So it was a bit more of a creature movie

than it was an all-out kind of slasher film.

It's reminiscent of THE HIDDEN

which I hadn't even seen before we wrote JASON.

So we were like, 'Wow. That's coincidental. Uh, oh.'

I was so surprised when I finally saw the film

that it actually made any sense at all.

I think we figured out that the entire crew

was under the age of 25 except for me.

And I went, 'Really?'

And so there was that enthusiasm like, 'Oh, boy!

We're doing a feature film here!

This is so cool!'

I didn't know a damn thing,

and I think about the first day of production

is when I realized, 'Wow! I am so in over my head.'

As JASON GOES TO HELL begins,

a nubile young woman returns to her Crystal Lake cabin

in the dead of the night.

But in an unexpected twist,

it is revealed that Jason's intended victim

is really an FBI agent being used as human bait.

So what's funny about my character, Agent Marcus,

is that she's an FBI agent.

We try to make it like you wouldn't know that.

I mean, why would an FBI agent get naked in this cabin

to lure someone but, hey,

the girl's gotta do what the girl's gotta do.

And I remember Adam like hating my hair.

I'm like, 'Honey, if you're looking at my hair

and not my hooters, what are you doing?'

And we put every cliché

that had ever been in any of the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies

within a 5 minute section.

You'll see the mirror close, and he's not there.

I thought Adam was kind of brilliant

in the way he kind of just spoon fed you.

'Oh, you're okay, you're okay, okay. No, you aren't.

You're fucked.

I was able to bring Kane Hodder back

who had played Jason before, and he was basically

the only holdover that was left from the Paramount years.

It wasn't even a discussion.

It was, 'So who's got Kane Hodder's phone number?'

I really like working with Kane.

He took the part so seriously,

and he knew everything that Jason would or wouldn't do

so it made my job an awful lot easier.

It was probably the hardest makeup to work in,

and the least amount of days that I was in the makeup.

We really wanted to go with a sort of mutated,

diseased look where the head is sort of diseased and misshapen.

A lot more sort of Elephant Man.

The hockey mask had been on Jason so long

that the skin had grown around it in theory.

The hard thing was not being able to take the hockey mask off

between shots.

If you do something violent and, you know,

with a lot of energy, it takes your breath away.

You want to be able to take that thing off

and catch your breath.

I couldn't take it off between shots

so I had to catch my breath

while breathing my own exhaled air.

Not easy to do at all.

He's very method, and that's great for camera,

but boy, when you have to work with him,

it can be very daunting and in one scene,

he almost took my head off.

And I was supposed to run and jump around the car.

I literally jumped over the car because he scared me that bad.

And I remember coming back, and I was shaking.

I was like, 'Don't ever do that again.

Well, maybe one more time. That was kind of good.

Was that good, Adam?'

Jason has been done away with in so many different ways.

I mean, in previous movies, you know, he was set on fire.

Of course, he's shot hundreds of times.

But blown up in JASON GOES TO HELL?

I thought all that could have been done to Jason had been done

but, lo and behold.

There are a lot of Jason fans who to this day are, you know,

pissed off at me for blowing up Jason

in the first ten minutes of the movie.

They love that scene

but then they want Jason right back, right again.

And for me, I thought it was more fun

to have Kane Hodder actually in the film

making fun of Jason.

And he makes this comment about himself

when basically he says

He wasn't nothing but a big ol' pussy anyway.

And I love that. I love that!

Kane was a remarkable asset to the film

because I wanted all the other actors

who play the 'Jason Evil' in the movie

to have that same economy of movement

and that same language.

With not a single teenage character

featured in the script,

Sean Cunningham called upon an experienced ensemble

made up of recognizable faces from network television

including Erin Gray,

Steven Williams and John D. LeMay,

the only actor to play the male lead

in both the film and television incarnations

of FRIDAY THE 13TH.

We cast John D. LeMay because the director, Adam Marcus,

really felt comfortable having him

because he knew him from THE SERIES.

That was the reason I didn't want him to do it.

I married the daughter of Jason's sister.

Who knew?

But I'm happy to know that I am related

to such a cultural icon.

Tracked by mysterious bounty hunter Creighton Duke,

it is revealed that Jason is attempting to be reborn

through a never-before-mentioned relative.

Thirteen years and nine films later,

we learn that Jason Voorhees had a sister.

The reasoning for another child

was that Pamela Voorhees

had had her daughter out of wedlock.

And Jason became sort of the jewel of her eye.

This was the only child she cared about.

She fixated on this boy and sent her daughter up for adoption.

That was the idea behind it.

I was the sister to Jason Voorhees.

They needed somebody who had the DNA,

and I guess it was me and then my daughter, of course,

and my granddaughter.

I played Baby Stephanie in JASON GOES TO HELL.

When I made the film, I was about 6 months old.

I've little to no memory about being in the film

considering I was so young

but when I got a little bit older,

my parents broke the news to me

that I was in a horror film

Here's beautiful

And I wasn't allowed to watch every scene, of course.

But I did watch the scenes that I was in.

I was like, 'Oh my gosh, that's me.'

And it was just a really crazy experience

to be able to watch myself.

I think the actors were amazing,

especially John LeMay and Steven Williams

who was out of his mind and brilliant.

The finger breaking scene was one of my favorites actually.

Jason needs to be reborn again, and he needs Jessica to do it.

Just because it was so weird and twisted.

I mean, here's this guy fondling my fingers.

Ooow! fuck!

Amazingly I was able to still beat Jason up

at the end with my broken hand.

Everything about JASON GOES TO HELL,

especially the scene

between Creighton Duke and Steven Culp.

Robert: I want you to say the first thing

that comes to your mind. Okay?

Creighton: Okay.

Robert: Jason Voorhees.

Creighton: Well, that makes me think of a little girl

in a pink dress sticking a hot dog through a donut.

It was always about,

'How can we crack each other up?'

It was like two guys on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE

trying to get the other guy to laugh.

After an early test screening,

New Line requested that several new sequences be added

to the film,

including one that ranks as one of the most violent

and graphic in the series' history.

I play a camper named Luke who's going camping

with two beautiful ladies.

Luke: We're going to Camp Crystal Lake.

Steven: Oh yeah?

Planning on smoking a little dope,

having a little premarital sex, and getting slaughtered?

The murder of the couple in the tent

was something that we shot after the film had wrapped.

I was petitioning to have both ladies in the tent.

I thought it would be fun. Why not?

And it was one of those sequences

where they felt they needed a really violent kill

that had a lot of impact.

So we started our scene with these kids

who are pretty lit up.

They'd been skinny dipping.

The run into the scene, they go to have sex

and what happens is they choose not to use a condom.

Oh, God, Debbie, I hate these things.

And when the killer steps on that condom wrapper,

on that unused condom,

the audience went out of their minds.

Every screening.

For actress Michelle Clunie,

later known for her role in the groundbreaking television series

QUEER AS FOLK,

the scene put her in a compromising situation...

In more ways than one.

Michelle and he had been dating and had broken up

right before we shot that scene.

And then we showed up on set and there we were,

naked together for a couple days.

So she had to do this huge love scene

with her ex-boyfriend, and they were both completely nude.

You're on a mattress on the floor,

inside a fake tent with all these guys around,

and you've got to sort of create some sort of chemistry,

some sort of intimacy between you

which doesn't feel natural at all.

And then when they finally kill her,

they put this fake Clunie on top of me.

Michelle came up to K.N.B.,

and we actually cast her in that position.

She's on top of the guy and they're having sex,

and, all of a sudden, out of the middle of her chest,

the road sign pops out and blood sprays everywhere.

(screams)

Oh shit!

And then it's torn through her shoulder blade

where she flops open.

And it was the second dummy that had been already pre-cut

with the torso cut in half,

and it had a little mechanism in it

so that it could sort of flower open.

And they're spraying blood at me with a fire extinguisher,

I remember.

It's a little sad that today that probably would have been

a digital shot of the thing coming out,

and they would have animated it.

Richard Gant who was playing Jason

was supposed to at some point crush my head.

And I think that they ran out of time and money,

and they, and so they didn't build a cast of my head.

And they cut out right as his head's coming down, I think,

and they cut to an exterior of,

and we hear me screaming and then crush.

[Off screen screaming]

Unsafe sex equals death, I was totally cool with.

What was amazing about that

was that the Wall Street Journal,

when they talked about JASON GOES TO HELL,

they called the film a return to morality in cinema

because of that scene.

The thing about Adam Marcus was he was really behind,

100% behind shooting every gag to its fullest.

[sounds of sharpening blade]

The reason for the homoerotic shaving scene

in JASON GOES TO HELL was that I knew 15 years later

everybody would be asking me

about the homoerotic shaving scene in JASON GOES TO HELL.

Again, I found these movies to be really pretty sexist.

It's always women in the shower

soaping up just before they get whacked.

And I thought, 'You know what?

I'm going to make the first one of these

where there's as many naked men as there are naked women.

Let's even the score. Something for the ladies.

Not only is it homoerotic,

but I have a middle-aged guy naked on the table.

I don't have Brad Pitt on the table.

I have an interracial kiss at the end of the scene.

I mean, everything about it was a taboo.

There's not a scene like it in any other Jason movie

or really in any other movie I can think of.

I don't know if that's good or bad but

Filming my death scene was lots of fun.

I remember in acting class,

I was good at being dead,

so I was able to bring that to FRIDAY THE 13TH.

And it was kind of fun going to work with a knife in my back

and pretending... l've been killed.

[screaming]

In Joey B's restaurant,

the carnage was fabulous.

Bodies everywhere.

It was really bloody and violent.

I just loved watching Rusty work.

She was great at improving...

This makes a whole new patty, hence,

the two-for-one burger sale.

And every time she was in a scene,

I was just mesmerized by her.

When I have my gun on John and Kari

defending the baby, the line was

'Nobody's going to touch that baby, '

but I decided to say...

Nobody's gonna touch that fuckin' ray of sunshine!

In Rusty Schwimmer's case,

she got punched in the face.

Poor Leslie. He got dumped in a fry vat.

And I know from friends that there was a big cheer

that let up when I was punched in the face

because they wanted me to shut up.

In an attempt to finally subvert the MPAA,

the filmmakers planned to release JASON GOES TO HELL

as both an R-rated theatrical cut

and an unrated home video version.

This allowed the K.N.B. Effects team

the freedom to create some of the bloodiest

and most over-the-top gags ever attempted

in a FRIDAY THE 13TH film.

As a horror film back then,

you always went in pretty gore-heavy

expecting to be cut back.

I think that the whole point was,

throw all that stuff in there

and then go to the ratings board,

and if we can't get it, then we'll do the unrated version

and give the audience what they want.

Eventually, of course,

the evil gets back into the body of a Voorhees.

Steven: That part about being reborn

through a Voorhees woman, does it have to be a living woman?

Duke: No.

Steven: That thing's in the basement with Jessica's mother.

And Jason is reborn into his hulking magnificent form.

Jason's rebirth may have thrilled fans,

but it did not sit as well with actress Erin Gray,

who was not present when an insert shot

was added to the film at the last minute.

The first time that I was made aware of this scene

was actually in the movie theater

when I saw it, and I gasped loudly.

I just thought it was inappropriate.

It was not something that I would have agreed to.

I actually felt violated.

It's the one thing in any scene,

in any movie that I've done

that I just find very distasteful,

although I've forgiven Sean since.

I do love Sean personally.

The truth is, what I was trying to do

was use Jason, the figure of Jason,

as almost a prize for the audience.

Duke: Tonight, my friend...

You will...

Steven: Jessica! Duke: Die!

[bone snapping]

Bringing him back at the end,

I wanted it to feel like your friend came back into the movie.

John's character took a tremendous amount of abuse.

We had a helluva fight out in the front of the house.

I did put up a pretty good fight.

I take great pride in my backhand to Jason

at the very end of the film.

And, by the way, you might not know this.

I'm Jason.

All of Jason's vocals, that's me.

Because I work cheap.

Kari's character was fairly tough too.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to fight her

as much as I would like,

but we still had some good scenes

where she stabbed me with the knife and everything.

Interestingly enough, at the end of the movie,

it was always scripted as a big, lightning-filled climax

with the skies opening up and all this celestial activity.

K.N.B. had a very elaborate sequence

designed for that with all kinds of puppets,

and we had a very elaborate miniature

which wound up not being used because of technical problems.

These branches or these roots of these trees

were supposed to suck Jason down into hell.

And we were all underneath the table puppetering these things.

And they were going to do these aerial shots

and big camera moves going around the two of us

as we squared off.

Originally there was one extra creature at the end

which was a demon baby

that they had, I believe, an amputee in a prosthetic suit

that had a big long tail and

ultimately that wound up being excised.

This is my doll that Bob Kurtzman gave me

after the shoot.

They didn't use it so yeah, a little keepsake for me.

But there was one parting shot yet to come.

One that would set the stage

for Jason's long-anticipated face-off

with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET'S Freddy Krueger.

I suddenly said, 'Wait a second.

We've got a chance for the ultimate in-joke in this movie.

We're with New Line.

New Line owns Freddy.

'What are we doing?

Like, that's the end of our movie.'

And they fell in love with the idea.

I mean, it was like instantly, 'Oh my God, that's great.'

In the end where Freddy's hand comes out of the ground

and grabs the hockey mask,

it was my hand wearing the Freddy glove,

grabbing the mask.

And this is your final chance... to see it!

JASON GOES TO HELL THE FINAL FRIDAY

opened on Friday, August 13, 1993

to a respectable $7.5 million in its opening weekend.

To this day, JASON GOES TO HELL

remains one of the most hotly-debated installments

of the series.

And once again, THE FINAL FRIDAY wasn't final after all.

We were trying to do something different.

Some people really like it for that and forgive its faults.

Other people only see it for its faults and, you know,

say there should be all Jason all the time.

Jason has to be in the film.

I think that was one of the biggest let-down for the fans.

It's possible that the concept jumped the shark on some level.

At the time they were trying to reinvent and figure out

how to keep the franchise going,

and how to keep people interested.

So I respect that.

I think we did something that was bold.

I know there are people who are upset by that,

but my response to that has always been, 'You know what?

There are 7 of those movies you can rent.

You can see a whole lot of Jason in the hockey mask.'

You have to deliver a certain story,

and that story had better be consistent

with the ones that preceded it,

and Jason better be consistent with what happened beforehand.

So this is not a place where you want to say,

'l've got an idea.

Let's have Jason do body swapping.'

Not so good.

The Jason audience is a smart audience.

Not just about Jason movies,

which they will quote you chapter and verse.

They know more about my movie than I know about it.

The truth is, true horror fans

know every genre of cinema,

they just happen to know horror better than anything else.

Yes, are they going to blog incessantly

about the color of someone's suit? Sure.

But ultimately, for me,

every time I see somebody blogging

about JASON GOES TO HELL or about, quite frankly,

about any of the FRIDAY THE 13TH films,

I feel really lucky that they care enough

to actually spend the time and energy

talking about this character.

For me, I really learned to always respect every audience.

And I think that's probably the most important thing I learned

from Jason.

Following the crowd-pleasing coda of JASON GOES TO HELL,

it appeared that the long-anticipated showdown

between Jason and Freddy

was finally about to become a reality.

But as the project remained stalled at New Line Cinema

throughout the 1990s,

Sean Cunningham decided to give fans one more FRIDAY.

We had been in development hell

on FREDDY VS. JASON for years,

and finally Jim Isaac,

who's the director of JASON X, said, 'Well,

if we're just waiting on FREDDY/JASON,

let's just make another Jason film.'

So Todd Farmer, Jimmy and I sat down

and just started coming up with ideas for a new Jason.

We didn't want to do anything that was going to screw

FREDDY VS. JASON.

So the way to stay away from that was to push him

into the future.

I mean, that was just kind of thrown out as kind of

like a gag at first

because that's, you know, that's where horror films go to die,

like LEPRECHAUN or HELLRAISER, l guess.

You know, space is kind of the final frontier.

Armed with a budget of $13 million,

Isaac took his team to Toronto

and set out to make the most ambitious FRIDAY THE 13TH yet.

JASON X takes place 400 years in the future.

Jason has been captured by the military,

and they really don't know what to do with him.

There's somebody in charge of the operation

who thinks that he should be rozen.

The high ranking official comes in, played by David Cronenberg,

and says, 'No, we're not going to freeze him today as planned.

We're going to take him away and study him.'

His unique ability

to regenerate lost and damaged tissue,

it just cries out for more research.

David Cronenberg supplied a lot of his own crew

for Jim Isaac.

Our first AD was, you know, David's AD.

Stephan Dupris, who I've worked for years

Who did NAKED LUNCH.

He's got an Academy Award for THE FLY

and a lot of David Cronenberg films.

He's an amazing makeup effects artist.

The rumor going around set was Cronenberg

wanted to be in the movie only if he got killed on camera.

That was the deal.

They dropped their guard a bit and, of course,

Jason gets free and creates havoc

but ends up getting frozen anyway.

In the future, earth has been completely destroyed.

It's a wasteland.

And a group of science students, kind of loser kids,

go on this field trip.

We arrive doing some archeology

and discover a frozen Jason Voorhees,

and we don't know what trouble we're in for,

but of course the audience does.

Really it came down to, you know,

kids basically having sex or drugs are going to die.

Even four hundred years in the future,

neither Jason, nor his appetite for sex-crazed victims,

has evolved.

I think in the future maybe teenagers

are a little more sexual.

Of course, some wonderful devices that I get to use

for such things as nipple tweaking.

So, yeah, it's all in there.

It's all in the curriculum.

The easiest, most fun work you can get as an actor

because you're basically just running from a monster

until he catches up with you and kills you

and hopefully you get to make outwith a hot chick

along the way.

Which is one of the things that somehow

manages to sort of stir Jason's soul and re-awaken him.

Certainly the way it's edited, it kind of implies that,

that it was just too much for him to take,

and he just had to rise up and put a stop

to all this crazy teenage love.

One of the important things in a Jason FRIDAY THE 13TH film

is to be true to Jason's character.

I think that's where Kane comes in.

My first impression of the script of JASON X was like,

'I don't know. Jason in space?'

I didn't want to make it hokey.

He took it seriously.

He took playing Jason very, very seriously.

Even though the location and everything,

all the surroundings, were different,

I just tried to keep him the same

as I had always done before and I guess, you know,

it worked out.

He definitely made sure that we were all kind of a little bit,

sort of like intimidated by him.

I think he had a tattoo that said 'Kill' in his lower lip.

I think he definitely goes to a dark place

when he plays the role.

He was also very safe when we were, you know,

when we were struggling.

He made sure that we worked out how he was going to hold me

so that I could fight without actually getting hurt.

I did my own stunt when he threw me against the window.

Which I thought was great because, you know,

sticking a girl's head in cryogenic fluid

and smashed it on the counter. Very creative.

I had to plunge my face into water and scream

and then hold my breath and just wait

because then they ended up putting, you know,

all the CGI over the top.

Technically our most difficult kill.

And we spent a lot of time on that, prepping it.

I think they made 10 heads,

but it was really, really creepy.

All these heads lined up of, you know, me screaming.

L've never seen a crew and a cast gather for an event

just to watch that effect.

Everybody just thought that was a great one.

We knew from way back then that that was going to be a good kill

and it stands the test of time.

Apparently MYTHBUSTERS a few years ago tested my death

to see if they could actually freeze a head in liquid nitrogen

and then smash it.

Guy: Absolutely nothing like the movie.

Girl: So I guess this one's busted.

Originally in the script

my death scene was going to be that he was going to somehow

use the sliding doors to cut me in half,

and I was really stoked about that happening.

I was really looking forward to them doing that.

And then I guess they thought it would be a little too difficult

to do and so they switched it to the machete blade.

Melanie's reaction to me being killed,

they squirt out my blood.

It shoots up and hits her right in the eyes,

and she just freaks out because it wasn't actually

supposed to go in her eyes like that,

and I think that's the shot they ended up using,

so I kind of get a chuckle when I watch that scene.

JASON X has some good kills, I think.

I think we did a pretty good job of that.

You had different elements as well.

You had this sort of super SWAT team

that was out to get Jason.

You had hologram games.

I thought this was an alien sim?

Yeah, it is.

This was my tiny cameo in JASON X,

and I get the privilege, myself and Dov get the privilege

of saying that we died twice in a Jason movie

because we die in the virtual reality scene

where I get my head cut off.

OK, screw this. Game over!

And then later I get my head smashed into a wall

where my stuntman lovingly broke his nose for me.

I really liked Jonathan, the guy who plays the teacher.

We're gonna be safe here.

[Screams]

Shut up!

He's just such a sleaze ball, you know,

and he's always making the wrong choices and, you know,

he basically endangers everybody.

Jason's coming at him,

and he doesn't know what's going on,

and he grabs his machete and so he says,

Guys. lt's okay. He just wanted his machete back.

[Makes slashing sound]

We didn't know how I was going to die initially.

I'm asking everyone,

'How do I get it?'

So they said, 'Ah, we're going to cut your head off.'

Came back later and they said, 'We changed our mind.

He's going to grab you,

and he's going to slam your head into an electronic box.'

I leapt up going 'Holy fuck, that's hot.'

The thing about JASON X which, you know,

we didn't really think about

was that this took place in the future

so every single thing on frame had to be built.

It had to be created.

It had to be designed and fabricated.

The future was a lot more colorful

than I thought it would be.

It was beautiful, but it was beautiful in the way

that BATMAN 3 was beautiful in that, you know,

there was lots of color and lots of neon

and just not what I was expecting.

You know, what I was expecting was THE DARK KNIGHT.

We had something like, I don't know, 800 visual effects

in the film.

Sometimes you're acting with a tennis ball

on the end of a stick.

I was very new to it.

Given the fact that we were trying to pull off

a lot of technical things,

it was pretty smooth.

We had one shot that was outside

which just made the shoot very easy

because we were on stage every single day.

Following the release of Wes Craven's 1996 mega-hit SCREAM,

'slick, smart and self-referential'

became the hottest buzzwords in horror,

and JASON X was no exception.

No wonder you wore this thing.

My only issue really was that,

as we got closer into shooting, the script got changed.

It was one of the sort of post-SCREAM films.

And suddenly all the studio notes were

'this needs to be more like SCREAM.'

So it was a movie that had to acknowledge

that the movie-going audience, we knew all the cliches.

Now what?

Now basically... we die.

At one point, Lewis Abernathy, who had written DEEPSTAR SIX

and had been doing some work with Cameron,

he was also in TITANIC.

He was the frizzy-haired guy telling the story

about how the Titanic went down.

He came in just as a fresh set of eyes.

I think they went through and polished a lot of the dialogue

and it maybe made it a less ALIENS

and a little more campy.

Aw, shit, I forgot my arm.

Yeah, here you go, dumb-ass.

Hi, hand.

Some people thought it was a great idea and fun.

Other people thought, 'Oh, no.

We should go back to basics.'

If a rusted machete would no longer cut it

for Jason in the 24th century,

his opponents also had to be tougher, stronger

and more resilient than ever before.

Both good and evil needed an upgrade.

The women in FRIDAY THE 13TH movies

are always the strong, you know,

the strong characters,

and we wanted to be true to that.

But being in the future,

we wanted to take advantage of that as well

so Todd and I came up with this idea of this robot.

And this is the lovely Kay-Em 14,

Tsunaron's little 'love-bot.'

I actually took this character seriously.

I wanted to not just be android-like,

completely robotic.

And so Jim and I talked about

what would be some kind of templates

that we could work with,

and he actually mentioned STEPFORD WIVES.

There's some strength in that

in terms of being completely unflappable

and delighted at, 'Oh, what are you doing now?

You've taken my head off. No worries.'

I'd clap if I could.

There's a scene in JASON X

where the robot Kay-Em wants to get fake boobs.

- What do you think? - Hmm?

- Do you like them? - They're fine.

And the boobs are not Lisa Ryder's boobs.

It's a prosthetic that goes over it

and then they have these fake nipples,

and they were attached to wires.

[clinking sounds, Tsunaron grumbles]

To this day, still, when people mention that movie

they are like, 'Oh, I love that fake boob scene.'

A giant challenge was my costume.

My costume was completely head-to-toe PVC

and corseted at the back.

It was hard to breath.

I think I lost like 10 pounds just sweating through that,

you know, PVC costume.

We wanted her to be the one that kills off Jason.

So it was just - it was just a way to have some fun with it.

There was a lot of gymnastics.

Just a lot of kung fu really.

Jason got shot so many times during that movie.

The wardrobe was changing every day, you know.

Here's the one that has 15 bullet holes.

Now this next scene you're going to have 45 bullet holes.

She shot off his arm, shot off his leg,

and then shot his head, and it exploded.

Yeah.

And that's when we felt that he had died.

We really wanted to play with the technology,

with taking advantage of the fact

that we're 400 years in the future,

and then we tossed around ideas

of what kind of technology might be forefront

and nanotechnology, I thought, was the obvious choice.

So we've got Uber-Jason.

So this is Jason 100 times better

than Jason has ever been before in the future.

The makeup was very easy to work in

until we got to Uber-Jason.

That was an entire one-piece suit.

It limited my motion a lot with the arm and the leg

that had the metallic pieces.

I couldn't bend at the joints as much as I was used to.

I still love the design of that Uber-Jason mask.

Then you get the red contact lenses.

Crew people didn't even want to look at me in the eyes

because it was so weird looking.

Because even though you've got the same character,

it's doing something different.

Jim lsaac's son brought his class in and, you know,

of course, I scared the hell out of them,

and, you know, kid went into a fetal position, one of them.

I guess I'm a little cruel but I gotta have some fun too.

Bar none, I mean, you can't put the guy down.

I mean he literally is indestructible in that sense.

Much to Kay-Em's sadness

because then he knocked my head off.

You guys might want to run.

Our big plan to use our robot has gone awry

so we've got this rolling robot head

that Tsunaron is in love with.

He's holding it, and he's gone crazy.

He's lost his mind, and he's holding the robot head.

We've got Waylander

who's sacrificing himself to save the day

and blows up the hull.

One of the things that's interesting about the film

is my death is sort of indirectly caused by Jason.

Jason has punched a hole from outside

into the spaceship and, of course,

when he pulls out his hand, it creates this enormous vacuum.

We're all trying to run away and poor little Janessa

just isn't strong enough or fast enough

to get away before the suction starts.

This sucks on so many levels!

Janessa has the best witticisms.

Want a beer?

Or do you want to smoke some pot?

Or we can have pre-marital sex.

The most successful scene in that movie

was the sort of hyper-reality of Jason on the spaceship,

you know, pummeling the naked campers in the sleeping bag.

You know, it's a love letter to all the other movies

because that's what they were at one point.

It was just innocent and fun.

Originally I wanted Uber-Jason

to pick up the girls in the sleeping bags

and swirl them around like this

and then hit them in the air and then throw them down.

We were running out of time and money by then.

It was the end of the show

and that would involve a lot of rigging to do that

or a little CGI stuff, so we adapted it a little bit,

which I think actually worked out even better.

The weightless environment scene

with Jason fighting another guy concerned me from the beginning.

I thought Jason might look a little comical

floating around weightless even if he's fighting

so we were able to limit that a little bit.

One way to find a weakness

because it's pretty hard to find a weakness for Jason.

Tsunaron and the Rowan character

escaped ultimately into a pod,

and they saw Brodski ride Jason off into the sunset

kind of thing.

And it was basically my head, Tsunaron and Rowan who survived.

During the year-long production of JASON X, Michael DeLuca,

New Line Cinema's president of production,

made a much-publicized exit from the studio,

and with him would go the film's biggest champion.

With virtually no support for the film at New Line,

JASON X would be left adrift in space for over two years.

You know, it just kind of sat there.

It was the redheaded stepchild for almost 18 months

um... and during which time actually

a print got leaked out on the Internet.

And I know for a couple months,

we were the most pirated movie out there.

By the time JASON X was released in April 2002,

it failed to ignite even a modest spark at the box office,

and is regarded by both critics and fans

as an interstellar dud.

When it finally did come out, you know,

a lot of the buzz that had been going on on the Internet

had kind of died down,

and whether it was deserved or not,

I think there was a bad smell to it,

and it just didn't perform as well as it could have.

There's lots of things I'd like to do differently.

I mean, I don't think there's anybody

who's sort of directed a film or, you know,

made a drawing or sculpted an ashtray or whatever,

I mean, I think you always look at it and go,

I could have done it a little bit differently.'

I don't think anyone's ever going to be happy

with the way it turned out.

Yeah, I wish it had been a little bit darker,

a little bit edgier.

You want to make the best movie you can make,

and I feel like because we were all going

in different directions, we didn't make the best movie

we could make.

And, you know, I know that people love or hate it,

but it could have been better.

I think the movie does suck on a lot of levels,

and I think that's part of its appeal.

One of the things I love the most about JASON X

is that it's not embarrassed to be JASON X.

We watched the movie. Everybody had a good time.

It was a packed house,

and we were walking out and there were these girls,

and they were like, 'Oh. You're in the movie,

you're in the movie.'

And one of my buddies said, 'Hey, you want his autograph?'

and the girl went, 'Nah..

I went right from doing JASON X to a TV show called ANDROMEDA

which the parallels were astonishing.

Lexa Doig and I both were in both.

It marked my, you know, the beginning of six years in space.

I look back now and I realize how lucky I was.

Of course, I was complaining,

and I thought my career was over

as I would see what was becoming of it but, you know,

it was what it was.

There have been an absolute tremendous number of spin-offs

for comic books, novels, all that sort of stuff.

I think with the JASON X franchise,

I think you can continue telling those stories

in the future.

And, again, look, even those movies,

if you really love the series, they have their merits.

I mean, we all sit and watch these things

when they play the marathon on Spike

or whatever channel they're on every year,

and there's no question, if it's a Friday the 13th,

we're going to go check cable

because you know a couple of them are going to be on.

And no matter what they are

or how ridiculous they might be at times,

I'm going to sit and watch them.

And probably enjoy them at an unhealthy level.

I think in general I should have fought a little harder

for the script that I fell in love with originally.

You know, that's your job as a director

is to fight for what you think is right

and that sometimes is difficult

when you're under the gun, time, money and all that.

But, I mean, as far as it being crazy and fun and different,

Pm pretty happy with it.

But really I think at the end of the day,

it got Jason back out there again,

gave the little push forward that FREDDY/JASON

needed to really take off

and get us back to where we are right now.

Ever since the idea

for a pairing of FRIDAY THE 13THs Jason

with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET'S Freddy

was first suggested in the late 1980s,

fans had been anticipating the ultimate showdown

between the two horror icons.

It was funny because when we finished our FRIDAY,

it started to go around that,

what about bringing Freddy into the series, you know,

and actually have a FREDDY VS. JASON.

The kids had been talking about it.

Whether it's letters to the editor in Fango

or at conventions or in fan clubs,

they'd been talking about Freddy and Michael Myers,

Freddy and Jason,

Jason and Michael Myers.

You know, who would win?

There was always the talk that Freddy and Jason

would somehow be combined,

and I think the ownership of those two properties,

of Freddy and of Jason,

kind of mish-mashed around various studios

and ended up finally at the same place.

Then after JASON X,

they started seriously talking about it,

saying they were going to have a script done,

and, you know,

then it was definitely a real project

and appeared to be the very next one to be done.

And you've got to remember even,

almost a decade in front of that

when you look at JASON GOES TO HELL,

it had been set up, it was clear it was coming.

And our idea was Jason was Hell's assassin,

so Freddy is the other assassin,

and both of them had just been killed.

So now these guys are both in hell,

and the devil proposes a contest to these two guys,

which is, I'm sending you both up.

Whoever brings me the most souls in this given time slot,

you're the winner and you get to stay up there as my assassin.

The other one is gone forever.

So that was sort of our idea for Freddy vs. Jason

back in the day.

But New Line had, you know,

no interest in giving, you know, the rights over

and Paramount was not going to go the other direction.

And it took a long time for Paramount

to finally lose their option.

They wanted to distribute the film.

So it was a combination of things.

I got the first draft of FREDDY VS. JASON

when I was a freshman in high school in 1994.

I bought it for $15 at the Motor City Comicon in Detroit,

and I remember pledging right then and there,

'I need to get to New Line, I need to get to LA

before they make this movie,

or I'm never going to forgive myself.'

And I made it my goal.

I dropped out of college

specifically to be able to get there in time

to make FREDDY VS. JASON.

And credit to Jeff Katz because, you know,

you've got to be kind of a dog with a bone

on these things.

There's so much... not just on FREDDY VS. JASON,

on every kind of movie,

it's always easier at a million different stages

just to say no.

But after more than a decade in the works,

and millions of dollars

spent on some of Hollywood's most sought-after

screenwriters and directors,

it seemed that Freddy and Jason

might forever be trapped in Development Hell.

They had gotten Rob Bottin attached.

Rob Bottin was a huge special effects makeup guy.

You know, he'd worked on Carpenter's remake of THE THING.

And Rob Bottin was going to make his directing debut

with this project.

And so it incubated and then there were scripts

and scripts and scripts.

I think there were 13, 14, 15 writers on that script.

There were so many different specific takes

and so many different, you know,

versions of that movie from beginning to end.

The first draft I ever read was the Peter Briggs draft

which was actually taking very good care of continuity

to where Alice the Dream Master was in it,

the Freemans from JASON GOES TO HELL were in it.

It was about the kids and the families coming together

ultimately to stop them.

They didn't like the script, and they didn't like the director.

Then they didn't like the script.

Because Freddy Krueger's origin

was that Freddy was a child killer,

a child molester.

He had actually molested Jason and actually drowned Jason

so that Jason wouldn't tell anybody what had happened.

You had another series of scripts

where I believe the character's name was Dominic Necros

if I get this, if I remember correctly.

It seems to me that a third of this movie

needs to be about Freddy, a third needs to be about Jason,

and a third needs to be about a new character.

So I created the head of a cult of Freddy fanatics

who were called Fred Heads.

But it was really, just look, it's Freddy and Jason.

They're the stars of the show.

I certainly wouldn't buy a ticket to a movie

Called FREDDY VS. JASON

to go spend the bulk of my time with a guy named Dominic Necros.

I didn't buy a ticket with his name in the title.

In our version they find Jason's grave

at the Crystal Lake Cemetery,

and there's a headstone that says Jason Voorhees, you know,

born 1958, died 1963, and that was crossed off,

1978 and that was crossed off, 1981 was crossed off,

1982, 1983, and there were like 20 dates on there

of like all the times he had died.

So that's probably a documentary all unto itself.

It's all of the writers and all of the drafts.

Ultimately, a young screenwriting duo

came up with a take that would pit the two terror titans

against each other while remaining true

to the established histories of both franchises.

The writers lobbied hard not only for the assignment,

but also to put the project back

on the studio's fast track.

When Freddy's glove comes out of the ground

and pulls the mask in, and we asked ourselves,

'What does that mean?

Why is Freddy grabbing his mask?

Why is he pulling it down?

Does he need him for something?'

And that's kind of the seed that kind of grew

into FREDDY VS. JASON.

Our angle was we started by saying here are the things

that you should not do and then we went backwards.

And then we sort of got them to understand

what this movie could be, you know what I mean,

and then got them excited about it.

Those guys ultimately,

because they grew up as fans of both these franchises, got it.

I think if you ask most of the fans,

I want to see Freddy as I know him and love him best,

Jason as I know and love him best

and just let these two sort of forces of nature

go head-to-head and ultimately,

thankfully, we ended up in that place.

While Sean Cunningham undeniably

retained creative control of all things Jason,

the same could not be said for Wes Craven,

the mastermind behind

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET'S Freddy Krueger.

I never really had any participation

after NEW NIGHTMARE.

That was kind of the end of it for me.

Wes also had moved on to other things,

the SCREAM franchise and everything,

so he really didn't really care too much

about FREDDY VS. JASON.

Outside of Wes, who's certainly being paid every time

the character is used, getting his credit and all of that,

it wasn't a case where Wes could actually control,

I don't want Freddy to do that,

that wasn't a possibility,

whereas in Jason's case, Sean has that ability.

When it finally got together,

we had trouble finding a director too.

They met with probably 40 directors.

They met with every director you could think of

on this project

because a lot of guys wanted to do it.

We went to one of the executives and said,

'You should really think about this guy Ronny Yu'

because we were big fans of BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR.

New Line agreed to meet with the action director

from Hong Kong,

who had recently brought another American horror franchise

back from the dead with BRIDE OF CHUCKY.

That first meeting, my intention

really was to go in to tell Bob

that I don't want to do the movie.

He's been getting, like, directors,

tons of directors,

like saying they grew up with these two franchise,

and they're crazy about this

and then there come this Chinaman comes in

and tell them that, you know,

he doesn't care about the franchise

but he knows how to make an entertainment movie.

So he said this is what he want.

We wants somebody come in with a different angle.

He had never seen a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie

or a NIGHTMARE movie...

and that seemed like a very odd choice for me,

for a director to direct the most important one

of each franchise.

You know, at this point we were looking for journeymen.

I liked the guy's cultural influences,

and he was also a nice guy

that I felt like I could get along with.

Just that little outside-ness that Ronny Yu brought to it,

being a Hong Kong director,

I think really, really helped it.

Don't take it too seriously.

You know, have fun with the monster.

This is what I learned when I was making BRIDE OF CHUCKY.

Chucky: What would Martha Stewart say?

Tiffany: Fuck Martha Stewart!

It was never a question in the minds of genre fans

that Kane Hodder, who had already played Jason four times,

would be back for FREDDY VS. JASON.

But as pre-production began,

rumors began to circulate that Hodder was out of the running.

I had planned, in my own mind, I guess,

for years to do that movie.

I thought they had planned for me to do it as well.

In that fan boy base there was a dispute

as to whether or not Kane Hodder

was going to be as good as some other Jason might be,

and frankly I never thought of anybody else playing the part.

I really was excited about doing it.

Got the script.

Then the director was hired

and things started changing, and I wasn't sure why.

Before I'm onboard,

already the studio decided that they wanted a new Jason.

The decision not to use Kane Hodder

really had nothing to do with Ronny.

Ronny said from day one,

'If you guys want Kane Hodder, I don't care.'

But one of the executives at New Line said, 'No.

Let's go a different way.'

In terms of Jason, I certainly personally point

to parts 3, 4 and 6 really at the end of the day.

Tall, lanky, clean mask.

And I think that there was an attitude

that when you shot them side-by-side,

one had to look like a sort of force of nature,

a tank, that being Jason.

You know, I think it was just the stigma

of all of the Jasons that led up to what we were doing.

They'd all been sort of, you know, forgive me,

but a little cheesy and not too expensive to make.

And I think New Line, when they decided to make this movie,

decided they wanted to do something different.

And different just didn't mean Kane Hodder,

it meant everything.

I says fine, you know.

This is their call, and I'm fine with it.

I always did feel kind of bad that, I had been, you know,

pushing for this whole match-up in interviews for 16 years

in playing Jason

and then not be allowed to do it.

And a lot of people were unhappy and still are.

And, you know, part of me really wishes

that, you know, those fans had been able to see

that dream that they were always looking for,

which was Robert and Kane.

And unfortunately that didn't happen.

But, you know, this is showbiz

and apparently we're all replaceable.

I get the issue on this one,

but I also sort of know the larger movie business,

and the way things go.

It was going to happen at some point.

I would say to you at the end of the day,

do I really think it affected box office? I really don't.

You know, it was going to be a success no matter what

just because people wanted to see the two characters together,

and I just, I really wish I had been able to do it.

The producers' search for a new Jason

led them to a six-foot-seven Canadian stuntman

who had donned Jason's trademark hockey mask once before.

This time, however,

not only would Jason have to convincingly swing his machete,

he would have to show

that even an unstoppable force of nature could have feelings.

One of the people that we'd seen early on

was a big-time stunt player in Vancouver named Ken Kirzinger.

Jeff Katz who was at New Line

so passionately wanted to cast Ken Kirzinger as Jason.

He just thought he would bring something special.

Something in the eyes he saw different or better.

As it was put to me when I auditioned for it,

is they wanted to convey some emotion in Jason.

Actually he had been a stunt double of Kane Hodder, I think,

on one of the Jason films.

In JASON TAKES MANHATTAN

there was a shot where Jason gets hit by a police car

and since Ken Kirzinger was doing the stunts

on the show too, he doubled me for that shot.

That was a question that I put to them at the beginning.

Like, you know,

because Kane had sort of established the character,

did they want some of the trademark moves

that Kane does, you know, the deep breath and stuff,

and they didn't.

They really wanted a more unique character

and Ronny Yu and I had some discussions about, you know,

movement and the fact that they wanted to do

a lot of close-ups on the eyes.

He was big enough. His attitude was good.

He looked good in the wardrobe. So we cast him.

I was a little leery because a lot of the feedback I, you know,

that fans were putting out there was negative, I think,

in the beginning.

But then when the movie came out,

it became very, very positive.

Jason was not the only role to be recast.

Once again, the script called for the return

of Jason's maniacal mother.

We literally underlined cameo, and we wrote in the script

Betsy Palmer.

I believe they contacted Betsy Palmer,

and she was not interested.

I was asked three times to be in three different pictures

of FRIDAY THE 13TH,

and I declined each time.

First of all, they didn't want to pay any money.

They probably said, 'Hey, we'll give you a plane flight

and a sandwich, and she was like,

'Well, everybody else is getting paid.'

In the script they had me standing in a graveyard,

I guess, and saying, you know,

'You promised me you'd kill all those people.'

Mommy has something she wants you to do!

I mean, what sort of lines are that?

That's nothing for an actress to do, for God's sake.

Make them remember what fear tastes like!

Jason finally appears after his mother says like,

'Wake up. Go get these people.'

And then he somehow, finds my house.

I live in the house that Freddy has, you know,

tortured people for years,

and then Jason shows up out of nowhere.

Surprisingly the bed death was not initially popular

when it was in the script.

We thought it was one of the highlights of the script,

but, you know,

that was something that they wanted us to take out.

Whoa, babe.

I told you about kissing me after you smoked.

He wasn't a very nice guy.

He used to yell at my friend Gibb a lot,

played by Katherine Isabelle.

You know I don't like to be touched after, okay?

Just mouthing off and Jason literally

just snapped his mouth and his body shut.

[screams]

[giggles]

You know, and then they said, 'Well, it's too brutal,

it's too gory, it's too this, it's too that,

and then we just kept saying,

'Listen, this is not something you want to cut.'

That was actually the last day of photography.

It was the last thing we shot.

When we went to the first test screening, and that, you know,

the audience really loved the movie

and that got the biggest reaction

and you really couldn't hear any of the dialogue,

like in the previous scene,

because people were still cheering.

It was really satisfying.

To be drowned in a lake, already have deformity,

be insecure about it,

and have to watch your mother's head get cut off,

I think the fact that he just is killing people isn't that bad.

With Freddy using Jason as his pawn

to stalk the kids of Elm Street,

a cornfield rave sets the stage

for one of the film's biggest and bloodiest set pieces.

The cornfield massacre is one of my favorite one.

I loved the burning Jason, you know,

going after the kids with a machete.

That was, that was the most difficult sequence in the movie

without question.

First of all, it smelled to high heaven

because it was actually like the cow field

and just the smell of the manure or whatever

was horrible.

I think there were like 400 or 500 extras in that scene.

Those kids that were smoking pot said

Why don't you go find yourself a pig to fuck?

And they called him a corn poke.

And that's when he just breaks his neck,

and, I don't know, once again he felt like ostracized

and like he didn't fit in.

Maybe he was just there to party.

I don't know.

Burn, motherfucker!

But shooting that sequence is really tough

because lighting fire in a dry cornfield

is the most dangerous request.

When they gave me the part of Jason,

they made a point of telling me,

'Ken, you're an actor on this movie.

We're going to have a stunt double for you.

You know, we don't want you getting hurt.'

And I went to them and I said, 'Listen, you know,

there's one stunt I really, really want to do in the movie,

and that's the fire burn in the cornfield.'

Very, very dangerous because you could only,

an actor or stunt actor could only be in a burn suit

and burn for 30 seconds maximum.

And they wouldn't let me do it.

And I was really disappointed

because that should have won the stuntman's awards that year.

You know, the big top shot of seeing this burning,

burning figure just running,

running across the cornfield

creating a path, for me, that visual, that image is,

I thought is fantastic.

It took forever for them to figure out

how to keep this machete on fire.

They had to keep putting like petroleum

and all this stuff, and we would do like part of a take

and then it would burn out.

And, so, that was a very, very long night of shooting.

Some of the extras, some of the kids,

didn't know that a burning Jason

going to dash out from the cornfield.

So some of the reaction from their faces are real.

Jason probably did more damage, had more carnage in that scene

than several of the movies he's been in before.

We need those pills.

Can you get us back to Westin Hills?

We're going to get some of the Hypnocil

so that we don't dream, so that Freddy can't get us.

Jason shows up and starts causing shit,

as he is want to do.

He had to break through the glass door with the machete

and Kelly Rowland and I

were screaming at the top of our lungs.

L've never been... so terrified,

and I didn't know the line between reality and fantasy.

My favorite personal part of the film is,

for my character, is the big standoff

where I'm actually possessed by Freddy.

Let me handle this, bitch.

And Jason comes down the hallway,

and he comes up and ba-bam into the neck,

plunge him in...

Sliced right in half.

Which is a pretty awesome way to go.

You need to have one guy

that the audience should invest a little bit of their emotion.

And for me, personally,

I thought we should invest a little bit more on Jason.

Dude, that goalie was pissed about something.

Freddy obviously, even before he became Freddy Krueger

and was a burn victim and this crazy dream demon,

he was a bad guy.

Jason was just trying to go to camp and have a good summer.

When Lori enters the dream world of Jason Voorhees,

she witnesses the childhood tragedy

that unleashed his inner rage.

In FREDDY VS. JASON you see him confronted by fears

that he never had before or people didn't realize

or wasn't shown in the other movies.

So you are afraid of something after all, huh?

Just knowing myself, I would have tried to fight

against the Jason-fearing-water part of that movie.

I just want to put the record straight.

We never said that Jason was afraid of water.

We never wrote that. That was not in our script.

- Very important. - That was not in our screenplay.

That would, that came afterwards.

That was in a re-write.

All we wanted to do was say

that Jason perhaps would have a subconscious fear of drowning.

And there was some debate of,

in that scene where you see Freddy's blade

going into the little poor kid's brain.

But there is a flashback to when I go back to Camp Crystal Lake

to try to save him.

I really genuinely cared for him and saw him in a new light.

I got to see him as a little boy that was picked on.

If I had been there,

I would have killed all those horrible camp counselors

and stuff.

Throwing him in the lake and teasing him.

It was awful.

JASON VOORHEES?!

And sort of for the first time, I think,

in FREDDY VS. JASON, they touched on that,

and I think that would be really interesting

to get into Jason's head more.

While Elm Street is said to be located

in the fictional town of Springwood, Ohio,

Crystal Lake is approximately 600 miles away

in rural New Jersey.

Fans have asked, how were Lori and her friends

able to get Jason back to Crystal Lake in record time?

Where is Crystal Lake located?

That was a big problem for us in FREDDY VS. JASON.

We had to get them to be able to drive there.

But for us it was important that it was far,

like those two things.

So we had all these scenes where they were going like

all night and all day, and of course,

when the movie gets cut it looks like

they're like right next to each other.

Look, we're almost there.

Jason is in the back of a van.

They've got him all taped up, and they've been drugging him.

Kelly Rowland despised the scene

where she had to give Jason mouth-to-mouth.

As much as I'm saying I loved Jason now,

and I have a certain compassion and empathy for him,

I don't know that I'd want to give him mouth-to-mouth.

[sputtering sounds]

And then the drugs wear off, and the van flips,

and he comes shooting out of the back of the van

which is probably the biggest stunt I did on the movie.

The mother of all battles between Jason and Freddy

is waged in the real world,

and on Jason's home turf.

The moment of truth had arrived.

For fans awaiting the ultimate slasher slugfest,

the time had come to place their bets.

My philosophy is everything in the movie

should set up for the end fight.

Yeah, that was an amazing, amazing finale there.

I'm like wrestling with a 6 foot 7 Canadian stuntman

who's been in over 100 movies

and is buff and hard and can drink me under the table,

and it was a rough shoot.

I did a lot of my stunts.

You know, I think Freddy got the best of that one.

He's pretty much kicking his ass the whole time.

I think there were a couple moments where I felt

kind of maybe crossed the line a little bit,

where we wanted to have Jason to kick his ass

a little bit more.

Hey, asshole!

Originally in ours it was

- He calls him a mama's boy. - Mama's boy.

Which I thought was good, you know.

He's a little character related. Calls Jason a mama's boy.

And they changed it to 'Hey, Asshole.'

And I remember backing up in the scene and saying...

Freddy vs. Jason, place your bets!

And it never actually ended up being in the movie.

I still don't know why they cut it.

Place your bet was not in script, and I didn't shoot it.

It's basically just for the, for the trailer.

Quentin Tarantino saw the movie and was so disappointed.

He went to the premiere and he said,

'Where's the place your bets?

That's what made me want to see it.'

At the end with the set piece,

we involved with all different special effects,

like, you know, fire, water, wind, smoke, explosions.

One of the bloodiest battles you'll ever see in a movie.

And that was all Ronny Yu's doing.

And none of it was CG.

We'd have sometimes six hoses going in

and blood spraying everywhere and Ronny still screaming,

'More blood! More blood!

We were like, this looks like a Monty Python movie,

I mean the amount of blood spraying,

it was unbelievable.

So over the top,

the violence and everything

that the audience would laugh at the violence

rather than really affected by the violence.

Jason, he and I almost became teammates.

And we were both against Freddy,

and he actually saved my life in the end

when Freddy was about to kill me on the dock

at the very end of the movie.

And so he was protecting me.

Welcome to my world - BITCH!

He allowed me to be able to cut Freddy's head off

at the end and kill him.

And I really felt like he and I

had some sort of bond or connection.

Out of respect, I throw the machete back in the water.

So in the end who won?

The claw or the machete?

Fans of both franchises

were equally passionate,

and New Line feared that tipping the scales in either one's favor

would alienate just as many as it would appease.

I always have problem with the original ending.

I hated the ending.

I thought is a wrong focus.

Well, the original ending was that it's six months later,

and Jason Ritter and I are in bed together

and then he turns into Freddy at the end.

Which I thought was really interesting.

And we test screened it and then the audience loved the movie

but hated the ending.

That's how they decided to do the re-shoot

which I was a part of.

Originally I was up for the role of Jason,

and I had had several callbacks for the part,

but months later I got a call to do the re-shoots

to play Jason and I was just thrilled.

I was like, 'Oh my God.

I'm going to actually get to do this.'

Not only did I get to step behind that mask,

but I got to play Jason in a film

with Robert Englund, Freddy Krueger.

Ultimately, FREDDY VS. JASON

would end not with a whimper or a bang...

but a wink.

I would say that Jason won the fight,

but the war might not be over.

Look, Freddy's the one who doesn't have a head

at the end of it, now granted he winks.

But I think the ending, what was great about that

was the great Rorschach test for the fans.

You got the Robert Englund/Freddy Krueger fans

who say Robert Englund won.

You got the Jason fans say Jason won.

It's kind of left up in the air.

It gets people talking.

I spent three years

working in the professional wrestling industry,

so I learned very early on

that even if someone seems to have won,

the feud will go on.

Freddy or Jason, who won?

Me! I won!

I made Freddy defeat Jason and then I killed Freddy!

So I'm the winner. I'm the victor. I won!

In anticipation of the film's release,

New Line put the FREDDY VS. JASON publicity machine

into hyper-drive with a pre-fight press conference

and boxing event held in Las Vegas.

What's the matter?

Can't you speak for yourself, hockey puck?

Soon Jason Voorhees was everywhere.

From officially licensed hats and mugs,

to comic books and even children's lunch boxes.

And for the first time in his more than twenty-year history,

Jason was even given a proper Hollywood premiere.

It's something the fans have wanted.

It was, that's really a fan-inspired film,

and that's probably one reason it did 135 million worldwide.

When the movie came out it was the highest horror opening

of all time,

and I think it was the highest grossing of the bunch.

I think it opened to $25 million or something the first weekend.

It was incredible.

But to those who toiled in the early years

of both franchises,

FREDDY VS. JASON was more hype than holy grail.

After seeing the movie, I guess I was kind of hoping

that I would see a scene to say,

'Oh, that's why.'

But honestly there's nothing in the movie that I saw

that I wouldn't have been able to do.

I went to see the film.

I found it really just kind of brutal

without being very imaginative.

I love Ronny and I think he did an excellent job?

But you know, he was maybe a little more influenced

by WWE type stuff and you know,

you can see that in the film, and that's not a criticism.

But definitely in our screenplay,

we thought that there would be scenes,

maybe there'd be a little more tension.

While it's got its faults, I think it was pretty true

to the spirit of those characters

and tried to show a little love for the continuity

which was very much intentional.

It was able to sort of help breathe a little new life back

into the genre on the whole.

After the film's record-breaking success,

the question was inevitably asked,

would there be a rematch?

At that time I just thought, you know, great.

We should do THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

type of movie with the HALLOWEEN guy, you know.

The Myer vs. Jason vs. Freddy.

But then you've got two kind of quiet killers.

I think it's kind of an overkill there.

There were some interesting ideas at one time.

There was a, you know, a Freddy vs. Ash vs. Jason

that was talked about

which I think that Sam Raimi wanted Bruce Campbell to win

which I thought was a terrific idea.

You know, making the world safe from sequels... Ash.

Sam and the camp are very interested.

We negotiated sort of on and off over two years.

As is the nature of Hollywood, deal making,

it comes and it goes.

We try again and it comes and it goes

until ultimately the deal's just not going to make.

Well, I love EVIL DEAD. I love EVIL DEAD II.

I love Ash.

Groovy!

But I think that that would be even harder than it was

to pull off FREDDY VS. JASON and as you can see,

it wasn't that easy.

But I think that's perfect idea for a comic.

Several years later in actuality,

David lmhoff at New Line Licensing at the time said,

'You know what?

We should take the treatment that I had written for the film

and let's go do this and do it as a comic.

At my last horror convention,

one of these fans brought up to me this comic book

FREDDY VS. JASON VS. ASH and I said,

'Where did you get this? This is amazing.

This is what the sequel was supposed to be.'

And he said, 'I know.

Do you want to see it? You're in it.'

The heroine from the first one always has to die pretty quickly

in the second one.

But you know who kills me?

Jason.

Two pages in, I have a machete hacking through my head.

And he wouldn't even have that machete to kill me

unless I returned it to him. I did the right thing.

And then he cuts my face in half?

Freddy hadn't even shown up on the scene yet.

I changed my mind. He doesn't have morals.

He's just a heartless, soulless killer.

I'm very honored and at a large level

kind of humbled that in comics now

we sort of have the responsibility

of keeping the original continuity going,

and FREDDY-JASON-ASH because it was going to be

the legitimate sequel and that was the take

we were going to use,

it's an incredible honor because it's basically,

to the fans like myself that care about the continuity

and want to know where Tommy Jarvis has been

and what he's doing,

it's a thrill to get to kind of deliver that

for them ultimately.

And at least let the people

that want to keep the Freddy and Jason

that they grew up with and love,

let them sort of keep living on in another medium

while these new sort of re-interpretations are done.

Of course I'm very happy and very excited

with the end result.

But more importantly,

I just felt that my instinct was right

in the very, very beginning.

I'm so happy that the audience also endorsed that,

endorsed my gut feeling.

You know, we love NIGHTMARE and FRIDAY,

and, you know, we were, you know, stewards of it, I guess,

a little bit, you know, for a short period of time,

and, you know, we always try to do our best.

We always put our, you know, the fans first,

and, you know, hopefully some people out there

think we did an okay job.

Two months after the box office smash of FREDDY VS. JASON,

another horror icon was given a new lease on life

With 2003s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

This time, it was neither a sequel nor a crossover

that left audiences screaming.

It was a remake.

If the mother of all slasher films was no longer sacred,

then a remake of FRIDAY THE 13TH seemed inevitable.

Platinum Dunes is a company I started with Michael Bay

and Andrew Form, my two partners,

and I knew that New Line had the rights to FRIDAY THE 13TH.

That was a title that we'd always talked about

wanting to make.

I guess when you do a remake

you sort of play with people's expectations.

You try to know what those expectations are

and you give them what they want

but not what they expect.

I rang Marcus up and I said, 'Marcus, you know,

I'm not quite sure why we're doing this film.'

And he explained to me that he had enjoyed a great success

with THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE remake and that, you know,

basically he was taking this film

because he felt like his career needed

that shot in the arm again.

When I did TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE

I was actually surprised to see like the outcry, you know,

how dare they?

FRIDAY THE 13TH, in a Way,

it's less of a holy cow to bring to the butchering block.

Aided by partner Michael Bay, director of ARMAGEDDON,

PEARL HARBOR and the TRANSFORMERS series,

the Platinum Dunes team

spent the better part of a year securing the rights

from both studios.

Yet no one could see the point

of faithfully retelling the story of Pamela Voorhees

and her murderous rampage at Camp Crystal Lake.

The audience wanted Jason.

So the producers brought back two of the series' biggest fans

to conceive a new vision of FRIDAY THE 13TH.

Shannon: As kind of a reaction to FREDDY VS. JASON,

we wanted to adjust the tone.

Yeah.

We wanted to make this less goofy.

Yeah.

More serious, a little harder edge.

Jason didn't kill in the first movie as we know,

and we didn't want to make a movie

where, that didn't have Jason, that had Mrs. Voorhees killing.

So we took elements of the first four.

We didn't really ever think of it as number 12.

It was like, you know, this could be

like we're starting all over again.

This is the story from the beginning.

There are many words for making a movie again,

I think retelling is a fashionable one right now.

Definitely not a re-imagining

because we are just basically going back

to what Jason was in the first place.

It could have been called a sequel in my opinion.

A mash up, or a poupou platter.

More of a hybrid.

- It was a reboot. - A reintroduction.

- A potpourri. - A greatest hits.

I don't even really know what it is.

From the get-go for me it was always 'this is a reboot'

and that was sort of drilled into our heads.

It's a re-box-officin-ing. That's what it is.

It's sort of the Reader's Digest of slasher films.

We did not want to say none of these movies happened.

I mean, it was important for us not to sort of say,

'Hey, we're starting over and that didn't exist.

Absolutely.

That's not something we wanted to do.

But, of course, you know, they wanted to just call it

FRIDAY THE 13TH, you know what I mean,

so it kind of started over.

But, you know, for me it lives sort of in,

along with all the others.

It was really important to us to go back to Crystal Lake.

It had been a long time since Jason had been there,

and we loved the setting of the camp.

This is really a New Jersey story and for some reason,

we wound up shooting this in Texas.

There weren't even camps around, you know,

and not the right type of lakes.

I don't remember specifically discussing

where we were geographically in the United States.

I don't believe that's addressed as to where it is.

I think it's kind of like in THE SIMPSONS.

Crystal Lake, I mean, there's a lot of Crystal Lakes out there.

You know, it could happen anywhere.

Do you know how many lakes are probably called Crystal Lake?

Crystal Geyser, Crystal Water.

For the next actor chosen to wield the famous machete,

playing Jason wasn't just another job,

it was the role of a lifetime.

I'm a huge fan of the FRIDAY THE 13TH series.

It's my favorite horror series of all time.

Derek Meats waked through the door and, you know,

you don't know what to expect after seeing his pictures

from past movies and clips

and he turns out to be the sweetest guy.

And then you find out he actually does cage fighting

as a hobby.

When I was in school, I have a disorder called alopecia

which means my body sees hair as a foreign obstacle

so it rejects it, and when it started originally falling out,

it would fall out in little patches,

little pieces here and there,

and I was kind of the different kid in school.

And I looked and I go, 'Oh my God,

I'm like a, I'm like a little Jason, like we're similar.'

And so I kind of had a relation there,

a tie to that character.

Derek Mears was the only person

we considered to play Jason Voorhees.

When that phone call came in,

trying to be professional and be stone-faced,

'Well, that sounds great. Well, cool.

We'll work the days. Where are we shooting? Fantastic.

We'll talk to the managers.'

But inside you're like

a 13-year-old cheerleader, schoolgirl,

'Oh my god, that's amazing.'

The fact that Derek got to come in

and recreate this character,

someone who is so passionate about FRIDAY THE 13TH

as a whole and every film that's come in the genre before,

I feel like it couldn't have been a better fit.

He was constantly in his head,

talking to the producers, talking to the directors,

what about this, what about that, you know,

and he'd go through different films.

Well, you know, Jason did this before,

or are we going to do something different?

When I approached the character of Jason,

I did a lot of research on child psychology

being that Jason saw his mother get murdered in front of him

at such a young age,

being that he was an outcast

and teased and picked on from all the other kids.

His mother, his only tie to life,

that's his only source of love

and seeing that taken away from him,

how does that affect a person?

It'll be easier for you than it was for Jason.

This is about a victim who is lashing out in vengeance

for the death of his mother.

You should have been watching him... every minute!

Ultimately Jason's still a person.

He's just a very damaged person obviously.

So I think Derek really wanted to explore that.

You know, he's been rejected by society. That's his area.

And so when the kids come into his area,

he's forced into a corner, again,

kind of like a wild animal, and he retaliates.

It's very similar to John Rambo from the FIRST BLOOD series.

John Rambo: Don't push it or I'll give you a war

you won't believe.

And the discussion was, 'ls he running or is he walking?'

He ran in the first few films.

You know, in 2, 3,4 he was running.

Why not go back to that?

It feels like if you see him running,

all 240 pounds of him with that 4 foot machete,

that it feels scarier than if he just pops up.

We actually shot a lot of scenes kind of two different ways.

One was like more empathetic

so the audience could understand and feel for Jason,

and one was more aggressive.

You know, it's not an easy job wearing all that makeup

and running around and carrying the machete,

and it's easy to get aggravated and mean.

And every day he was a pleasure to be around and just a happy,

grateful guy to work with.

There couldn't be a greater contrast in personality

for a serial killer.

Derek is the nicest guy that any of us have ever met,

perhaps the nicest guy that exists on this planet.

I mean, it's so funny that for someone who plays

such a dark and scary character,

he couldn't be a warmer, more loving person

filled with more light. I just think the world of him.

I'm ruining my bad-guy career right now.

I'm going to have to punch somebody

just to establish dominance.

When you discuss the makeup,

or the costume really that Jason Voorhees is wearing

in our film, that's Scott Stoddard.

I was inspired by the asymmetry of what Tom did

for the original makeup for the little kid,

and what was done then in Part 4.

But I also really wanted to combine what Carl Fuller did

and had done in Part 2.

I thought that kind of mountain man, you know,

just longer hair falling out, kind of grizzly looking guy,

was something that I wanted to put into it.

Scott did an amazing job.

I remember the first day that Derek came on set.

I had - I mean, like chills ran down my spine.

I was like, 'Oh my God, Dude.'

They wrote in the sackhead in the script and when I read it,

I was like, 'Okay, great. Brings me right back to Part 2.'

The sack cloth was really scary for me too.

I think in some ways more scary than the hockey mask.

I think both versions, the hockey mask

and the sack head version of Jason are terrifying.

To me the hockey mask does seem more iconic though.

You know, that's what I associate with Jason.

The film opens at Crystal Lake

in one of the longest pre-credit prologues

in FRIDAY THE 13TH,

and perhaps motion picture history.

This remake centers around

this brother-sister story between the Whitney character

and the Clay character played by Jared Padalecki,

and it starts off because their mother is dying.

I don't feel right being here, so far away from my mom.

My boyfriend drags me away from taking care of her

to go on a camping trip,

and we don't realize that it's Camp Crystal Lake.

And it doesn't go so well.

[random screams]

With the crew being around you, once you sort of got outside

of all the lights and stuff,

you could really see how creepy it would be

to be out there in the pitch black

and not really know your surroundings.

The dark woods outside of Austin, Texas

provided the perfect cover for a practical joke

on actor Jonathan Sadowski by his fellow cast members.

We were shooting in the dark woods late one night,

and, it was like 3 or 4 in the morning, super tired.

Of course, the portapotties are like a walk.

It's a hike to get there, and it's pitch black,

like there's nothin' out there.

This would make the perfect serial killer story,

that somebody actually got killed by a serial killer

in the woods while shooting FRIDAY THE 13TH.

And we're all watching the monitors,

watching the scene that's taking place,

and Jonathan pops up from his chair and goes,

Well, gotta go to the bathroom,

and he walks off in the darkness.

And so Feldman and Mennell

like thought it would be a really great idea

to convince Derek to hide in the bushes.

So he goes out and, of course, Derek sees him

disappear into the woods

and Derek goes to the opposite side of the woods

and hides and waits for him to walk back.

He hid in the bushes like halfway through the walk

and jumped out at him with his mask and machete.

I have never seen an adult man get so scared

as Jonathan Sadowski who literally,

when Derek came charging at him out of the woods

in full costume, didn't know what to do,

so just ran in place like a cartoon character.

Ahhh-ahhh-ah-haha!

His feet are jumping back and forth.

His hands are going up and down.

What happened was that part between fight and flight.

He goes, I didn't know, I was so scared I didn't know

if I should run or punch you in the face.

And the whole set just died. Just killed everybody.

So I'm like, Oh, mission accomplished.

I felt pretty good about that.

Our movie has a ton of nudity in it.

And as a kid when I was going to movies,

that was part of the genre and for some reason

it kind of went away.

And it was important to us to bring back the nudity.

America and I are in the tent and we are loving each other

biblically from behind.

Oh, you like that?

Yeah baby, wait for me,

- No I think I'm gonna... - No, don't do that again-

As it turned out, playing the role of sex-starved Amanda

was more than original actress Moran Atias bargained for.

America Olivia bares her breasts in the beginning of the film.

That was written into the original screenplay.

And we shot that scene with another girl

who when it came time to bare her breasts,

she refused to do it.

You know, I think she'd recently come from Israel

and was ready to do some serious acting

and FRIDAY THE 13TH, I think,

was not exactly what she had in mind

when she came to do 'high art' in America

and, I guess to put it plainly,

I think there were just too many boob shots.

Hey It looks like you.

No, it doesn't.

It does. lt's cool, you should keep it.

When Mike and Whitney go into the cabin,

and she finds the locket, because she's wearing it,

yes, it does save her life to a certain degree.

That symbol of love is that locket,

it's that confusion, oh, that's my mom.

He's not all there but it's that tie in to him needing love.

Little Oedipus.

[scream]

I think for me if there's wooden boards involved

and someone's falling through or bashing up into them,

that's the kind of death scene I like.

I don't know why. I'm just creeped out by it.

And I jump into the bathtub,

and I'm trying to pull Nick into the tub with me.

There was a lot of thrashing around and Derek Mears,

Jason, was out of town.

He was actually getting married, funny enough

while we were shooting.

And they had a stunt double for him

that was supposed to grab me.

I bashed this guy, kicked him straight in the eye

and gave him a good shiner.

I run back to save Amanda, and she is hanging from a tree

in a sleeping bag on fire and burning to death.

That is when I stumble upon a bear trap.

[scream]

We shot like 10 takes and after a while I'm like,

my leg's kind of like dented and like a little bit bleeding

and like black-and-blue and so I was like,

Guys, can we loosen up with the bear trap?

And they were like, Oh my God, that's the real one.

Can somebody just get him the rubber one?

Jason comes at me at the end of the scene

and puts a machete through my forehead

and then he turns on Amanda Righetti's character,

and we cut to black and then the real movie starts.

Jared Padalecki goes back to Crystal Lake

because he thinks that that's where his sister is.

So he kind of goes, he's there on a mission to find her,

and he finds some other kids who are hanging out

and partying at Crystal Lake.

I have a cabin. I'm very rich and I want people to like me,

I guess, even though I don't like anybody

that I really bring to the cabin.

Hey, take your feet off the table please.

Jenna, you know, registers what Clay is going through

and how hard this must be

despite the fact that all her friends

are just focused on partying and having a good time.

I'm trying to set up myself to get laid

with this beautiful girl.

She ends up going to this other guy.

I'm definitely jealous, a little pissed off.

So you don't want to be friends after this?

Don't want to hang out?

Two boys wanting to duke it out over a girl.

Like that's a story we can all relate to.

I would probably leave soon before I get pissed off,

and, you know... Yeah?

Yeah.

The new film attempted not one,

but two, versions of the scene

where Jason discovers his iconic hockey mask.

The original scene was, in my mind,

not nearly as interesting as the one that we shot later on.

Donnie comes into his pot den in the barn,

and he's getting high.

And he puts the hockey mask on,

and Jason comes in and grabs him by the head.

You don't see him get his head chopped off

but then you see the head drop out of frame

and land on the ground.

He's looking at the mask and puts the mask on

and there it was.

That's how he was going to get it.

And then a few months later,

they decided to go and re-shoot that a little different,

and it was when he goes upstairs, confronts Donnie,

That shit ain't fuckin' right, dude

Cuts his throat, pulls something aside,

and there's the hockey mask.

I also think the scene's quite effective.

I think it's an interesting moment there.

Not only when he gets the mask,

he puts it on, and he goes to the mirror.

I think it's quite an effective scene.

I'm really glad we shot that.

I thought they both worked well.

It would have been fun if they had Shelly from PART Ill

who introduced the hockey mask,

where he's like working with Donnie doing something,

You know, there he is. There's Shelly, you know.

In keeping with FRIDAY THE 13TH tradition,

several of the film's death sequences

had to be reconceived and re-shot.

So there's a kill in the script with Willa Ford's character,

originally it was written where the boat sequence happens,

Ryan's character gets shot with the arrow,

she gets hit by the boat, and she's stunned.

As she's kind of coming to, and she realizes

there's a guy wearing a hockey mask,

and she's kind of confused and all of a sudden,

the guy pulls out a machete, and she's like,

Oh my God, oh my God.

And so she starts to swim parallel to the water,

and he just slowly walks with her keeping the same distance.

It cuts to the kids back at the house

having a big party, having a good time.

It's a very long scene there.

Then it cuts back to her and now the time is passed

where it's dark, and she's been treading water

for a long time, and Jason hasn't moved.

He's still just staring at her.

And so it was more of a psychological kill,

like she's so afraid to get out of the water,

she'd rather drown in the water.

And I thought that was brilliant.

But they changed it where she faked it

and comes up under the docks,

has the machete get the top of her head

which is still a great kill.

The kills are obviously such an important part

of this franchise and of horror movies in general,

and I loved them in this movie.

I thought everyone had a really unique and disgusting way to go.

We were talking to the producers and they were like,

Did you realize there are 13 kills in this movie?

And I was like, Yeah, it was intentional.

And they were like, Really? Wow. That's great.

The other part of the formula, I guess for us,

was we wanted to have kids having fun.

We wanted to bring back some of that feeling

from the 80s where it's kind of sex, drugs and violence.

Well originally we did want to put it in the 80s,

I mean, that was sort of important to us,

and then once you start talking to like the studio guys,

they go, yeah, it's not going to happen.

It's very modern, and we didn't step back in time at all.

We really brought that modern energy to it.

As Form and Fuller once explained to me,

'These kids have got to be fuckable.

The guys have gotta want to fuck the girls,

and the girls have gotta want to fuck the guys

in the movie.' So that's what makes them care.

My character did have some good lines in the film.

I know the one that I did not want to say was

Your tits are stupendous.

And they said, Trust me. It'll get a laugh. lt's funny.

I said, Okay.

And then we were doing the sex scene,

and, it was like a twelve-hour day for that thing,

and it sounds like, Oh, man, you had to do that for twelve hours,

you poor guy, but seriously, twelve hours a day

wearing a little cock sock,

it's not really the most comfortable thing.

This is a man's sport.

Aaron Yoo, who plays Chewie in the movie,

he had to have full stomach surgery

while we were shooting.

He had an obstruction in his stomach,

and he was rushed to the hospital from the set.

He came back with, I don't know, 30 staples in his stomach.

I don't know how he held up but he kept going like,

'Hey, look, can you actually throw me?

Can you like do it for real?'

I go, 'Yeah, I can do it for real. I'm not doing it for real

because I don't want to hurt you.'

Are you looking for this? 'Cause it, uh...

completes your outfit.

And he was like, 'l'm good for one.

Is that cool with everybody?' 'Okay, dude, if you're sure.'

[screams]

And all I'm thinking is if his guts pour out

while we're doing the scene... l'm going to shoot that, right?

'Cuz I can use that in the movie if his guts pour out.

There's a point where I'm stabbing him,

and he starts to choke, and he's gagging,

and he goes to the ground, and we end the scene.

I go, Dude, are you okay? What's going on?

And he goes, No, no, no. I had the blood in my mouth,

and rather than just coming out of my mouth,

I tried to inhale it into my sinuses so it would come out.

I go, you are far too committed for this.

That is insane.

No, but it looked really, really cool.

Take that, motherfucker!

My death scene, it hurt the most.

And you know, oh, he's getting away and then all of a sudden

you just see [noise] axe.

I'm screaming for help, and you can hear me.

Oh my god, please!

It's always interesting to me to see, you know,

a bomb drops, you know,

a bunch of kids scatter around like roaches on the kitchen sink

and how do they interact.

- You can't go out there. - We have to help him.

No we can't, ok? He's using your friend as bait.

You know, at least someone said we have to help him.

Somebody's gotta do something!

I was like, Do it, be a friend, go out there

and save your buddy.

And we're all like, Whose life is more important here?

Ours.

As I was watching the movie,

I thought of so many different scenarios

of how I could have been saved.

Spineless bastards.

[screams]

I mean, I think I die three or four times in the movie.

I get suffocated by Jason.

Then I get hung on these hooks.

And I get shot through a door.

Then I get thrown out a window.

Marcus, I guess, wanted to try to get a little more creative,

you know, like the things that make you squirm.

The poker through the eyehole, that was... errrrr.

Anything with eyes, like when you watch that movie ZOMBIE.

As the remaining characters make a last bid for survival,

an on-set accident nearly resulted

in a real FRIDAY THE 13TH casualty.

Whenever you're making a horror movie

and kids or people are running and they have sharp objects,

someone's bound to get hurt.

We were shooting one of the scenes

where we run from upstairs to downstairs.

And we're coming down the stairs.

I'm backing down as fast as I can

like pretending I'm a frickin' FBI agent or something,

and I run into Danielle and I slam her into the wall.

He somehow pushed me into the windowsill,

and I hit my chin, and I split my chin open

and fell back and gave myself a concussion.

She hits her head,

and she almost gets knocked out unconscious.

And she had to go to the hospital.

I think - it was just bad.

So I still have a teeny tiny scar on my chin

that will forever remind me of FRIDAY THE 13TH.

I feel bad but it was - I mean,

I guess it was payback for her going to the other guy.

So I got her back.

I think the most brutal kill

would probably have to be Travis's.

He had the iconic scream.

[screams like a girl]

I think he probably out-screamed all the women

that have been in any of the FRIDAY THE 13TH films.

My death scene in this film was a great one,

and I think the whole purpose of my character

staying in the film as long as he did

was you wanted the audience to really slowly hate me

and hate me more and more

so that when I died it was a big payoff.

We went through probably 10 gallons of blood.

Gets the machete basically all the way up his body

until he's lifted off the ground.

Then he lets me down, lifts me up

and throws me on the back of a hay bale spike

that goes through my chest as the car pulls away.

So timing had to be perfect. I had to be strapped in.

It was just a really... It's a gnarly death.

He was the asshole, he was the jerk,

and, as we all know in films, we want those people to die.

So he got what he deserved.

And then they drive away with my dying body.

So, altogether I'm... that was one of my favorite parts

was to watch me die.

The original script that I read,

it involved a much more intricate scene

involving Jared's character

and Amanda Righetti's character and my character,

in more of a battle with Jason

and Jenna was definitely more involved in that version.

They needed to find something

that wasn't going to be too difficult to shoot

and that was going to fit in their schedule.

So Jenna had to die in the tunnel

I loved that about this.

You know, the sort of, she follows all the rules

of a quintessential Jason movie, and she doesn't swear,

she doesn't have sex, she's not a hard partier,

and yet she still gets killed.

And I think it's fun.

I think it's a great talking point,

and I love that people are so invested in it.

With the Platinum Dunes partners

closely watching over the set,

and with the mounting pressure of constant script changes,

tensions flared between the producers

and director Marcus Nispel.

The working relationship that I had with Marcus

shifted quite a bit in the course of making this film.

Kind of a recluse. He would just keep to himself,

and he would say things to you when you needed to hear them.

There's a fine line between genius and madness.

He's such a visual guy. He gets so excited.

'Da-da very good scene. I want you to burst in.

You're going to attack her. The energy stop there.

Oh they can't help it. You're going to rip them apart!

I think I had a better relationship

and better communication with Brad and Drew.

They were the producers that were on set

the entire shoot.

Unfortunately there was a lot of conflict

between those parties.

Marcus was trying to push this film forward

but they kept changing the script

and rewriting the script. And they were forever at odds.

Almost every shooting day would start with,

you know, some sort of discussion

or conversation about what we're shooting.

No, no, that's not even a scene anymore.

There may have been something between them,

but by the time it gets to us actors,

everybody's... you know, it's like mom and dad.

If they fought it was when we went to bed.

As time went on I realized this is no way to carry on

making a film.

We have to somehow arrive at an amicable agreement

where we can just carry on and, you know,

and that never really happened.

As filming drew to a close,

one question still remained...

How would this FRIDAY THE 13TH end?

And we ended up going back out to Austin

a few months after we had wrapped the movie

to re-shoot some of it,

and they wanted to see me stab Jason.

The original ending we shot for FRIDAY

when Jason's getting pulled into the wood chipper,

we actually shot where the mask pops off.

He's staring, he's confused

because, you know, he loves her so much.

It's like the confusion of like he loves his mother,

and she's not his mother, but she kind of is,

and so he's like, Why are you doing this?

And then she stabs him with the machete.

Jason! Say hi to Mommy... in Hell!

'Jason, say hi to Mommy in hell.'

I fought that tooth and nail.

I was like, Oh, guys, really? That's cheesy.

What they were looking for is the entire audience going like,

Yay! The bad guy's dead!

But instead the entire audience was silent.

And so they changed the ending.

I prefer the more, the emotional one myself

because it adds more depth.

Obviously the big pressure is will there be a big,

big scare at the end,

and then, of course, your biggest trick as a director

is to see what you make look like an end or not,

the false end, you know.

What are you going to do? You know, it's hard.

It's hard to top what happened in the first movie.

The first movie has one of the great, you know,

jump scare endings of all time.

So it became a really tough bar, I think,

for every other filmmaker.

It's like well we need something.

And they just couldn't decide.

There was one point where we were both in a canoe

and then the canoe goes over.

And then there was one point

that maybe it was just Jared in the canoe,

and I was on the dock.

And then it ended up, no, we'll both be on the dock.

They weren't sure if they were going to do a sequel

but they wanted to keep it open-ended

if they did do a sequel.

And then they ended up just deciding, Okay,

he's going to just come out of the water and grab you.

[screams]

On Friday, February 13th, 2009, FRIDAY THE 13TH

was released on 3,105 screens in North America.

Although it brought in an astounding $43 million

in its opening weekend,

negative reviews and a backlash from hardcore fans

caused the film's box office to plunge 80%

in its second weekend.

Nevertheless, the film went on to earn

$65 million domestically,

making it the highest grossing film

among any of the slasher remakes

and proving that Jason Voorhees can indeed survive anything,

including his own reinvention.

Any film that gets remade ever

is going to come across a lot of criticism.

We're messing with something that to a lot of people is holy.

So it doesn't surprise me that there were people

that weren't happy or satisfied

with the way they depicted where Jason was living

and how he was going about killing these people.

The diehard fans

kind of got their panties in a wad about it,

but I thought it was a pretty good execution.

If you're really a fan of those original things,

and you're mad that we messed with some original things,

then go watch the original movies

and don't come see Michael Bay's remake of it.

Well, at least Jason wasn't like living in space.

I had a friend send me something the other day

saying there was a list of recognizable characters

in the franchise, and that I was one of them.

I'm like, That's really cool.

L've been very fortunate because the fans, fan boys,

can sort of fall on one side of the fence,

and they've been very kind to me,

and I'm very grateful for that.

We tried to make a fans' dream.

Because we are fans and I mean I don't know if everyone says,

You guys aren't really fans.

But I really am. And I love these movies,

and we just wanted to write the movie that we wanted to see.

I just knew I worked on a film that I loved working on

with a great group of people

and then when the people started seeing it

and watching it and coming up to me and telling me

what they loved about it,

then I was able to look at it and go,

I just worked on a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie.

This is so cool because this is what I grew up on.

I never thought about growing up

to try and make one of these films.

I don't think you dared to dream that high.

I make no bones about it. I loved making this movie.

I would love to make another 12 of them.

You know, I think there's probably more life in Jason,

and there's just another way to reintroduce him

into the next generation.

This is how much of a nerd I am.

I got chills, which is crazy.

It's such an honor to be a part of the series.

It's mind blowing because when I hear Jason I think of Kane,

C.J. Graham, Ted White.

You know, I think, Oh, yeah, that's right.

I got to play Jason. How unreal is that?

If they do a sequel, I would like to return.

But if not, even if I'm not asked or I don't return,

I'm a fan of the series.

I just want to see more Jason films,

and I'm totally cool with that.

No matter when or if

Jason Voorhees ever hangs up his mask and machete,

fans will always have their Crystal Lake Memories

to remind them that the world would indeed

be a must darker place without FRIDAY THE 13TH.

It's fun to think that Jason,

who started off as just this little surprise ending

on the first one, has turned into a pop icon,

a virtual cottage industry.

I don't think anybody,

myself, Sean or Steve

or pretty much anybody involved with that picture,

had any idea that FRIDAY THE 13TH

would spawn twelve and who knows how many more films?

I know I didn't.

Honestly, FRIDAY THE 13TH has given me a gift

that is just bigger than life itself.

A movie that I didn't give two cents for

in the beginning has brought me into the world

and into the lives of people who have viewed it

in a very special way.

If that's how people saw me,

as kind of the strong, intelligent woman,

it made me feel pretty empowered.

To be able to carry it with me for the rest of my life,

this fun cult film,

it's something to talk about,

it's a great conversation starter.

I can say I was in FRIDAY THE 13TH,

and I gave Jason his hockey mask,

and nobody doesn't know what I'm talking about.

Everyone knows what what is.

I'm really proud of it.

I'm part of history, film history.

You know, this is my first job ever,

and there I was the lead of this film

and that sort of, I think that started me off

to a good path of eventually lots of doctor and lawyer roles.

It's like a badge of honor, you know,

of all the iconic horror figures, you know,

to be killed by Jason, it's really cool.

The quote is 'you're not an actor

unless you've done a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie.'

There are so many people I run into all the time that say,

You know, I was in a FRIDAY THE 13TH.

The fact that We become an 'non

is the weirdest experience of my life.

Because, you know, there's no reward

when you're making the damn thing.

It's a year later when it comes out.

You're listening to the screams and the applause

and that's what that's why we do it, you know.

We went and had a great time watching people

watch the movie.

Again, you don't see that very much now.

Well I guess in some weird way these are classics?

So I'm happy people enjoy 'em,

and can laugh about it and not take us all too seriously.

A lot of actors tend to like kind of shy away from it,

kind of put it in their past, look the other way,

act likes it's a porn or something

that they're not proud of and they just would rather not admit

that it ever happened.

For me, I feel quite differently about it.

I'm grateful to the fans of the horror world,

and I am grateful that, you know,

I was welcomed with such open arms

by the fans of the franchise.

I loved playing Tommy Jarvis.

Corey set it up so great in PART 4

that it was like passing the torch.

And of course he goes on to PART 6.

He at least lives, so I must have done something right.

I just want everyone to know I had a great time,

I was really proud to be a part of it.

I am very grateful,

and I'm glad we can all share a good laugh... or a scream.

Ethel: Ayyyy-ahhh!

No matter how twisted these movies seem,

there's something that actually kind of interweaves

this whole big group of people that makes it one big family.

Host: Never in the course of film history

has a single date

meant so much to our culture

than that of FRIDAY THE 13TH.

It was a party for the launch

of the Crystal Lake Memories book.

And then of course, Jason showed up and, you know,

cut the cake with a machete and that was awfully fun and silly.

[cheers and applause]

And I got to meet my father and mother

from the films, and we had a photo,

and we felt like we were a family reconnected,

found each other again.

And she's this little adult now,

I think she's going off to college, bless her heart,

we did really well, she turned out great.

FRIDAY THE 13TH has been an anchor for a lot of people

for those who just had it as entertainment,

but for filmmakers, directors, writers.

Several years back I had the great opportunity

to be cast as the standby for Hugh Jackman

in the Broadway show The Boy from Oz.

His whole dream to grow up and become an actor

was based on Jason, he wanted to play Jason.

REPORTER: So do you ever think that you'll ever play Jason

in one of those FRIDAY THE 13THs?

HUGH JACKMAN: Oh man, you've done your research.

That's what inspired him to be an actor.

I saw everyone was committed to doing their job

to 100% and, you know,

it made me in a way fall in love

with what it is that I do.

I do think these movies are essential.

I think they allow us to live out some weird dark part

of our personalities.

I think they're healthy.

I don't think they're negative on society.

I think that's an excuse.

We all love, you know, being scared

and wondering what's happening behind us and around us.

[scream]

I think that's why they last, honestly.

FRIDAY THE 13TH is always a great date movie, you know.

We like to say we've been bringing people together

for thirty years.

[scream]

For guys like us who like horror,

and who like Jason, Michael and Freddy,

they're part of our culture and so,

you know, we'll tell our kids about these stories.

That is what made it scary

was the fact that you could only deter them.

There was no way of killing them.

They were gonna be around for the next generation

and the next movie,

No matter what you did to them...

they were gonna be back.

How long will this go on? Who knows?

It could go on for another 20, 30 years. Who knows?

The amazing following that we have,

I had no idea, and I'm so pleasantly surprised

of the fans and everybody.

They're so nice, and I feel really proud

to have been a part of it.

I'm just amazed at the phenomenon this has become.

I never dreamed when I was doing the film then

the effect it would have on so many people

and how there would be such a following 30 years later.

And I'm so grateful to the fans for their loyalty.

They've shown me a lot of love

and that's been very uplifting and surprising.

L've never met as many people

that are as excited about saying hello

to some guy that wore a hockey mask

and getting his signature.

They know more about me than I know about myself half the time.

And they're terrific. They're terrific, terrific people.

You know, as Andy Warhol said,

we all have fifteen minutes of fame.

And thanks to FRIDAY THE 13TH,

my fifteen minutes, it keeps going.

You know, it may be a one-time thing for me, I don't know,

but it has been a great experience.

I'm taking pictures with 4-year-olds

with machetes and masks, babies with masks on.

Most of them come up to me and say,

Hey, you scared the shit out of me

when I was 8 years old, you know.

And I say, Well, what were you doing

watching the movie at 8 years old?

When you get that cult following,

when you get that group of people who's so into it,

it never goes away.

They would have stopped making those movies a long time ago

if they weren't successful.

And success isn't just money, it's people want to see 'em,

it's desire, and they trigger something,

and they become an institution.

It's so weird now to go into these different stores

and see these plastic hockey masks

that are just there because of the FRIDAY thing.

Between toys, novelizations, non-fiction books, video games,

if everyone remembers that wonderful Nintendo

Entertainment System game.

He is no less marketable than Ronald McDonald

or Mickey Mouse at this point.

It's really become part of the everyday culture

in the American culture and throughout the world.

It's just an incredible opportunity

of experiencing something that, you know,

you're going to look back 15, 20 years, 30 years,

and just remember that you were part of that.

What gave me nightmares as a child,

now it's like a weird full circle. lt's so bizarre.

How the heck did I get here?

It's kind of like I've jumped in through my computer monitor,

and I've joined this secret, fun, murdering society.

Playing a character that's known around the world

is an amazing feeling

and something I'm really proud of,

and I never expected anything like that

going into this career as a stuntman,

and I've just been very lucky,

and I'll always love the fact that I was Jason.

FRIDAY THE 13TH in this long odyssey

towards becoming iconic horror filmmaking,

it's just an amazing phenomenon.

I swear to God, I don't understand it,

and I'm just grateful that it happened.

And there you have it, the story of Jason Voorhees.

For now he may be quiet,

but he will be back.

The one thing we know for sure...

Jason's horrific reign of evil

is eternal...

immortal...

and unstoppable.

Jason is still out there...

and maybe... just maybe...

he's closer than you think.

Kill her, Mommy.

Paul there's somebody in this room.

There's somebody in this fucking room!

Whooo! This feels good!

Dude, that goalie was pissed about something.

If Vera had...

Boo!

[Scream] Ohhhh!

It's that creep Shelly. What a sick sense of humor.

Why do you do these stupid things?

I just want you to like me.

I have seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo

wearing a mask is never friendly.

I don't think so, Maddy.

You could use a little touch-up work first.

Need a little bit of touch-up work, my ass.

This sucks on so many levels!

Now I say we regroup,

and let's go find this mother-fucker

before he finds us. Huh? Are you with me?

You didn't get me in the lake, Jason,

and you're not going to get me now!

Tommy! Tommy, get the hell out of here!

That's what's known as screwin' the pooch!

Bad news Crews.

I'm in the mood for I feel like a Jarvis Sandwich!

When I looked into that mirror I knew I'd always be ugly.

I said, 'Lizzie, you'll always be plain.

Are you ready for Tony the Wonder Llama?

I told you to sit on it, Tonto.

Hey, you're lucky you weren't alive

during the Microsoft conflict.

We were beating each other over the heads

with our own severed limbs.

Come on, Sara, strip and dip?

Freddy died by fire, Jason by water.

How can we use that?

Dude, that's not a good look for you.

You ask the one black guy to pump the gas for you? Shit.

Do you...

You know, I gave up a weekend with Mary Jo Conrad

to be here with you.

You know, Jimmy, you're a dead fuck.

Yeah, well, I guess I do owe you.

You slut! [laughter]

Stay here. Relax. L'll be right back.

I'm gonna chop you into itty- bitty little pieces, my friend.

Just like I done to that piggo

over at that fuckin' crazy farm.

You tell 'em, Ma!

Ayyyyyy-ahhhh!

Melissa's a bitch. [laughter] No, I can't even do it.

Jason belongs in hell. And I'm gonna see that he gets there.

Wherever the red dot goes, ya bang.

Nobody's gonna touch that fuckin' ray of sunshine.

[tongue lapping sound]

Rrrrrrrrruffff!

My earring

Must be my imagination.

Survival's the name of the game,

and that flag is mine.

We never should have let her play.

Oh God, somebody help! He's trying to kill me!

You're not just a lousy doctor,

you're a blank-blank-blank coward! [laughter]

Aww, what scary man?

It's the best. The best!

You're talking to the prom queen, Eva.

Do you really think I'm going to risk getting caught?

What's brown and sits on a piano?

Beethoven's last movement.

[party horn sound]

Hey buddy, where are you, Michael?

Hey buddy? [party horn sound]

Ben? Are you coming back or not?

And then [slashing sound]

That's it. Come to Momma.

Mmmm. Smart and sexy.

[sounds of agony]

The story could have happened anywhere, dude.

That's how they get little kids to shit themselves.

May I please have the wallet ma'am.

You've got perfect nipple placement, baby.

L've actually said that to a woman before.

Wow, you really know how to make a girl feel special.

Jason's out there. And he's hungry.

Ma'am... we didn't find any boy.

Then he's still there.

Yeah, when I was doing the films CLERKS, MALL RATS,

CHASING AMY and JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK,

um... wait a minute... I wasn't in those movies.