Friday The 13th (1980)

 

In 1957, a young boy named Jason drowns in a lake near Camp Crystal Lake. The next year, two counselors are murdered. In 1980, a descendant of the original owners reopens Camp Crystal Lake with some counselors' help. The counselors gets killed one by one by a mysterious person. Could it be Jason, out for revenge?

Friday the 13th is a 1980 American slasher film produced and directed by Sean S. Cunningham, written by Victor Miller, and starring Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Laurie Bartram, Mark Nelson, Jeannine Taylor, Robbi Morgan, and Kevin Bacon. The plot follows a group of teenage camp counselors who are murdered one by one by an unknown killer while they are attempting to reopen an abandoned summer camp with a tragic past.

I've watched so many shitty horror movies recently I decided to go back to an old classic. 'Friday the 13th' may have been panned by critics when first released but since then it is one of the most famous and influential horror films, the franchise containing one of horror's most iconic villains.  It demonstrated the importance of setting the tone in horror movies, making the audience themselves feel as if they too were being stalked. Cunningham also was one of the few directors to introduce the idea of a possible female serial killer.

You know you like looking at my sexy chest.

Prompted by the success of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), director Cunningham put out an advertisement to sell the film in Variety in early 1979, while Miller was still drafting the screenplay. After casting the film in New York City, filming took place in New Jersey in the fall of 1979, on an estimated budget of between $550,000 and $650,000. A bidding war ensued over the finished film, ending with Paramount Pictures acquiring the film for domestic distribution, while Warner Bros. secured international distribution rights. Friday the 13th became the first independent slasher film to be acquired by a major motion picture studio.

Released on May 9, 1980, Friday the 13th was a major box office success, grossing $59.8 million worldwide, making it the fifteenth highest-grossing film of the year, and the second highest-grossing film for Paramount. The film's critical response was largely unfavorable, with numerous critics deriding it for its graphic violence, though it did receive some praise for its cinematography and score.  What the fuck do critics know? 

The screenplay was completed in mid-1979 by Victor Miller, who later went on to write for several television soap operas, including Guiding Light, One Life to Live and All My Children; at the time, Miller was living in Stratford, Connecticut, near Cunningham, and the two had begun collaborating on potential film projects. Miller delighted in inventing a serial killer who turned out to be somebody's mother, a murderer whose only motivation was her love for her child: "I took motherhood and turned it on its head and I think that was great fun. Mrs. Voorhees was the mother I'd always wanted—a mother who would have killed for her kids." While writing the film's death scenes, Miller incorporated elements of nightmares he had experienced throughout his life in which he was murdered.

Mrs. Voorhees: [high voice] Kill her, Mommy! Kill her! Don't let her get away, Mommy! Don't let her live!
[normal voice] Mrs. Voorhees: I won't, Jason. I won't!

The idea of Jason appearing at the end of the film was initially not present in the original script; in Miller's final draft, the film ended with Alice merely floating on the lake. Jason's appearance was actually suggested by makeup designer Tom Savini. Savini stated that "The whole reason for the cliffhanger at the end was I had just seen Carrie, so we thought that we need a 'chair jumper' like that, and I said, 'let's bring in Jason.'" Miller was unhappy about the filmmakers' decision to make Jason Voorhees the killer in the sequels, saying "Jason was dead from the very beginning. He was a victim, not a villain."

Tom Savini was hired to design the film's special effects based upon his work in George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978). Savini's design contributions included crafting the effects of Marcie's axe wound to the face, the arrow penetrating Jack's throat, and Mrs. Voorhees's decapitation by the machete.

On Friday the 13th, they began to die horribly...one...by one

When Harry Manfredini began working on the musical score, the decision was made to only play music when the killer was actually present so as to not "manipulate the audience". Manfredini pointed out the lack of music for certain scenes: "There's a scene where one of the girls ... is setting up the archery area... One of the guys shoots an arrow into the target and just misses her. It's a huge scare, but if you notice, there's no music. That was a [deliberate] choice." Manfredini also noted that when something was about to happen, the music would cut out so that the audience would relax, rendering the subsequent scare more effective.

While listening to a Krzysztof Penderecki composition, which contained a chorus with "striking pronunciations", Manfredini was inspired to recreate a similar sound. He came up with the sound "ki ki ki, ma ma ma" from the final reel when Mrs. Voorhees arrives and is reciting "Kill her, mommy!" The "ki" comes from "kill", and the "ma" from "mommy". To achieve the unique sound he wanted for the film, Manfredini spoke the two words "harshly, distinctly and rhythmically into a microphone" and ran them into an echo reverberation machine. Manfredini finished the original score over approximately two weeks, and then recorded it in a friend's basement. Victor Miller and assistant editor Jay Keuper have commented on how memorable the music is, with Keuper describing it as "iconographic". Manfredini says, "Everybody thinks it's cha, cha, cha. I'm like, 'Cha, cha, cha? What are you talking about?'"

They figured it would be a long summer. What they didn't figure was that it would be a long summer THAT DAY.

To me, the film works because of how great Betsy Palmer is as Jason's mom. It's a fine film, but nowhere near the excesses that the series would grow into. This was also the start of critics really hating on slasher films. Gene Siskel was so upset about Betsy Palmer being in the film that he published her address in his column and encouraged people to write her and protest. Of course, he published the wrong address.

No, it's not award-winning material, but it doesn't have to be. Appreciate it for what it is, and you can't go wrong.  It also has Kevin Bacon in it as he started his wildly successful career. 

Just chilling in this boat. I'm safe now.

Trivia:

The movie was filmed at Camp No-Be-BoSco in Blairstown, New Jersey. It is a Boy Scout Camp that is still in operation, and it has a wall of Friday the 13th (1980) memorabilia to honor that the movie was filmed there.

The film earned $39,754,601 at the domestic box office on a budget of $550,000. Its worldwide gross was $59,754,601.

Betsy Palmer said that if it were not for the fact that she was in desperate need of a new car, she would never have accepted the role of Pamela Voorhees. In fact, after she read the script, she called the movie "a piece of shit." Over the years, however, Palmer did warm up to the film, as it made her more famous than infamous, and made appearances at conventions and in documentaries to discuss it.

Tom Savini was one of the first crew members on board for the film because the producers idolized his special make-up effects in Dawn of the Dead (1978).

While most of the cast and crew stayed at local hotels during filming, some of the most dedicated, including Tom Savini and Taso N. Stavrakis, stayed at the actual camp site. They had Savini's Betamax VCR and only a couple of movies, such as Barbarella (1968) and Marathon Man (1976), on videotape to keep themselves entertained so each night they would watch one. To this day Savini says he can recite those movies by heart.

Composer Harry Manfredini came up with the now classic "ki ki ki ka ka ka" vocals attached to the score. It's his voice as well.

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They were warned...They are doomed...And on Friday the 13th, nothing will save them.

Because the camp was closed during filming, and situated in the deep New Jersey woods, the cast and crew didn't see much outside interference, but it turned out they had a very famous neighbour: rock star Lou Reed, (famous for being the frontman of the band The Velvet Underground, as well as having a very successful solo career) who owned a farm nearby. "We got to watch Lou Reed play for free, right in front of us, while we were making the film," Soundman Richard Murphy said. "He came by the set, and we hung around with each other, and he was just a really great guy."

After the film's success, Adrienne King was stalked by an obsessed fan. Terrified, she asked that her role in Part 2 be small as possible. She did not take any other roles or make convention appearances for almost 20 years after its release.

Betsy Palmer tells fans she has no idea who this character in the hockey mask is, since her son, Jason, apparently drowned in 1957.

Victor Miller admitted that he was purposely riding the success of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Director Sean S. Cunningham even approached Halloween producer Irwin Yablans to produce the film, but he declined, as he wasn't interested in doing another horror movie.

(at around 19 mins) Special effects supervisor Tom Savini performed the arrow shot that narrowly missed Brenda when she was setting up the archery target.

Willie Adams was a production assistant for the film. Although he spent most his time working behind the camera, he played the male counselor in the 1958 scene, and holds the unique distinction of being the first murder victim in a Friday the 13th film.

Don't count on making it to Saturday morning.

Harry Crosby, who played Bill in this movie, is the son of Bing Crosby.

The MPAA told the producers of Friday of 13th to scale back on the gore for the sequel, since they regretted the amount of gore that had gotten through in the original (and the subsequent critical backlash). This is why Part 2 is much less gory than Part 1.

Most of the location and set were already there. The crew only had to build the bathroom set. However, few realized that only one toilet was actually working, so after a while, the other toilets had to be cleaned out.

Jason is not mentioned by name until 1 hour and 16 minutes into the film.

Sean S. Cunningham was so sure the title Friday the 13th would sell the movie alone, that he took out a full page Variety ad over the Fourth of July Weekend of 1979, without a script or even a premise. It worked, as Phil Scuderi, the financier behind his previous movie Together (1971) and The Last House on the Left (1972) (which he had produced) contacted him, and offered to cover 25% of the proposed 500,000 dollar budget. Cunningham went into production, hoping to raise the rest of the money along the way, until Scuderi wanted to put up the entire budget. Cunningham turned him down, as he didn't expect that the movie could earn back its budget, and the actual long-term part of the deal could royally screw him, so production was halted. However, nobody else was offering to put up the entire budget like that, so he changed his mind the next morning.

Producer Steve Miner initially thought it was an idiotic idea to bring Jason back in sequels. "He wasn't your villain, he's just a figment of someone's imagination." Despite this, he went on to direct the next two Friday the 13th movies starring Jason as the villain.

Victor Miller's working title for the script was "Long Night at Camp Blood."

Alice: Who are you?
Mrs. Voorhees: Why I'm... I'm Mrs. Voorhees, an old friend of the Christys'.

Tom Savini and Sean Cunningham have said in interviews that Claudette's murder at the beginning, which is offscreen and only hinted at, is meant to be coy and to throw the audience off for the brutal killings that would follow.

This was Betsy Palmer's first film since The Last Angry Man (1959).

Harry Crosby was attempting to make a go of it as an actor without leveraging any connections available to him as the son of Bing Crosby. The producers have been accused of casting Harry to further mimic Halloween (1978), which cast the daughter Jamie Lee Curtis of well-known actors Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis as its female lead. Today, they claim that the prospect of having Crosby's son as the ostensible male lead was something they only later realized could be used in marketing down the road.

Robbi Morgan was not auditioning for the film when she was offered the role. While in her office, Julie Hughes just looked at Morgan and proclaimed "you're a camp counsellor." The next day Morgan was on the set.

Rex Everhart, who portrays Enos, did not film the truck scenes with Robbi Morgan, so she had to either act with an imaginary Enos, or exchange dialogue with Taso N. Stavrakis, who would sit in the truck with her.

Sean S. Cunningham wanted to cast his son Noel Cunningham as Jason, but his wife Susan E. Cunningham wouldn't let him do this.

Most of the actors were actually Broadway actors who were sent over by a Broadway casting agency. The movie debuted in a Broadway movie house.

The film takes place on both "Friday the 13th 1958" and "Friday, June 13 The Present" but in the second case, at no point in the film is the year mentioned. However, in real life the 13th of June, 1980 did, curiously enough, fall on a Friday.

Cunningham got financing for the film based solely on a title shot of "Friday the 13th" approaching the camera and breaking glass. He had no script or story idea yet.

You're doomed! You're all doomed!

Cunningham doesn't buy the whole "sinners must be punished" scenario that many slasher films seem to support. Instead he simply sees it as "bad things happening to good people for no apparent reason." Cunningham also didn't like Gene Siskel's complaint that the film was "misogynistic," and that "Cunningham is a little tougher on the girls in this movie than he is on the guys." Cunningham said the film is not meant to be sexist, and both males and females get punished equally in this movie. John Carpenter was similarly dismissive when critics complained that Halloween was pushing an old testament puritanical sex-must-be-punished-by-death moral code on the audience. Debra Hill, his co-producer and screenwriter on the project said in response: "I think people are reading moral and sociological messages into a simple horror story that has no agenda to lecture the audience in any way."

In the French dubbed version, Jason is called Jackie. His named has been restored to Jason in each of the following sequels, including the intro of Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) which is the ending of this film.

Launched the acting careers of both Adrienne King and Kevin Bacon, although it was not Bacon's first film. His breakout role was as Chip Diller in National Lampoon's Animal House, one of the leaders of the villainous Omega fraternity that is bullying and fighting with the Deltas. In between Animal House and Friday the 13th, he starred in Starting Over, as well as the 1980 superhero spoof Hero at Large, starring John Ritter.

The two Jeeps used in this film are actually the same Jeep, shown with and without its soft top. The model is a 1972 CJ-5.

Sean S. Cunningham and Victor Miller set the film at a summer camp because they needed a remote location and Miller remembered the scary stories his brothers used to share of their summers spent at camp. The name "Jason Voorhees" was Miller's idea as well, "Jason" being the combination of the first names of Miller's two sons (Josh and Ian), and "Voorhees" the last name of a girl he went to school with.

Did you know a young boy drowned the year before those two others were killed? The counselors weren't paying any attention... They were making love while that young boy drowned. His name was Jason. I was working the day that it happened. Preparing meals... here. I was the cook. Jason should've been watched. Every minute. He was... he wasn't a very good swimmer. We can go now, dear.

On opening weekend, this film reportedly grossed over ten times the production cost.

Jason's father is never referenced in the Friday the 13th movies. However, in comics and novelizations, he is said to be a man named Elias Voorhees, who is very cruel and abusive to Jason. An unused Jason and Freddy "team-up" screenplay from the early 1990s, written by Lewis Abernathy, features a brief scene with Elias that ends with Pamela murdering him.

For a film that primarily takes place in one location, a number of real northern New Jersey companies and local sites are seen or referenced in the film. As Annie is hitchhiking her way to the camp, she accepts a ride from a trucker, Enos, at a real general store in Hope, NJ, called Hartung's (aka Skip's, which is now an antique store). The truck he drives is for a real company, Elston Oil Supply, based in Stanhope, NJ, that provided their product to owners of oil heated homes, which were common in rural parts of New Jersey back in the 70's and 80's. This company still exists; in fact, the phone number on the passenger door of the truck can be reached if you use the area code used for all of northern New Jersey in 1979. Annie is dropped off by Enos at Moravian Cemetery in Hope, NJ, as it says on the rusted iron sign at the entrance. In reality, Crystal Lake is Sand Pond, which is right next to the Delaware River and crosses into eastern Pennsylvania. All of these shooting locations are in a total of three counties in the northwestern section of New Jersey. Though almost every movie in the series is set at or near Camp Crystal Lake and it is believed that all these films are set in New Jersey, this was the only Friday the 13th movie that was filmed there.

Ned: If you were a flavor of ice cream, what would it be?
Marcie: Rocky road.

Sean Cunningham cut his teeth in the industry directing soft-core porn, and then eventually transitioned into horror with fellow porn aficionado Wes Craven, with whom he produced the 1972 horror classic Last House on the Left.

Sally Field was offered the role of Alice Hardy, but turned it down.

When Marcie is in the bathhouse looking in the mirror, she does an impression of Katharine Hepburn with a line from her film, The Rainmaker (1956).

The casting was done by TNI Casting, a New York-based casting agency well-known and respected in the theater community in New York. Friday the 13th was their first horror film, and many of the actors were stage brats drawn to the auditions based upon the stellar reputations of the casting directors, having only the vaguest of clues as to what kind of film they were truly auditioning for. The most famous of these actors was Kevin Bacon, who had been in his first film, Animal House, the previous year, but had, to his surprise, returned right back to the life of a work-a-day actor. He was the only one they auditioned for the part in Friday the 13th.