Behind the Scenes: Friday the 13th (Cunnigham, 1980) with Betsy Palmer and Adrienne King

In the early 70s I made a horror film with Wes Craven called Last House on the Left, which had some notoriety and some success initially. But as a byproduct, both Wes and I got reputations as being people that would produce really disgusting stuff and cheap. So if you want to puke in a bucket and cheap, you know, call Sean and Wes. Finally, I got to do some kids films in the late 70s. I did a Bad News Bears kind of ripoff film called Here Come the Tigers. And after we did that, we had this notion of doing sort of a soccer movie. Well, at that point, everybody was saying what America really needs now is a good family film. So Sean and I set out and he got the funding and God love him, we made two wonderful family films. And once again, America had lied. It did not want to see good family films. Evidently, America wanted to see Halloween. Because in 1979, Halloween was absolutely raking in the box office dollars. I was playing around titles. And one of the titles that just came into my head at the time was Friday the 13th. And out of frustration, I said, Friday the 13th. Christ, if I had a picture called Friday the 13th, I could sell that. He said to me, I'm going to make the scariest picture ever made. It's going to be called Friday the 13th. So I said, well, who am I to question? And I went to school basically on the movie Halloween, saw it once, figured out what a good horror film would need. First of all, you have to start with a prior evil, something that happened a long time ago that was really bad. Then you have to have a group of adolescents or slightly post adolescents who are in an environment in which they cannot be helped by adults. The other thing I learned from Halloween is that if you make love, you get killed. So I had to figure out a way to do that. We took out this ad in Variety that said, Friday the 13th, the most terrifying film ever made was a great big block letters crashing through a mirror. He was very open about the fact that he was definitely going to make people sit up and watch this movie. Sean and I talked about all the possible places that it could be. And I came up with a summer camp. How far is it to Camp Crystal Lake? They have to watch themselves be thinned out one by one. I had some theater owners from Boston who had invested initially in Last House on the Left, and they came in for a meaningful chunk. With all that stuff at hand, suddenly I was able to raise the money to make a picture called Friday the 13th. To my way of thinking, Friday the 13th was very much like, hey, kids, we're going to make a movie. Very fortunate to run into Barry Moss in New York, work with Julie Hughes, and they were primarily theatrical casting agents, but they were able to help us cast the movie. As soon as I think they were associated with it, it brought it up a notch. Every actor and actress that was under 21 was trying to get an audition. The cast of Friday the 13th, to me, seemed to be just a bunch of kids that were looking for their first break. Do you think you're going to last all summer? I don't know if I'm going to last all week. I was trying to make the break from commercials into television, into film. So you would do anything and everything you could to get some kind of role on a film, and I actually danced for about four weeks on Saturday Night Fever. For me to actually get this without a theatrical agent was pretty amazing. I mean, those things just don't happen. I was a Burger King girl the year before. One of the things that Barry Moss brought was Harry Crosby, who, as it turns out, was Bing Crosby's son. Kevin Bacon was in our movie. I know for Kevin Bacon, it was like his fourth. He'd already done Animal House. He was a kid from New York trying to figure out how to make it happen. When we were doing the setup for the movie, we hired this guy named Walt Gorney. The function of Crazy Ralph is to set the tone for this horrible geographic area. You're doomed if you stay here. We cast nobody that wasn't willing to go out and get dirty and have special effects applied to them and just accept it on faith we're going to go out and do all this stuff. But I swear to God, it's going to be okay. But when you've had a dream as long as I have, you'll do anything. Everybody was young and overacting. Terribly overacting, everybody. Hey, wasn't that the road up for Camp Crystal Lake back there? We shot this picture in a tiny little town in New Jersey called Blairstown. We shot completely below the radar out at a Boy Scout camp. Camp Noby Bosco, that's what it was, which stands for North Bergen Boy Scouts. Camp Blood, they're opening that place again? We had to wait for the Boy Scouts to all go home and go back to school before we were able to come in and make a contribution to the Boy Scouts and camp out there basically for three weeks or four weeks while we shot the movie. There was not one person that ever really complained about how cold it was and wet and just dreadful. We didn't actually have a real whole script. We would get pages that day and they would change what we did have. They'd change them the next day. So it was kind of like, we got to find out as we were going along. The image always was of me was that I was this girl next door. And of course, I've always said that there wasn't a gal that ever lived next door to me that I wanted to be like. I'm not afraid. Betsy Palmer had worked in television on the morning talk shows and she was squeaky clean. Comparable to the Doris Day type. I was always trying to prove that I wasn't the girl next door. I had a Mercedes, which I'd had a number of years and it broke down on the Connecticut Turnpike. So I said to myself, I need a new car, universe. And I went out to go shopping for a car and I found a little Scirocco. I thought, oh, that's what I want. I want a cool little car like this. And so the phone rang and my agent said, how would you like to do a movie? I said, great, that'll pay for the car that I want to buy. And he said, well, now there's just one other thing I have to tell you. He said, it's a horror film. And I said, oh no. So the script came and I read it and I said, what a piece of... What monster could have done this? And I said, oh, nobody is ever going to see this. It will come and it will go and I'll have my Scirocco. The real iconoclastic part of Friday the 13th was taking mom and apple pie and standing it upside down and saying, you've never seen a mother like this. I didn't get up there and try to play a bad lady. In fact, I tried to play a good lady who had gone a little wrong, but that was because she wanted to save more children. She didn't want them to die. This was the mother that I never had, the one who would protect you and go to any horrible lengths to do it. And you do, you want to do that. You want to all of a sudden get very kind of, I'm that bad lady. And I was beginning to do that. And Sean would say, no, no, no, no, no, Betsy. He said, just play it straight. That's all. Kill her, mommy. Kill her. What we needed to do was create something that had an element of circus in it, but we had no idea how to do any of this stuff. I think Steve Miner said we should hook up with Tom Savini, who had worked with George Romero on Dawn of the Dead. He would be looking through my screenplay and be saying, well, I noticed you have a hatchet in the face on page 38 or whatever it was. And he turned to Sean and said, do you want a fake face and a real hatchet, or do you want a fake hatchet and a real face? Savini just said anything's possible. It was a highly technical special effect that literally they could only shoot once. I mean, when that arrow comes through and the blood squirts up and Tom Savini is underneath the cot and he's squirting blood into this tube with this plunger so that can come up through the fake rubber chest. After the shot, Sean says cut and everybody applauds. And Tom Savini comes out from underneath the bed covered in blood. And it's sheep's blood and it goes like this and it's just awful. And somebody says, what happened? And he said, well, I started to hit the pump and the fitting gave way. So blood was going all over the place. So he had to literally blow on the pipe to make the blood come up through the arrow and then look like Kevin Bacon was squirting all over the place. If you're going to sit there and blow sheep's blood up through a tube in Kevin Bacon's alleged chest, you're giving a lot. And then, of course, you get the one shot with the hatchet in the face, which is, of course, the Styrofoam hatchet glued onto the real face. And that was the other thing about it. You waited for the next one to happen. It's about the buildup to the tension. It's about the don't go in there. It's about, oh, don't go in there. Can I help you? One of the most memorable aspects is the music. It's iconographic now. It's like, people come up to me. Oh, you did. And everybody thinks it's cha-cha-cha. I'm like, cha-cha-cha. What are you talking about? I got this idea from the picture. There's a close-up of Betsy Palmer's mouth. Get her, mommy. Get her. Kill her. The mouth is going, kill her, mommy. Kill her, mommy. So I got the wacky idea to take kill her mommy, the first letter of, first two letters of kill, K-I and ma-M-A. And then there was a gizmo we had called an echoplex, which we were using a lot in the film. Kill her, mommy. Kill her. I went to the microphone, and I don't know why, but I just went, and it went, then I went, and whoa, I went, that's really, that's pretty spooky. So I think it's obviously a success, because everybody remembers it. It was really important that we rehearsed those scenes, because we were really using pokers, you know, and really using frying pans. They were not props. I mean, they were props, but they were real props. There was one moment when I was supposed to smack Adrienne, you know, give her a in the face. And on stage, of course, you do, you know, and you're careful. You cup your hand, and you get it along the jawbone so you don't break them, you know, their jaw. And when we actually came to blows, I got a real smash across the face. She fell to the ground. I said, did I hurt you? He said, what is it? What is it? I said, well, I said, we were just rehearsing the scene. And I said, you know, you hit somebody when you're going on stage. He said, no, no, no, Betsy. You don't hit anybody in the films. I remember after I had the fight on the beach, I lost my head. How in the world can we do this? Chop somebody's head off and make it look as if it actually happened. That night, he made my mock-up of my head. Straws up my nose, all this gunk and goop going down my face. He was baking Betsy Palmer's head in the oven, you know. It's like it was so bizarre. You wind up building up her shoulders and put the false head on top of it. I know that Tommy Savini wielded the machete. But it's amazing how real that looks. It was really disgusting. And we were at the last, last, last, penultimate draft. And Sean said, Victor, we need a chair jumper for the end. And I said, OK. And I went back to my drawing board and borrowed from all of the best horror films I've ever seen. And so we have the dream sequence with Adrian King floating around in a rowboat. And then the hand coming out of the water. And it's Jason. The ghost story is over. So you can turn on the lights. So Dawn comes up. And she's on this beautiful, placid lake. When the kid comes up out of the bottom of the lake, it comes up musically at a point where it's also unexpected. Then you had the audience. The part of Jason. We wound up hiring Ari Lehman. He came out and did it. We were both so cold and freezing. They had the heaters there. And, you know, they had towels as soon as we came out. And we did it a few times. And I'm going, Sean, are you sure we want to do this again? He goes, we're going to get it. We're going to get it right. Don't worry about it. This is it. But I certainly did not suggest in that scene that he was or deformed in any way. Tommy Savini showed me this Polaroid. And I didn't have my glasses on that night. And I said, now, who is this? He said, oh, that's your son, Jason. I said, why does he look so strange? He said, oh, he's a... I said, what? I said, that wasn't in the script. He said, no, but they thought he didn't look weird enough. So we were making him up. Because of the nature of the nightmare ending. And because they, Sean had Tom Savini on board as such a fabulous makeup artist. They turned him into sort of a monstrous looking Cretan. I mean, he just looked awful. We had screenings for ourselves. But then we had the first screening that I recall for Paramount. And if you recall the ending, when that head pops up, I swear people just jumped at it. And I think that's the thing that sold it. The next thing I know, Paramount has bought the movie and is going to do this massive release in all these theaters. I'm going, wow. Warner Brothers took foreign distribution. Paramount took domestic. At that point, Frank Mancuso was running distribution for Paramount. And he made a choice to take this no star independent film, release it nationally with a national budget and see what happens. And the notion of doing an independent film that would ever be released nationally had never occurred. The opening night on Broadway, it was just packed. It was packed. What are all these people going to see this movie? Do they know what they're going to see? I guess they did. The best part of watching Friday the 13th in theaters, and I was watching the audience say, don't go in there. You know, I mean, literally talking to the screen saying, girl, don't go in there. You don't want to go there. And Sean would just go like, I got him. I got them all. The kids would come out of the theater telling the kids are coming in the theater. Oh, you better look out. Or there was so much fun. And it became a really big social event. The next thing I knew, I was looking at the variety results. And we were in the top 10. People poured into the theaters to see this. And kept coming and kept coming and kept coming. They started talking about 10 million, 20 million, 30 million dollars. When the film was released, by and large, it was dismissed by the critics as being exploitative and just not really worthy of attention. The critics universally hated it. I read that I'm really awful and that the movie sucks and that we all suck. One of them was fit to be tied because I had done this movie. How dare I let my viewing audience down by playing this horrible woman? He said, you write to her. So there were people who were disappointed in me. I didn't look at it that way as, you know, the victim. I actually thought it was an empowering position. I lived. Have I written something that caused people to go off? If there's a paranoid schizophrenic out there who's seen Friday the 13th 147,000 times, should I feel guilty if he goes out and murders somebody? I had someone who came into my life, a very bizarre situation. It was a person who was obsessed and for some reason obsessed with me. I had a reevaluation of my career at that point. I realized that I just didn't want to be in front of the camera that much, that my life was going to be so affected. And it was. It was really affected. For quite a while until the person was apprehended. We didn't find any boy. And he's still there. We started talking about doing a sequel within days, really, of the initial success. And that came directly from Paramount. You killed eight people. Maybe next year you should kill 12 people. My friends in Boston felt it was really important to bring back this Jason character. Well, I thought that was just the worst idea I ever heard. I was completely wrong. There was no hockey mask, which became one of the icons of the film. It was never my idea to put a hockey mask on anybody because I had nothing to do with parts two through whatever. I said, I don't know who this guy in the hockey mask is. I would never have done what I did to Camp Blood if my little boy hadn't drowned. I said, he's at the bottom of the lake. Friday the 13th kind of became its own little industry, didn't it? When you go to cocktail parties and you say you're a writer, and then people say, well, would you write that I would know? Now I can say, well, Friday the 13th, and they either go, ooh, or really? But at least they know what it was. I mean, I dismissed it for many, many years, and I wouldn't fess up to it at all. And then it just became such a big thing where everybody seemed to enjoy it so much. I thought, well, all right. I'm comfortable about it now. It's almost like a badge of honor, in a way. It has become that. I'm the queen of the slashers, you know? What am I going to do? It's not going to die. It will go on forever. The most important thing you can do in a film career is make money. Because if you make money, people will let you make more films and take other chances, and nobody will blame them. So I've had a lot of opportunities given to me as a result of doing this one little film in New Jersey. Oh, God help them. My kids may be producing Friday the 13th movies long after I'm gone.