13 Things You Didn't Know About Friday The 13th Part 2
Let’s see how much you know about the movie that really kicked off the legendary franchise...
There wasn’t supposed to be a Friday The 13th Part 2. Nobody really believed that Friday The 13th would do such great business - nearly forty million dollars on a half-million budget. But there was a problem. Rooted in a lurid version of reality as it was, and with the killer having been decapitated in the final minutes of the movie, Sean Cunningham’s slasher wasn’t exactly set up for a sequel.
Despite that, Paramount began making plans for a follow-up soon after the original movie’s run came to an end. With unhinged bereaved mother Mrs Voorhees definitively deceased, it was decided to go with her son Jason as the new Crystal Lake murderer, and a new batch of pretty young things were assembled as his cannon fodder.
Just as no one involved in Friday The 13th had any idea how successful it would be, no one making Friday The 13th Part 2 had any clue that the movie would kick off a franchise that would run well into the next millennium, or that its gruesome hillbilly antagonist would become a household name and a horror icon.
The franchise’s ubiquity means that a lot of fans think they know everything there is to know about Jason Voorhees and Friday The 13th. Of course, there’s a difference between a fan and a super fan - so let’s see which one you are...
13. The Original Cast And Crew Thought It Was Stupid
Cunningham’s original idea for the sequel involved using the Friday The 13th name as part of an annual release strategy: once a year, a new Friday movie would be released with a new concept, plot and characters.
However, the film’s distributors reportedly insisted on continuity between the first and second movies. It was decided, given the popularity of the closing scare with Jason Voorhees rising from the water to attack final girl Alice Hardy, that Jason himself should be the new killer.
Cunningham and original writer Victor Miller hated the idea - and they still do. That coda had only ever been a gag, a way to inflict a final scare on the audience - that’s why it was framed as dream sequence, which allowed for Jason to appear as a child despite having died two decades earlier. Jason Voorhees was only ever supposed to be a plot device. For Mrs Voorhees’ motivation to work, he had to have died in 1957.
Effects and prosthetics whiz kid Tom Savini felt the same way, commenting dismissively:
"For Jason to be around today means what? He survived by living off of the crawfish on the side of the lake? For 35 years? Nobody saw this kid walking around and growing up?"
Meanwhile Betsy Palmer, the actor who’d played Mrs Voorhees and who’d created a backstory for her character that she identified with strongly, simply insisted that ‘her son’ was dead.