20 Things You Somehow Missed In Friday The 13th (1980)
18. Betsy Palmer's Double
Betsy Palmer was on the set of Friday the 13th for a mere ten days to film her sequences as Mrs Voorhees and focused almost exclusively on her confrontation with Alice Hardy. However, the killer is present throughout the entire film.
Memorably, when the killer gives Robbi Morgan's Annie Phillips a lift, Annie soon realises that the driver does not want her to get to Camp Crystal Lake. The killer pursues Annie through some woods, using cunning and an inherent knowledge of the area to catch her and slit her throat.
The killer is initially characterised as being male although whilst it might seem that Annie is flirting with the killer in their Jeep, her behaviour is also akin to one woman confiding in another.
For the killer's initial scenes, Tom Savini's special make-up effects assistant, Taso N. Stavrakis doubled for Betsy Palmer; in fact, Robbi Morgan never met Palmer at all during filming.
To try and conceal this potential continuity error, Cunningham had Betsy Palmer wear several layers of clothes to give her a more masculine build. Stavrakis also doubled for Palmer during Mrs Voorhees's death scene, as his own hairy hands come up to feel for her missing head.