Long before I had ever seen a horror movie in full, I was well aware that a man wearing a hockey mask and brandishing a sharp weapon was bad news.
I can’t quite pinpoint it, maybe it was Clark Griswold scaring his neighbors in Christmas Vacation (1989) or the hitchhiker Plucky Duck faces off against in the 1992 Tiny Toon’s DTV movie. Or, it could have been the machete wielding icon himself, staring back at me from those terrifying VHS covers at the video store. Either way, even as a kid totally uninterested in horror, I knew that Friday the 13th meant death by way of an un-killable goalie named Jason.
So, imagine my surprise when Scream (1996) revealed otherwise in its opening minutes. I, the uninitiated horror novice, found myself in the protagonist’s shoes when a mysterious caller prompted Drew Barrymore to identify the killer in Friday the 13th. Her vehement answer was the same answer I would’ve given: Jason. And, unfortunately, like Drew, I too would’ve gotten her boyfriend Steve gutted. For, moments later, the menacing caller informed her that Jason’s mother, Mrs. Voorhees, was the original killer.
I was… surprised. It was like pop culture had lied to me. Jason’s mother? That just sounded so… interesting. And while the seed of horror fandom Scream planted did not blossom until many years later, the revelation of Mrs. Voorhees’ maniacal actions offered an intriguing question even then: if she was the killer of this famous horror flick, why had I only ever heard of her son?
I didn’t see Friday the 13th (1980) until I picked up a boxset of the franchise’s first eight movies on DVD some time after my experience with Scream. Even though I knew the ending, I had a great time watching it unfold. Particularly ==the way Pamela Voorhees was introduced. A matronly woman with a smile on her face. Someone to be trusted. Someone who could help.
Subversive and chilling, the advent of the matriarchal killer challenged the tropes of the burgeoning slasher genre as well as the pre-conceived notions of the audiences which were devouring them. The viewer assumes the killer will be a crazed, sexually stunted male. I can only imagine the surprise in 1980 when it was revealed that the ruthless murders had been committed by the hands of a grieving mother, attempting to avenge the death of her child.
The production of the film went through several phases, many of the most impressive set pieces and kills evolving as the script transitioned to the screen (the arrow through Kevin Bacon’s neck, for example, did not appear in the shooting script). However, what was there to begin with and never altered course was Pamela Voorhees and her graphic demise by the blade of her own machete.
Victor Miller’s screenplay is incredibly action oriented, all the while maintaining a sense of ambiguity throughout many of the events onscreen, allowing the action description to read clearly while still encouraging imagination. His words evoke a moody atmosphere, the rising dawn signifying the clarity and command with which Alice stands up to the villain and fights back. Of course, the transition to the screen brings with it several alterations, emphasizing the brutality of the fight and expediting the narrative flow.
Together Sean S. Cunningham and Victor Miller brought to life a truly iconic villain, birthing a franchise not built on her image, but on her legacy. Echoing through time, the shock of Pamela Voorhees’ actions invaded the minds of horrors fans and novices alike and her iconic death cements the bombastic and lasting impact of her presence onscreen.
She may not have been wearing a hockey mask, but once I saw her in action, I understood why Ghostface asked Drew Barrymore about Mrs. Voorhees and not her son. She may not get the fame, but damn it all if she doesn’t provide the franchise the weight such infamy requires.
THE SCENE
Alice hurries to a canoe. She sits. A shadow rises behind her. Mrs. Voorhees swings a machete toward Alice’s back. Alice stands, blocking the blow with an oar. The oar breaks and Alice is knocked down. Mrs. Voorhees attempts to stab her with the broken oar. Mrs. Voorhees attacks Alice, pinning her to the ground. They wrestle. Alice escapes the woman’s clutches and retrieves the discarded machete. She rushes Mrs. Voorhees and decapitates her. Alice wanders to the canoe and pulls it into the lake, drifting off into the darkness.
THE SCRIPT
THE SCREEN
EXT. LAKE — NIGHT
The moon comes out from behind a cloud. ALICE pushes a canoe into the water and paddles, as rapidly as her tired body will permit, out in the lake to safety.
EXT. LAKE — NIGHT
Exhausted, ALICE puts her paddle across her lap and falls forward, slumped across a thwart.
The screenplay opens as the scene in the film concludes, Alice allowing herself to drift lazily away from shore. Then, DAWN. The birds are up, foraging for food. The scene is described as peaceful. Alice is depicted as still as she reflects and listens to the sound of the lapping water.
Clearly, from the start, the film was written to have a false conclusion with one-final-scare in tow. In this iteration, the final scare would have been an elongated battle, set in broad daylight, with Mrs. Voorhees. The words on the page evoke a creeping dread, an unease to the calm which begs to be shattered. A block of text signifies the climactic occurrence, impressing not only the violence of what is to come but the utter shock of it happening at all.
Suddenly there is a blood-curdling scream, a MUSICAL STINGER, and the screen is filled with the flying, whirling form of MRS. VOORHEES, who leaps from the overhanging boughs into the canoe, barely missing ALICE’s slumped form!
A clear parallel to the Jason-ending that the film eventually embraced, Mrs. Voorhees’ animalistic attack on the canoe feels almost supernatural. She’s a force of nature here, no longer hiding or shrouded in darkness, unleashing the full force of her fury on the last remaining person at the camp she feels is deserving of it.
The film charts an entirely different path to this encounter.
The night is dark, alight only by the surface of the full moon. Alice approaches the lake in a wide shot, hurrying at first but slowing as she reaches the canoe. Then, she sits. The moment is reminiscent of the calm the screenplay shows a clear desire to create leading up to the attack. Only seconds pass before the scripted MUSICAL STINGER alerts us to danger and a shadow is cast against Alice’s back.
The film shows a medium wide angle of the water where Alice’s reflection sits in contemplation. A moment later, Mrs. Voorhees’ reflection is there too, moving in as she swings her machete down with tremendous force. Hardly a flying, whirling form, Mrs. Voorhees is very much depicted as she was previously, an intelligent, unhinged woman determined to punish those people who embody the carelessness that resulted in her young son’s demise.
The decision to keep the struggle in the darkness, under the full moon, adds an immediacy to the eeriness and the flow of the plot. It allows the bulk of the interaction to take place on land, as opposed to water, making for a clearer fight that was more than likely easier to execute like it was to track in the viewer’s eyes.
In the script, the canoe overturns and the two face one another in shallow water. Mrs. Voorhees is covered in mud and blood and the two wade through waist-high water as quickly as they can, Mrs. Voorhees brandishing her machete and Alice her paddle. Then, again, Mrs. Voorhees’ face goes through a horrifying transformation and speaks in the VOICE OF JASON.
This happens twice in the script before her demise, but the film excises these bits of dialogue entirely. As her psychosis has already been established and it’s clear why she’s doing what she’s doing, the words add nothing new and again only make the exchange more clunky. The film chooses to be frugal with its time, focusing on the intensity of the struggle and nothing erroneous to it.
In the film, Mrs. Voorhees’ machete slices through the paddle in a close up shot and the two fence with their respective objects for a handful of seconds. It feels improvisational and intense, evolving into a struggle which lands them both on the ground. Mrs. Voorhees pins Alice down, strangling her. Discarding the weapons adds a brutality to the event and the act of strangling reminds the viewer of Mrs. Voorhees’ son’s inability to breathe as he drowned in the lake.
The struggle is shown in a medium wide shot, the tip of the canoe in the left corner as the two women struggle to its right. Every move is visible. Every hit easy to discern, each impact felt.
The script calls for a similar confrontation in the end, again in the bright light of the sun, but in a far more murky manner:
MRS. VOORHEES is trying to strangle ALICE, her hands stretching to reach around her throat. They roll over and under the water. We cannot see who is winning.
Once again, the screenplay pushes toward metaphor, the characters falling into the waters which swallowed the antagonist’s son and harbor the dark secrets of the past. While beautiful to read on paper, the visualization of the fight on land under the moonlight allows the events a more visceral reaction that falls in line with the tone of the movie around it.
In the film, Alice escapes Mrs. Voorhees’ clutches and spots the discarded machete. She hurries over to it in a wide shot and retrieves it. Mrs. Voorhees watches, at first amused but then anything but. The events onscreen transition to slow motion. The shooting script mentions nothing about camera speed, simply that Mrs. Voorhees is screeching madly as Jason when Alice shoots up out of the water holding the machete, and in one, wild swing, decapitates MRS. VOORHEES, whose head flies off into the water.
In the film, once the motion slows, the image intercuts between a close up of Mrs. Voorhees and the wrathful Alice, screaming as she runs full force toward her attacker. Mrs. Voorhees watches, her mouth opening wider and wider, more in shock than fear, finally culminating in a swing of the machete and the woman’s severed head falling from her sinewy neck, spurting blood.
In the script, The body stands for a minute, then falls heavily into the lake.
In the film, Alice stands back as Mrs. Voorhees’ headless body teeters before her for a second or two, her hands rising up into the frame, grasping and clenching as if lamenting the loss of their commanding voice. The moment adds a sense of realness to Mrs. Voorhees’ demented character. She does not feel like a supernaturally endowed monster, rather a flawed human being plagued by tragedy, sadness and the rage which those things often birth.
While there’s a poetry inherent in the script’s assertion that she joins her son at the bottom of the lake, the film offers a more visually and narratively satisfying conclusion to her character. And, at the very least, it’s lake adjacent.
The script leaves the scene with, ALICE drops the machete into the water and starts to wade to shore. The film takes a lead from the opening lines of the scripted scene, as Alice pulls the canoe into the water and drifts into the lake. The darkness engulfs her in a wide shot and she is gone.
Dawn does indeed come after, as does one final scare. However, instead of the human villain, back from the dead in a crazed, water-logged attack, it is by all accounts the manifestation of the memory of her son. The ghostly, monstrous face of untended grief which neither Alice, nor Mrs. Voorhees, will ever truly be able to defeat… only manage.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
“My favorite character is Mrs. Voorhees,” director and producer Sean S. Cunningham said on the blu-ray commentary track for Friday the 13th (Available here), “she was the crowning villain, she’s the wonderful achievement of my life.”
I’ve known about Jason Voorhees for as long as I can remember. It’s as though he were some great literary figure like Blackbeard the Pirate or Captain Ahab. It’s a name and an image that floats effortlessly through the cultural zeitgeist, popping up in every genre and every form of entertainment. But he’s nothing without his mother.
Pamela Voorhees is a character that received very little screen time, but whose impact to the film, the franchise and the horror genre is immense and wide reaching. I suppose part of the reason I had never heard of the character is the tendency for genre outsiders to write off films like Friday the 13th as unremarkable tripe, rarely giving a film like this the attention and interest it deserves.
Outside of the effects, a great deal of time and effort went into Mrs. Voorhees’ character. Betsy Palmer, the actress who portrayed Mrs. Voorhees, talked about her approach in David Grove’s 2005 book Making Friday the 13th: The Legend of Camp Blood (Available here):
“Being an actress who uses the Stanislavski method, I always try to find details about my character. With Pamela I began with a class ring that I remember reading in the script that she’d worn. Starting with that, I traced Pamela back to my own high school days in the early 1940s. So it’s 1944, a very conservative time, and Pamela has a steady boyfriend. They have sex—which is very bad of course—and Pamela soon gets pregnant with Jason. The father takes off and when Pamela tells her parents, they disown her because having… babies out of wedlock isn’t something that good girls do. I think she took Jason and raised him the best she could, but he turned out to be a very strange boy. [She took] lots of odd jobs and one of those jobs was as a cook at a summer camp. Then Jason drowns and her whole world collapses. What were the counselors doing instead of watching Jason? They were having sex, which is the way that she got into trouble. From that point on, Pamela became very psychotic and puritanical in her attitudes as she was determined to kill all of the immoral camp counselors.” (Grove, 2005).
Beyond the depth of the characterization, the filmmakers knew that much of what determined the villains impact would be the final confrontation between she and last surviving camp counselor Alice. In the feature “Secrets Galore Behind the Gore” found on the blu-ray disc, Tom Savini said, “she has to die in a glorious way.” In the same feature, Sean S. Cunningham spoke about the challenges associated with the effects.
“In 1980, if you wanted to do a special effect like chop somebody’s head off, you didn’t know how to do it. There wasn’t a way to do it. There weren’t computers and it had never really been done before as a graphic special effect… we were creating a magic show.”
Tom Savini continued on the same feature, saying, “We cast her head… we stuck the foam rubber head with toothpicks into the rubber neck so that the machete when it hit it would break the toothpicks.” He also commented, “Her hands actually come up into the frame as if looking for the head… and that’s just our way of making fake stuff look real.”
It’s easy to take the effects work of decades past for granted. To assign predisposed notions of unimportance to the gritty, independent works of horror and exploitation with a shrug and a chuckle. But if Scream’s success in the mid-90s is any indication, then the types of movies which suffer such a fate are more relevant than the cultural idiom which consumes and regurgitates them may be willing to admit.
Mrs. Voorhees may not have haunted me from the front covers of VHS boxes as a kid, may not have terrorized poor Plucky duck on his way to Happy World Land or inspired Clark Griswold to don a mask and a machete to scare his yuppie neighbors, but she easily could have. A mask is scary, but so is a welcome smile, that is, when it’s hiding something far more sinister.
The culmination of her handful of moments onscreen went through some fairly sizable changes, its true, but the script painted a climax that was steeped in powerful metaphor which reverberated into what finally hit the screen. A darker, more intense, more brutal fight which solidified Mrs. Voorhees’ power as well as her memory as one of the horror genre’s best villains. After all, one should never stand between a mother and her child.
In the film’s commentary track, Victor Miller says simply, “there were hundreds of reasons not to like Friday the 13th, unless you really enjoyed the movie.”
Horror offers many elements that may be off putting to the general public, but within them is a progressive, beating heart of challenging themes and social commentary that is far better informed and explored through the lens of the extreme.
In the end, VHS box or not, Mrs. Voorhees’ welcome smile and intense, piercing glare will follow me just as much as her hockey mask clad son, as it will anyone who manages sees her turn in Friday the 13th— even if Scream does spoil it for them first.
Friday the 13th (1980): Written by Victor Miller & Directed by Sean S. Cunningham
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