Because the end of Sean Cunningham’s 1980 slasher “Friday the 13th” deeply informed the many sequels that followed, revealing the film’s climax will not necessarily be considered a spoiler. For those unfamiliar with “Friday the 13th” … Well, first, I hope the cave you’ve been living in for the past 40 years has been comfortable, but second, you may want to avert your eyes.
Throughout “Friday the 13th,” a group of randy New Jersey camp counselors are steadily picked off by a mysterious figure lurking in the shadows. It’s implied that it’s the ghost of Jason Voorhees, a kid who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake years earlier. Jason, the campfire story goes, was neglected by his counselors and mocked by the other campers. One night, Jason sunk into the lake when his would-be protectors snuck off to have sex. Now, years later, campers at Camp Crystal Lake are targeted by Jason’s vengeful spirit.
At the end of the film, however, the truth is revealed. It was not the ghost/zombie of Jason Voorhees committing the murders, but his mother Pamela (Betsy Palmer). She was wounded and bitter over the death of her son years before and she eventually snapped. Now Pamela speaks to herself in Jason’s voice, and kills the counselors that wronged “him.” When Pamela attacks the camp’s remaining survivor Alice (Adrienne King), the young woman gets the drop on her. Alice picks up a machete and slices at Pamela’s neck, taking her head off. The camera lingers briefly on Pamela’s neck stump while her hands, still twitching with life, clutch at the air. It’s a cool kill.
In a 2015 oral history printed in Uproxx, director Cunningham revealed how he and SFX wizard Tom Savini filmed the decapitation scene. Cunningham says they employed an old stage magic trick.
How to cut off Betsy Palmer’s head
Cunningham noted that decapitation had been depicted many, many times in the history of cinema. But, he commented, it was usually achieved with clever editing. An actor would scream, there would be an edit to a swinging axe, and then another edit to a mannequin or fake body that would then bear the brunt of the bladed violence. It’s a fairly simple effect to achieve and can be convincing, provided one’s fake corpse is realistic enough.
Other common ways to film decapitation are to set up a mannequin, film it from behind, and have an actor swing a sword at its head, knocking it off. That, however, will only be convincing if the sword-handler makes it look like a cut and not a baseball-style thwack.
Cunningham wanted to add some realistic movements to Betsy Palmer’s death scene, and he feels that he and Savini came up with a good set-up: they mounted fake shoulders on a real actor’s head. Cunningham said:
“Today it’s just absolutely common. But the question is, how could you cut somebody’s head off in the movies and not have to cut around it. How could you do that? Savini was obsessed with trying to figure out how to do that. When we wrote that scene we were writing it at the very end, writing it in a way that was just almost like a shot list and Savini was able to make a good match with a head and then put a head on a shoulder rig. And it just worked, and people had never seen that.”
It looked pretty good for a film with a $550,000 budget.
Pamela Voorhees’ neck stump
There was still a hard edit to the actual neck-chopping, of course. And the machete didn’t actually sever a rubber neck. A fake head, instead, toppled from the mounted shoulder rig. The head falls so quickly, that one can’t really tell that it’s fake. Also, audiences will likely be too distracted by Pamela Voorhees’ freshly revealed, blood-spurting neck stump to care.
Cunningham was proud of the effect, feeling that it was similar to the classic stage trick of sawing a woman in half. Such a trick usually involves prosthetic legs, or a second body double, but if it’s done well, audience members may be momentarily convinced that something magical happens. And it’s that moment that horror audiences live for. Cunningham continued:
“That was a really delightful sort of magic trick. It’s the equivalent of sawing a girl in half on stage. People know you didn’t saw the girl in half, but they’re just looking at it, and they just saw her cut in half. It’s doing the things that magicians do.”
“Friday the 13th” ultimately made $59.8 million at the box office, and further cemented the slasher movie as a genre unto itself. The rest of the decade would be dominated by multiple slasher sequels, including seven additional “Friday the 13th” movies. At last count, the planned prequel series, to be called “Crystal Lake,” has stalled in production. Time will tell if Jason — or Pamela — will be back to kill again.