Friday the 13th Part 2

*"The body count continues..."*
—Tagline
***Friday the 13th Part 2*** is a 1981 American slasher horror film directed by Steve Miner. It is a direct sequel to *Friday the 13th*, picking up five years after that film's conclusion, where a new murderer stalks and begins murdering the camp counselors at a nearby training camp in Crystal Lake. The film marks the first time Jason Voorhees is the antagonist (his mother was the killer in the previous film).

Originally, *Friday the 13th Part 2* was not intended to be a direct sequel to the 1980 original but rather part of an anthology series of films based on the Friday the 13th superstition, but after the popularity of the original film's surprise ending to feature Jason Voorhees attacking the heroine, the filmmakers decided to bring back Jason and the mythology surrounding Camp Crystal Lake, a trend which would be repeated for the rest of the series.

Stylistically, *Friday the 13th Part 2* reproduces certain key elements that made the original *Friday the 13th* a sleeper hit in 1980, such as first-person camera perspectives, gory stalk-and-slash scenes, and campground settings. Although it did not reach the original's box office success, the sequel was a financial success, grossing over $21.7 million in the United States on a budget of $1.25 million.

## Plot

Two months after the Crystal Lake massacre, sole survivor Alice Hardy is recovering from her traumatic experience. In her apartment, she finds the head of Pamela Voorhees in her refrigerator and is brutally murdered by an unseen Jason Voorhees with an ice pick.

Five years later, Paul Holt hosts a camp-counselor training camp at a building near Crystal Lake. Included among the counselor hopefuls are lovers Jeff and Sandra, troublemaker Scott, his girlfriend Terry, wheelchair-bound Mark, sweet-natured Vickie, jokester Ted, and Paul's assistant, Ginny. At the campfire that night, Paul tells them the legend of Jason Voorhees to scare the other counselors from entering Camp Crystal Lake. That night, Crazy Ralph wanders onto the property to warn the kids, but is garroted with barbed wire by Jason. The next day, Jeff and Sandra go to Camp Crystal Lake and find a recently-killed animal that looks like Terry's dog, Muffin. They are discovered trespassing by the sheriff and returned to the camp. As he is leaving, the sheriff spots Jason on the road and chases him into the woods, coming across a run-down shack. As he investigates, he discovers a sight that horrifies him, moments before he is killed by a claw hammer to the skull.

Back at camp, trainer Paul offers the others one last night on the town, but makes Jeff and Sandra remain behind as punishment for their earlier excursion. Terry stays behind to look for Muffin, Scott stays behind to flirt with Terry, Mark doesn't want to go, and Vickie decides to stay with Mark. Terry goes swimming and Scott plays a prank on her by stealing her clothes. He gets caught in a rope trap and hangs upside down from a tree, while Terry goes to get a knife to cut him down. Scott has his throat slit with a machete, and Terry is killed off-screen when she returns. At a noisy bar in the nearby town, Ginny muses that if Jason were still alive, having witnessed his mother's death with no distinction between life and death, right or wrong. Paul scoffs at the idea, proclaiming that Jason is nothing more than an urban legend.

Back at the camp, while Mark is waiting for Vickie, he is murdered by Jason with a machete to the face, and his wheelchair is pushed down a flight of outdoor stairs. Jason then moves upstairs and murders Jeff and Sandra with a spear as they are having sex. Vickie returns and comes across her friends' bodies, before she is stabbed to death by Jason, who is wearing a burlap sack to conceal his face. Ginny suspects something is wrong when she and Paul return to find the lights out and the place in disarray. Jason creeps through the dark and attacks Paul before turning on Ginny who runs in terror. She is chased through some of the cabins before fleeing into the woods, and eventually comes across the old shack. After barricading herself inside, she finds a rough altar with Pamela Voorhees's decomposing head on it, surrounded by a pile of Jason's victims. Ginny quickly puts on Pamela's sweater and tries to psychologically convince Jason that she is his mother. The ruse fails when he spots his mother's head on the altar and attacks Ginny. Paul suddenly intervenes and attacks Jason but is quickly overwhelmed. Just as Jason is about to kill Paul, Ginny picks up the machete and slams it down into his shoulder, seemingly killing him.

Paul and Ginny return to the cabin and are greeted at the cabin door by Muffin the dog, alive and well. Just as they feel at ease, an unmasked Jason bursts through the cabin window behind Ginny and tries to drag her out. She then awakens, being loaded into an ambulance, calling out to Paul, who is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, back at the shack in the woods, Pamela's head remains on its altar.

## Casting

Tom Savini was asked to work on the film, but declined because he was already working on another project (*Midnight*) at that time.

Adrienne King was pursued by an obsessed fan after the success of the original *Friday the 13th* and wished her role to be small as possible.

Actor Warrington Gillette Played Jason throughout the entire film and was credited as Jason in the end credits of the film. Stuntman Steve Daskawisz (also known as Steve Dash) was credited as Jason Stunt Double.

### Cast

* Amy Steel as Ginny Field
* John Furey as Paul Holt
* Adrienne King as Alice Hardy
* Warrington Gillette as Jason Voorhees
* Walt Gorney as Crazy Ralph
* Stu Charno as Ted
* Bill Randolph as Jeff
* Marta Kober as Sandra Dier
* Tom McBride as Mark
* Lauren-Marie Taylor as Vickie
* Kirsten Baker as Terry
* Russell Todd as Scott
* Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees
* Cliff Cudney as Max
* Steve Daskawisz as Jason Voorhees stunt double

## Production

### Development

Following the success of *Friday the 13th* in 1980, Paramount Pictures began plans to make a sequel. First acquiring the worldwide distribution rights, Frank Mancuso, Sr. stated, "We wanted it to be an event, where teenagers would flock to the theaters on that Friday night to see the latest episode." The initial ideas for a sequel involved the *Friday the 13th* title being used for a series of films, released once a year, that would not have direct continuity with each other, but be a separate "scary movie" of their own right. Phil Scuderi—one of three owners of Esquire Theaters, along with Steve Minasian and Bob Barsamian, who produced the original film—insisted that the sequel have Jason Voorhees, Pamela's son, even though his appearance in the original film was only meant to be a joke. Steve Miner, associate producer on the first film, believed in the idea and would go on to direct the first two sequels, after Cunningham opted not to return to the director's chair. Miner would use many of the same crew members from the first film while working on the sequels. Cunningham had mixed feelings about the entire "Friday the 13th" enterprise that he outlined for noted film critic and author Stephen Hunter in an interview for a book Hunter wrote on violent films, which included Hunter making the statement that Cunningham "wasn't particularly proud" of his work on these films and Cunningham bluntly saying that the only thing that seemed to reach a teenaged audience at that time period involved high levels of gore and graphic violence.

### Filming

Principal photography took place in October and finished in August 1980.

Daskawisz was rushed to the emergency room when Amy Steel hit his middle finger with a machete during filming. Steel explained: "The timing was wrong, and he didn't turn his pickaxe properly, and the machete hit his finger." Daskawisz received 13 stitches on his middle finger. It was covered with a piece of rubber, and Daskawisz and Steel insisted on doing the scene all over again.

Originally the film's ending was after Ginny was loaded into the ambulance, it would switch to Mrs. Voorhees' head, which then opens its eyes and smile, indicating that Jason had killed Paul, however the ending was scrapped at the last minute for being too fake and cheapened the movie's impact.

In one scene where Daskawisz was wearing the burlap flour sack, part of the flour sack was flapping at his eye, so the crew used tape inside the eye area to prevent it from flapping. Daskawisz received rug burns around his eye from the tape from wearing the rough flour sack material for hours.

The film's ending has been a source of confusion for fans. Writer Ron Kurz has stated that Jason's window jump was intended to be set in reality and that Paul was killed offscreen. However, the beginning of *Part III*, in replaying the end of *Part 2*, instead showed Jason pulling the machete out of his shoulder and crawling away as Ginny and Paul leave him for dead in the shack. This arguably retcons the scene of Jason's window jump into a dream. In addition, near the beginning of *Part III*, a news broadcast reports the body count at eight, thus excluding Paul from this count.

Rumors sparked that John Furey left before the film wrapped as his character does not appear in the end. In truth, his character was not intended to have appeared.

### Music

In 1982, Gramavision Records released a LP album of selected pieces of Harry Manfredini's scores from the first three Friday the 13th films. On January 13, 2012, La-La Land Records released a limited edition 6-CD boxset containing Manfredini's scores from the first six films. It sold out in less than 24 hours. Waxworks Records will release the Harry Manfredini composed score, in summer 2015 on Vinyl.

## Release

The film was released theatrically on April 30, 1981, to immediate box office success, bringing in $6,429,784 its opening weekend. It played on 1,350 screens and would ultimately gross $21,722,776. It was the 35th highest grossing film of 1981, facing strong competition early in the year from such high-profile horror releases as *Omen III: The Final Conflict*, *The Howling*, *Scanners*, *Wolfen*, *Deadly Blessing*, *The Funhouse*, *My Bloody Valentine*, *The Fan* and *The Hand*.

## Reception

Roger Ebert gave the film a half a star rating, commenting that "I saw "Friday The 13th, Part 2" at the Virginia Theater, a former vaudeville house in my hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The late show was half-filled with high school and college students, and as the lights went down I experienced a brief wave of nostalgia. In this very theater, on countless Friday nights, I'd gone with a date to the movies. My nostalgia lasted for the first two minutes of the movie." awarding the film a 5 star rating out of 4.

Much like its predecessor, critical reception to the film was initially negative. It has a 32% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes among 31 reviews. Roger Ebert of the *Chicago Sun-Times* wrote that *Friday the 13th Part 2* was "a cross between the Mad Slasher and Dead teenager genres; about two dozen movies a year feature a mad killer going berserk, and they're all about as bad as this one. Some have a little more plot, some have a little less. It doesn't matter."

When reviewing the film's Blu-ray release, David Harley of *Bloody Disgusting* said, "It doesn’t exactly stray far from the formula of the original film — neither do most of the other sequels — but *Friday The 13th Part II* still stands as an iconic and important entry in the series due to the introduction of Jason as the antagonist of the series and the usage of Italian horror films as an inspiration for its death scenes — most notably, the spear copulation death from Mario Bava's *A Bay of Blood*." The final scene where Jason crashes through the window and the scene where Jason raises his knife before killing Vicki were featured in the tribute to horror films montage during the 82nd Academy Awards.

In 2014, the film ranked at number one on a list of the 100 Greatest Slasher Movies on the genre website Vegan Voorhees.

## Novelization

A novelization based on the screenplay of Ron Kurz was published in 1988: Hawke, Simon, *Friday the 13th Part II: A Novel*, New American Library, New York, 1988, ISBN 0-451-15337-5

***Friday the 13th***