Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981 film)

***Friday the 13th Part 2*** is a 1981 American slasher film produced and directed by Steve Miner in his directorial debut, written by Ron Kurz, and starring Amy Steel and John Furey. The film also features the return of Adrienne King, Betsy Palmer and Walt Gorney, who respectively portrayed Alice Hardy, Pamela Voorhees, and Crazy Ralph in the first film. It is the second installment in the *Friday the 13th* franchise. Set five years after the events of *Friday the 13th*, the plot again follows a group of camp counselors who arrive at a training camp near Crystal Lake, only to be murdered one by one by an unknown assailant.

The film marks the debut of Jason Voorhees as the main antagonist, a role which the character would maintain for most subsequent sequels.

Originally, *Friday the 13th Part 2* was intended to be an anthology film based on the Friday the 13th superstition. However, after the popularity of the original film's surprise ending, the filmmakers opted to continue the story and mythology surrounding Camp Crystal Lake, a trend which would be repeated in every film in the franchise.

Like the original film, *Friday the 13th Part 2* faced opposition from the Motion Picture Association of America, who noted its "accumulative violence" as problematic, resulting in numerous cuts being made to allow an R rating. The film was released theatrically in North America on May 1, 1981. Although it did not gross as much as the original, *Friday the 13th Part 2* grossed $21.7 million in the U.S. on a budget of $1.25 million and received negative reviews from critics. A direct sequel, *Friday the 13th Part III*, was released one year later.

 Produced by
 Written by
 Based on
 Starring
* Amy Steel
 Music by
 Cinematography
 Edited by
 Production
company
 Distributed by
 Release date
 Running time
 Country
 Language
 Budget
 Box office

Plot

Two months after the murders at Camp Crystal Lake, sole survivor Alice Hardy is recovering from her traumatic experience. In her apartment, when Alice opens the refrigerator to get her cat some food, she finds the severed head of Pamela Voorhees in her refrigerator and is murdered by an unknown assailant with an ice pick to her temple.

Five years later, Paul Holt opens a school for camp counselors on the shore of Crystal Lake. The camp is attended by Sandra Dier, her boyfriend Jeff Dunsberry, troublemaker Scott Cheney, tomboy Terry McCarthy, wheelchair user Mark Jarvis, sweet-natured Vickie Perry, jokester Ted Bowen, and Paul's assistant Ginny Field, as well as many other trainees. Around the campfire that night, Paul tells the counselors the legend of Jason Voorhees, a boy who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake in 1957, prompting his mother to exact revenge on the counselors and commit another series of murders in 1979 to prevent the camp from being reopened, until she was killed by the last survivor; however, Jason is rumored to have survived and is now living in the woods near Crystal Lake, killing anyone who comes across him to avenge his mother's death. After Paul finishes the story, a man with a spear scares everyone, but it's only Ted in a mask. Paul reassures everyone that Jason is dead and that Camp Crystal Lake is now condemned and off limits.

That night, Crazy Ralph wanders onto the property to warn the group but is garroted from behind a tree by an unseen killer. The following day, Jeff and Sandra sneak off to Camp Crystal Lake and find a dog carcass before getting caught by Deputy Winslow and returned to the camp. Later, Winslow spots a masked man in a burlap sack running across the road and chases him into the woods, where he finds a shack before the man kills him with a hammer claw.

Back at camp, Paul offers the others one last night on the town before the training begins; six stay behind, including Jeff and Sandra, who are forced to stay as punishment for sneaking off. At the bar, Ginny muses that if Jason were still alive and had witnessed his mother's death, it may have left him with no distinction between life and death, or right and wrong. Paul dismisses the idea, proclaiming that Jason is nothing but an urban legend. Meanwhile, the assailant appears at the camp and kills the counselors, one by one. Scott has his throat slit with a machete while caught in a rope trap, and Terry is killed off-screen upon finding his dead body. Mark gets the machete slammed into his face and falls down a flight of stairs. The killer then moves upstairs and impales Jeff and Sandra with a spear as they have sex, and then stabs Vickie with a kitchen knife.

Later, Ginny and Paul return to find the place in disarray. In the dark, the killer ambushes Paul and continues to chase Ginny throughout the camp and into the woods, where she comes across the shack. After barricading herself inside, she finds an altar with Pamela Voorhees' severed head on it, surrounded by a pile of bodies. Realizing that Jason Voorhees is the killer, Ginny puts on Pamela's sweater and tries to psychologically convince Jason that she is his mother. The ruse works for a time, until Jason sees his mother's head on the altar and resumes his attack on Ginny. Paul appears and attacks Jason, but he is quickly overwhelmed. Just as Jason is about to kill Paul with a pickaxe, Ginny picks up the machete and slams it down into Jason's shoulder, seemingly killing him.

Paul and Ginny return to the cabin and hear someone outside. Thinking that Jason has followed them, they open the door, only to find Terry's dog, Muffin. Just as they sigh in relief, an unmasked Jason bursts through the window from behind and grabs Ginny. She then awakens to being loaded into an ambulance, and calls out for Paul, who is nowhere to be seen, leaving his fate ambiguous. Back in the shack, Pamela Voorhees' head remains on the altar, with Jason nowhere to be found.

Cast

Amy Steel as Ginny Field

John Furey as Paul Holt

Adrienne King as Alice Hardy

Steve Daskewisz as Jason Voorhees

Warrington Gillette as Jason Voorhees (unmasked)

Stu Charno as Ted Bowen

Lauren-Marie Taylor as Vickie Perry

Marta Kober as Sandra Dier

Tom McBride as Mark Jarvis

Bill Randolph as Jeff Dunsberry

Kirsten Baker as Terry McCarthy

Russell Todd as Scott Cheney

Walt Gorney as Crazy Ralph

Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees

Jack Marks as Deputy Winslow

Cliff Cudney as Max

## 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 one another but be a separate "scary movie" in 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 film critic and author Stephen Hunter in an interview for a book Hunter wrote on violent films. Hunter stated that Cunningham "wasn't particularly proud" of his work on these films, and Cunningham bluntly said that the only thing that seemed to reach a teenaged audience at that time involved high levels of gore and graphic violence.

### Casting

Adrienne King was pursued by an obsessed fan after the success of the original *Friday the 13th* and purportedly wished her role to be small as possible, though in the documentary *Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th*, it was stated that King's agent had asked for a higher salary, which the studio could not afford.

The film's heroine, Ginny, is played by Amy Steel, who won the part through an audition. "At the time of [making the film], it was before the genre really picked up so I didn’t give it a lot of credit or take it seriously. For me, it was just another audition because I had no idea what it would end up meaning after all this time. When I played Ginny, I was really young and different from a lot of the people working at the time so that came out in my character. I was naturally suspicious of cocky guys at that age, and you see a lot of that when I’m on screen with Paul (John Furey). I tried to put so much behind the actual words in the script just so she felt almost unreachable, to Paul and to audiences. I wanted her to have some power."

Actor Warrington Gillette played Jason unmasked at the end of the film. Stuntman Steve Daskawisz (also known as Steve Dash) was credited as Jason Stunt Double but played the masked Jason throughout the rest of the film.

### Filming

The small village of New Preston, Connecticut was one of the filming locations.

Principal photography took place from October 3 and finished in November 1980, and primarily occurred in New Preston and Kent, Connecticut. Special effects artist Tom Savini was asked to work on the film but declined because he was already working on another project, *Midnight* (1982). In addition, he was not receptive to the concept of Jason as the killer in the film. Savini was then replaced by Stan Winston. Winston, however, had a scheduling conflict and had to drop out of the project. The make-up effects were ultimately handled by Carl Fullerton. Fullerton designed the "look" for the adult Jason Voorhees and went with long red hair and a beard while following the facial deformities established in the original film in the make-up designed by Tom Savini for Jason as a child. Fullerton's look for the adult Jason was abandoned in the sequel, *Friday the 13th Part 3*, despite the fact that the film took place the following day and was helmed by the same director, Steve Miner. Some fans have theorized that the sequence showing Jason with a beard and long hair reflects a "dream" rather than a reality because the following sequel picks up with the events showing his face having not happened, and therefore what was represented was Ginny's *guess* at what he looked like under the burlap sack rather than what he *actually* looked like, which would excuse the break in continuity.

Steve Daskawisz was rushed to the emergency room during filming after Amy Steel cut his hand with a machete. Steel explained, "The timing was wrong, and he didn't turn his pickaxe properly, and the machete hit his finger." Daskawisz received thirteen stitches on his middle finger. During the subsequent shoot, Daskawisz was forced to wear a piece of rubber over his finger, and both he and Steel insisted on reshooting this scene.[*citation needed*] During one take of Alice being killed by Jason, the ice pick prop didn't retract, injuring King.

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 use of the sack hood was similar to the 1976 film *The Town That Dreaded Sundown*.

The scene where Steel's character gets grabbed from behind by an unmasked Jason in the climax took three takes to shoot it right. Steel was tense and frightened during filming of the scene.

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.

### Post-production

Like its predecessor, *Friday the 13th Part 2* had difficulty receiving an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Upon reviewing the film, the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA) warned Paul Hagger, an executive at Paramount, that the "accumulation of violence throughout the film" may still lead to an X rating even if substantial cuts were made.

A total of forty-eight seconds had to be cut from the film in order to avoid an X rating. This film received a deluxe DVD release in February 2009, but the edited footage was not included. Most noted by censors was the murder scene of Jeff and Sandra, who are impaled by a spear while having sex in a bed (a scene many have compared to a scene in Mario Bava's *A Bay of Blood*), which the censors found particularly graphic. In September 2020, it was announced that the uncut footage had been located by Samuelson Studios and was included as an extra on the upcoming box set release from Scream Factory.

After Paramount discovered actress Marta Kober was underage, a scene showing her with full frontal nudity was completely deleted.

Originally, the film was supposed to end with Mrs. Voorhees' head opening her eyes and smiling towards the camera. However, Miner removed the scene out of the final film as he ultimately decided that would make the film's conclusion "too silly". To this day, the footage of this alternate ending has yet to be released.

## Music

 Released
 Genre
 Length
 Label
 Producer

In 1982, Gramavision Records released an 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 released the score, composed by Harry Manfredini, on vinyl in summer 2015.

## Release

### Home media

*Friday the 13th Part 2* was released on VHS and Betamax by Paramount Home Video in 1981. Paramount reissued the VHS again in 1994. The film was first released on DVD by Paramount on October 19, 1999, in a standard widescreen release featuring the theatrical trailer as the sole bonus feature.

In 2009, Paramount issued a "deluxe edition" of the film on both DVD and Blu-ray, which included several documentary featurettes along with the theatrical trailer. In 2011, it was released in a 4-disc DVD collection along with the first, third, and fourth films in the series. It was again included in two Blu-ray sets: *Friday the 13th: The Complete Collection*, released in 2013, and *Friday the 13th: The Ultimate Collection*, in 2011 with a roughly 3/4 size replica of Jason's mask and glossy cardstock booklet (this collection was re-released in 2018 in a plastic multi-disc case). In October 2020, Shout! Factory released a 40th Anniversary box set which includes a 4K scan of part 2's original camera negative and also includes the long lost uncut footage.

## Reception

### Box office

The film was released theatrically on May 1, 1981, bringing in $6,429,784 its opening weekend. It played on 1,350 screens and would ultimately gross $21.7 million on a budget of $1.25 million. It was the 35th highest-grossing film of 1981, facing strong competition from such high-profile horror releases as *Omen III: The Final Conflict*, *The Evil Dead*, *The Howling*, *My Bloody Valentine*, *Happy Birthday to Me*, *Graduation Day*, *Halloween II*, and *The Burning*.

### Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, *Friday the 13th Part 2* holds an approval rating of 27% based on 44 reviews, with an average rating of 4.43/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "*Friday the 13th Part 2* sets the template for the franchise to follow with more teen victims, more gruesome set pieces, and fewer reasons to keep following along." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 26 out of 100, based on eight critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews."

Roger Ebert of the *Chicago Sun-Times* wrote that *Friday the 13th Part 2* is "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." Helen Verongos of *The Clarion-Ledger* wrote: "*Friday the 13th Part 2* obviously does not pretend to be any more than it is, a cheap—dimestore cheap—thriller aimed at the adolescent market...  It is designed to be predictable enough to make the average fourth-grader feel sharp-witted."

The Dayton *Journal Herald*'s Terry Lawson deemed the film a "special effects freak show for an audience immune to violence," and "exploitative and gratuitous." Jacqi Tully of the *Arizona Daily Star* praised the film's special effects, noting Jason as "effectively disgusting sight," and ultimately summarizing: "Gross is a pretty good way to describe it. Scary, bloody and violent come to mind, too. Also very effective." Howard Pousner of *The Atlanta Constitution* was less laudatory, deeming the return of the Jason Voorhees character as a "ludicrous arrangement...  before you know it, eight more people have been murdered in virtually every manner: a neck sliced by barbed wire, a skull smashed, a jugular macheteed *sic*, a heart speared, et al."

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*." Scott Meslow of *The Week* described it as a transitional film that blended elements of the original film and those to come later in the series.

## Other media

### 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