Friday the 13th (1980) on Netflix
Steve Christy reopens Camp Crystal Lake with a few young counselors, years after a boy drowned there and two counselors were murdered. A hidden figure begins stalking the grounds.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.4/10177,199 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes68%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1957 a boy drowned at Camp Crystal Lake, and the next year two counselors there were killed. Attempts to reopen the place in 1962 failed. Now Steve Christy has gathered a small staff to try again. Annie, hired as the cook, rides toward Camp Crystal Lake, and the truck driver who picks her up fills her in on its past. The other counselors, among them Alice, Ned, Jack, Marcie, Bill and Brenda, arrive to clean the cabins and stock supplies before the campers come. Steve drives off for supplies as a storm gathers. A cloaked figure walks into one of the cabins.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Friday the 13th (1980)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
Betsy Palmer only agreed to play killer Mrs. Voorhees because she needed the money to buy a new car, and she believed the film would "be a piece of shit"; she also could not understand why anyone would cast her in a horror film.SPOILER
Composer Harry Manfredini built the score's famous "ki ki ki, ma ma ma" from Mrs. Voorhees's line "Kill her, mommy!", speaking "kill" and "mommy" harshly into a microphone through an echo machine after hearing a Krzysztof Penderecki chorus.- Critic Gene Siskel called Sean Cunningham "one of the most despicable creatures ever to infest the movie business", published the address of Paramount's parent-company chairman Charles Bluhdorn and Betsy Palmer's home city so readers could complain, and spoiled the film's ending to keep people away.
SPOILER
Jason Voorhees's appearance at the end was not in Victor Miller's script, which finished with Alice floating on the lake; makeup designer Tom Savini suggested it because he had just seen Carrie and wanted a "chair jumper" ending.SPOILER
Estelle Parsons was the first choice to play killer Mrs. Voorhees but turned it down, her agent calling the film too violent; Shelley Winters and Dorothy Malone were also offered the part and refused, while Louise Lasser was considered.- Unexpected snowfall during the shoot forced the opening scene, in which counselors Barry and Claudette are murdered while walking along the lake, to be moved inside a barn, even though the film is set in summer.
- For the scene where Jack is killed with an arrow through the throat, Kevin Bacon's head came up through the mattress into a prosthetic neck, and when the pump spurting fake blood through the arrow hole failed, effects man Stavrakis blew air into it.
- Friday the 13th was the first independent slasher film to be picked up by a major studio, with Paramount judging it a low-risk release because of its small budget and the recent success of horror films such as Halloween.
