Adrienne King
Our story begins with Adreinne King. The young actress was not too thrilled with her Poconos, Pennsylvania accomodations, and she could have used a bit more of a paycheck. She knew that the first Friday The 13th was not going to be Gone With The Wind. So why did she jump at the chance to play Alice in Sean Cunningham's low budget 1980 slayathon?
"What I liked about the original Friday script was that my character was not the typical horror bimbo," the New York-based King remembers. "Alice was strong, tough and had brains. I also liked the idea that I was going to be the film's only survivor."
King, of course, spent scant time going mano a mano with Jason in the first Friday; her antagonist was the character's mother, played by Betsy Palmer. In decapitating Palmer with a machete, King was the only Friday actress to put down her attacker for good - though Jason came back to return the favor, claiming Alice as his first victim in Friday The 13th Part 2 a year later.
King's experience with Jason in the first Friday was limited to the movie's final shock moment, when the deformed youngster leaps from Crystal Lake to grab her out of a canoe. The scene that scared audiences everywhere was a harrowing one for the actress as well. "It took us three months to shoot that," she recalls. "We first shot it in September, than again in October and finally the last time in November. On the first two attempts, something went wrong and we had to reshoot, so even though it's supposed to be spring in the movie, it was actually 28 degrees and snowing by the time we got around to shooting it a third time. Sean was real apologetic and promised me, 'This is the last time I'm going to make you do this.' We finally got the scene, but the water was so chilly and I was wearing so little that I came down with a bad cold and was out of commission for two weeks."
Despite the tough times, King, who has gone on to appear in several soap operas and TV shows like The Equalizer, looks back fondly on her Friday adventures. "There had not been too many slasher movies at that time, and so there was a real sense of innocence involved in making that first Friday," she says.
Amy Steel
Amy Steel was bit normally subject to jangled nerves, but all that changed when the actress landed the lead role in Friday The 13th Part 2. "Working for two months at night on the film eventually gave me the heebie-jeebies," recalls Steel, a former model. "Constantly having dirt and water thrown on you, and watching the actors you've been working with being killed, with blood pouring out of them - well, you know, it's not real, but after a certain point, it became a very tense experience."
The movie cast Steel (whose subsequent film credits include Walk Like A Man and Fat Chance) as Ginny, a camp counselor whose sympathetic feelings toward troubled youth are put sorely to the test when Jason comes calling. In her most memorable scene, Steel takes on both the sweater and the persona of the killer's deceased mother in an attempt to get the drop on him. While shotting the sequence, Steel drew some real-life blood when her machete swing at the killer ended with her slicing the stunt Jason's finger.
For the most part, she admits that her role in Friday 2 was not especially complex. "Being scared is a relatively easy emotion," she says. "It wasn't that hard to imagine somebody coming after me with a knife."
One moment that particularly unnerved Steel, however, involved Jason's climatic crash through a cabin window to grab Ginny off a bed. "I didn't care for that scene at all," Steel confirms. "Something would always go wrong, and we ended up having to shoot it three times. The worst part was sitting on the bed, hearing the high-speed camera making this whirring sound, and all of a sudden this monster would come crashing through the window. Because it required me to be emotionally involved and believably scared, I was a little crazed by the third take.
Dana Kimbell
Dana Kimbell was not pleased when she read the script for Friday The 13th Part 3. The concerned performer, who ultimately played Chris, found much that rubbed her the wrong way. "I was not wild about all the gore and the sexual stuff," says Kimbell. "So I talked to [producer] Frank Mancuso, Jr., and a lot of those elements were eliminated or curbed. But I still had some inner struggled because of the way I felt about Friday The 13th films in general, so I felt funny the whole time I was making the movie.
"I'm not a big fan of R-rated films, the actress continues. "I believe movies should be doing a better job of standing up for good values and morals."
Ironically, it was her performance in another slasher film - 1981's Sweet 16 - that led Kimbell to her Friday role; she went on to the Chuck Norris film Lone Wolf McQuade and numerous TV apperances. Her character Chris was the first of Jason's heroines to get out of the summer camp setting, and also the first to have a previous encounter with Crystal Lake horrors as part of their backstory. The memorable facet of Friday The 13th Part III, however, was the fact thatit was filmed in 3-D.
Nonetheless, her recollections of the film and its dimensional shooting are limited. "Because of the 3-D process, we had to work extra long nights," offers Kimbell. "The camera angles and the lights had to be set a certain way, and that meant extra time for the scenes to be shot."
Kimberly Beck
Kimberly Beck remembers her trial by terror in Friday The 13th: The Final Chaper as a series of tearful encounters. "I cried everytime they put water on me," she says. "I cried when I had to fall in the mud. I cried when I had to fight Jason. But after I stopped crying, I did what I had to do."
Which meant, among other things, performing enough of her own stunts to qualify for a Stuntman's Association card. The lion's share of Beck's rough-and-tumble work occured during the climatic battle with Jason. "The scariest and hardest part of those scenes was when I had the machete in my hand," she says. "It was pretty sharp, and we had to choreograph all these moves. I had a hard time getting them right and, just before the final scene was shot, I got really upset. I thought I was going to screw up and actually kill this poor guy [Jason actor Ted White]."
In fact, it is the little brother of Beck's character (played by a young Corey Feldman) who delivers what was supposed to be the final coup de grace to Jason. As Trish, Beck witnessed the murders of a household of teens next door, as well as that of an amateur Jason hunter she befriends. But she notes that one particular death discovery - one she calls "my best scene" - was ultimately cut from the movie.
"It's the scene where I find my mother, and she's dead," the California-born Beck says. "The producer and the director [Joseph Zito] decided the scene was too offensive, and I can almost agree. She didn't have sex, so how could she die?"
Prior to Friday duty, Beck, an actress since age 2, appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie and the 1976 cult classic Massacre At Central High. She's steered clear of horror roles since Friday, though - among other things, she turned down a part in Re-Animator - possibly due to the strange events that plagued her during Friday's shooting.
"A lot of weird things were going on in my life at the time," she recalls. I always went to this park near my house to run, and this strange man started showing up and watching me from a distance. That was creepy, and so were the strange telephone calls I would get; I got them at all hours. I have no idea if someone knew I was doing the film, but the scary scenes at the park and the phone calls stopped when I finished the movie."
Melanie Kinnaman
Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning. She studied the previous Friday films, as well as the fright stints of classic screamer Jamie Lee Curtis. "I was prepared to make the most of the opportunities I was given," claims the accomplished dancer and stage actress. She soon discovered, however, that a good deal of her work involved running like hell and hoisting heavy metal.
"The night we filmed the scene where I attacked Jason with a chainsaw was about the hardest thing I had to do," Kinnamen says. "It was just so funny. I mean, there I was with thise smoking chainsaw, going after this 6-foot-3-inch guy with a saber in his hand. I thought, 'He could kill me in a second, and they're trying to make this play like I got the upper hand.'"
Friday fans will no doubt recall that Kinnaman's foe wasn't a bona fide Jason, but an imposter to the throne. This subsitute murderer is an amulance driver gone round the bend after witnessing the violent death of his son at the youth center where Kinnaman's character works. As the death toll (a record number for the Friday films) mounts, she must not only deal with the question of whether Jason's now-teenaged killer (John Shepherd) is the culprit, but also with the familiar chases through the woods with the demented slayer in hot pursuit.
One such sequence led to a dubious sequence for the pretty star. "There was one scene that was shot using rain machines," she recalls. "I had to run toward the camera and stop on a certain mark, which was not easy. At one point, I hit the mark and promptly fell down. Rather than cutting, the director kept telling me to crawl through the mud. So I spent the next five minutes rolling and screaming through this dirt. When it was over, I said to myself, 'I went to acting class for this?'"
Jennifer Cooke
For actress Jennifer Cooke, who played the Sheriff's daughter Megan in Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, the film represented little more than a paycheck "and a chance to drive a car real fast."
"The script said to scream on cue, and I did," the Setauket, New York native recalls. "I memorized my lines and showed up on time. That's about all you can do with a film like this. You can't really draw on past experiences for inspiration. I don't know about you, but I've never been chased by a monster with an ax before."
The sixth Friday finds Cooke's ingenue befriending Jason-slayer Tommy Jarvis (Thom Matthews) after he accidentially brings the monster back to life during an electrical storm. She tries to convince her lawman father that Tommy's rants about Jason's return are true, but in time-honored tradition, the sheriff doesn't believe her until it's too late.
A former regular on the NBC series V, Cooke's strongest memory of her otherwise bleak Jason Lives venture was the especially uncomfortable near-drowning sequence. "We did the wide shots of that scene in a lake in Georgia at 3 a.m., and all I was wearing was a coat and blue jeans," she remembers. "Then, when we got back to L.A., we filmed the close-ups in a swimming pool at 4:00 a.m. It was horrible!."
Lar Park Lincoln
The attitude Lar Park Lincoln brought to the role of telekinetic Tina in Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood wasn't nearly so negative. In fact, she was excited about it.
"I'm probably Jason's biggest fan," the Texas actress proclaims. "I've always been a horror film buff, and I'm proud to say that I've seen every one of the Friday The 13th movies.
Lincoln's contribution to the series found her taking on her murderous foe with more than conventional weapons. The actress, whose other genre credits include House II: The Second Story and the direct-to-cable thriller Fatal Charm, plays a girl whose psychic powers give her an extra edge against Jason, whom she has inadvertently resuscitated while trying to raise her drowned father from the bottom of Crystal Lake.
Before the supernatural showdown, of course, Lincoln's character runs afoul of the usual Friday mayhem. "I never realized I'd have to be around all those dead bodies," she chuckles. "One morning we were shooting the scene where I discover the head in the flowerpot. We had been shooting all night and had to do a pickup shot early in the morning. I took one look at the head and totally freaked."
The former model was also frazzled during the final fiery confrontation between Tina and Jason. "We could fake things like the television flying over my head, but we could not fake fire," she says. "So I ended up being real close to Kane [Hodder] when he was doing the full-body burns. Of course, Kane and all the effects people knew what they were doing, but being that close made me nervous."
Jensen Daggett
Jensen Daggett had what many would consider the classic Friday The 13th audition when she tried out for 1988's Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhatten. "My screen test consisted of reading a few scenes and screaming into the camera," laughs the Connecticut-born actress, whose only pre-Friday film credits had been small roles im The Fabulous Baker Boys and the cheesy sci-fier Invasion Earth. But the spunky Daggett, when informed she had the role, did not face the opportunity to take on Jason with much trepidation.
"At first I thought, 'Oh no!'", she admits. "But in a way, a was also excited. I had seen the first seven Friday films, and I felt that this would be a good chance to experience the technical side of filmmaking that you never get in acting class."
What Daggett hadn't counted on was three months of night shooting under less the desirable conditions. Since this entry takes place largely in the bowels of a cruise ship and in the seedier side of New York (actually filmed largely in Vancouver), she found herself wading through water and grime on a regulatr basis.
"Every time I turned around it was 4:00 in the morning and I was getting hosed down," she chuckles. "For the subway sequences, we used an old mail tunnel that ran under the city of Vancouver. The special effects people filled that passage with 3 feet of yellow and brown water, and I remember spending a whole night walking through that disgusting stuff."
Among her other less favorite moments playing the film's heroine Rennie were "having to work with that stupid dog," and an unnerving incident during a stalker attack sequence. The scene in question involved Jason shoving his fist through ship's porthole and grabbing Daggett by the throat.
"One shard of candy glass was only about an inch from my neck," she recalls, "and having to deal with being pulled right through it was really frightening. I wasn't acting during that scene - I was really scared."
Daggett has never looked at her participation in Jason Takes Manhatten as a detriment to her career. She has turned down other horror roles (her subsequent appearences include a couple of TV movies as well as the 1994 theatrical release Rules Of The Game), but having that fright flick on her resume never really bothered her - with one notable exception.
"The only time that I was embarrassed about havingd one Friday VIII was when I met with Oliver Stone," she reveals. "Since it was my biggest credit to that point, it was the first thing he read. He just looked at me and said, 'Oh, you've done a Friday The 13th movie?' But I'm not really ashamed of it. Everybody is entitled to do a couple of off-the-cuff, bizarre types of films, and nobody really cares."
Kari Keegan
Kari Keegan was well versed in Friday lore when she was offered the part of Jessica Kimble in New Line Cinema's Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday. Consequently, the veteran of numerous theatre and independent film performances figured that her lungs and her legs would get the biggest workout.
But I was surprised, very happily surprised," she discloses while filming Friday's final entry. "Jessica's not your typical Friday The 13th teen; she doesn't do the usual horror thing, and there is no nudity. She doesn't have sex and she doesn't die. She's strong, centered and a grown-up, mature women. To my way of thinking, Jessica is a cross between Linda Hamilton in The Terminator and Sigourney Weaver in Alien. She's a mother who is strongly comitted to her child, and is willing to go up against Jason to protect that child. I was quite thrilled when I read the script and found out that my role was not going to be a bimbo.
"I have scenes where I go off on my won to fight Jason, and I have scenes where I have to fight Jason in another form," she says. "I also do some screaming and running, but what would a Friday The 13th movie be without that?" she laughs.
"Making Friday The 13th movies is not easy, but we've managed to pull this together in a real stylish way that I believe has broken the mold," Keegan concludes. "I get to have a mature relationship, fight the world's worst serial killer and, as it pertains to the roles of women who have appeared in these films, help take the series in a whole different direction."
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