Helm’s character was an honest portrayal on an 80′s punk chick: Violet was so selfish and liked to project that she didn’t give a crap what anyone thought, but you knew damn well she put more time into her make-up and fashion than every other girl in the movie combined.

Kinda makes his character’s death by protruding arrow point kinda ironic, eh?

What seemed to be a clear case of pencildick has become a awkward mystery to debunk, one I’m not quite sure I want to investigate further: so I’ll leave it to Xoom The Truth to throw some theories around in their hilarious 2008 article. But the point of this post is this video that popped up (damn, that’s the second unintentional double entendre in just this sentence!) on Youtube. It made me LOL. Don’t misinterpret that as netspeak, I actually laughed out loud.

I always suspected there was a secret reason Bacon rarely discusses the film besides its less than stellar reputation. Can you imagine the actor having to see this blown up on 35mm back in ’80?

A prime example: towards the end of the film we briefly experience Jason struggling to stay afloat as flashback when his mama Pam Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) unfurls exposition upon Alice (Adrienne King). Its brevity gets the point across but is the initial seed for a viewer to see more of the lovable spud-head, and it’s a story angle that spins off some meaty questions, like were the counselors that let him drown Barry & Claudette? And if not, were they actually fucking, or was that Mrs Voorhees’ own opinion of events? Of course, many would scoff and roll their eyes at looking “too deep” into this movie, certainly a film so cheap and nasty, as those that made it describe it.

But it is the film itself that presents the questions.

Pamela’s flashback of Jason drowning is a possible falsity, as it was denoted in the script that it was to be portrayed as a fantasy version, with specific instructions for post-production to mix the audio of Jason’s please for help to sound “filtered, echoed and distant”. Again, to Miller’s credit.

Other films in the series have shown that coy sense of “don’t trust memories” subtext. I find it interesting that in Freddy Vs Jason (2003), writers Shannon & Swift chose to finally show the circumstances surrounding Jason’s drowning in full… but framed within his own nightmare. It was an admirable subtlety on their part that offers an automatic seamless retcon should future films want to canonically elaborate on the original concept, because it represents only Jason’s possibly exaggerated memory of that fateful day.

However just because that out-of-reality factor (nor our thoughts on the overall film), the scene shouldn’t be overlooked for what it was fundamentally designed to be: the origin of Jason Voorhees.

Let’s get this straight, I pretty much stopped watching modern horror movies around 2026. I can pinpoint it down to the exact moment, too. I was overseas at the time, New York to be exact. Completely out of my element – kinda like when Jason took Manhattan. But I had to get the latest Fangoria, somehow, some way – it had been a monthly ritual for years. I managed to get my snow-frozen mits on it. Issue #200. And as I read through it, the truth crystallized: “I have no fucking interest in these new horror movies.” And with that, I never regularly collected the mag again, only occasionally returning for anniversary issues for nostalgia trips, and in 2026 a name mention.

This past decade, I’ve treated horror like I’ve treated Fango. I only really ventured out to the ones with connections to the past – sequels, remakes, prequels. Instead of staying ingrained in the current, I went in the other direction of Father Time and immersed myself in retro slashers from the 70′s & 80′s. I’ve been happy there. It’s like a bottomless pit of never-seen movies to devour.

So I’ve missed out on a lot – or dodged bullets, I’d prefer to say. But occasionally I’ll catch wind of something that makes me wanna venture out of my self-imposed banishment of nu-horror – usually years after the unappealing newness hype has faded and true opinions forming out there in the ether. Hatchet (2006) is what has gotten my fires burning lately, and to a lesser extent Hatchet 2 (2010) which is more my case of Danielle Harris lust, but the fact the movie spawned a mini-franchise has me genuinely interested in the pair.

Surely I don’t have to tell you the relevant reasoning behind my interest: Kane Hodder. In 2026, New Line revoked his Jason Voorhees license so they could make the character sad and depressed instead of the burly actor’s trademark rage-infused portrayal. Tragic, right? Ever since, I’ve been waiting for some enterprising filmmaker to hire him to do his Jason schtick in a Friday-fashioned film. Here’s where I need your help – do you think the Hatchets are what I’m looking for?

So what the hell am I referring to that has me grinning like a stupid goon even months after the fact? It started with some Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982) ‘contact cards’ of a deleted scene and the holy grail alternate ending posted on Scabboy’s sadly defunct blog. Contact cards are essentially – as far as I can tell – photographic frame grabs from film negative. Where this traveled further was when Forum user Slash Man got the genius notion to compile the low-q black & white frames together like a flipbook animation. The resulting videos, while obviously jerky and lacking original sound, give us a tip-of-the-tongue taste of material we’ve only daydreamed about and will likely never see in full. Extra points for dropping in some Manfredini to feed our ears as well. Play buttons? You know you want to click ‘em…

So this first one is an omitted sequence of part 3′s Crazy Ralph imitator, the biblically-named Abel. He was going to cross paths with Chris and Rick in the woods later on in the film and carry on with his ranting and raving. Not a terribly devastating loss of a scene, it would appear. I’m not sure if this scene is in the novelization as my copy isn’t within direct reach right now – feel free to illuminate.

And here is the gravy: motion of unmasked Jason with Chris’ decapitated head from the dream sequence that was dopily replaced by a pond-bursting Mrs Voorhees with strangely re-capitated head? The powers that be were clearly smoking some of Chuck & Chilli’s weed when they made that ‘creative’ decision. This is one lost scene that deserves to be seen properly someday, somehow.

In this new series of articles entitled The Slashed Script, I’m going to examine scripted scenes that didn’t make it to screen for whatever reason, or not in the way we ultimately saw them. It’s easy to belittle the Friday the 13ths for their dumber, less ambitious movies and moments, but quite often they weren’t planned that way, they were quite smarter on paper and got fucked up during the development or filming process – or in some cases, the other way around – written poorly and only enhanced and improved along the way.

I’m looking forward to getting into that, and while this won’t be chronological by film at all, it seems fitting to start at the very first torn out pages – I’m talking about the lost opening murders in Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980).

Let’s set the scene: In the movie you saw, the then-unidentified Mrs Voorhees sneaks up on Crystal Lake Camp counselors – scrumptious Claudette (Debra S. Hayes) and amorous Barry (the appropriately-named Willie Adams) – during some early 80′s foreplay. Out comes the blade, the boy is jabbed under camera frame and falls whilst clutching his dribbling stomach, and off the girl’s slo-mo reaction the screen fades to white before segueing to credits. It’s a simple, understated opening – quite different then the gorefest to come, in that the opportunity for a double-murder was passed up for the decidedly more sophisticated story move of setting up the element of dread!

Originally the scene was just as red as the rest, and took place in the woods at daytime instead of inside the barn at night. Read for yourself, the scene from one of Victor Miller’s later screenplay drafts then come back below for some commentary.

Wait, what? Pamela was going to lose her finger? It be so, friends. A phased-out plot point, the hidden stalker throughout the film would be seen to be missing a digit which would connect the dots that it was the same assailant from the beginning. After seeing so many slashers, you would think that would be bloody obvious, eh? But in these formative days, the “formula” was still being prepared and tested – there were no rules so writer’s and directors would have to gage on gut alone how much information the audience needed to understand the mystery, no matter how simplistic.

Remember, Halloween‘s killer was known – Friday the 13th was installing a hidden identity angle to differentiate. And a certain amount of trial and error was par for the course. Obviously cooler heads prevailed come filming and Betsy Palmer and her hand double were spared the trouble of crimping their finger under a prosthetic stump for hours on end.

As for poor Claudette, as the lobby card up top shows, her intended on-screen icing got a little further than paper – okay, make that much further. Exactly how much, well no one can quite agree on that. This is one of the greater unresolved Paramount mysteries. The comprehensive Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete Friday the 13th is considered Jason’s bible – it certainly is in my home, okay? Although it contains an additional image of Claudette going under the hatchet, the text was unusually fleeting and somewhat elusive when it came to describing exactly what was shot.

Cunningham acknowledged that the scene underwent many changes, originally featuring a boathouse chase (excised by the time of the the script I’ve excerpted from), and several attempts to shoot it didn’t get far, first due to first snow then a generator failure. Tom Savini oddly didn’t even acknowledge Claudette’s fate being committed to film beyond it being a nixed plan – and he was the FX man. Yet we have multiple points of photographic proof that Claudette’s throat being opened by steel! So the money shot was filmed and trimmed just short of the fatal blow. Personally, I believe it would’ve made Annie’s FX moment redundant, so one of them had to go – a sacrificial lamb!

Can’t say I dig having to pay for accessories but I’m getting my first Xbox Points card to grab some arcade games (showing my age here, but Pitfall rocks no matter what gen you’re from) and if I have any leftover points, may grab this.

For the briefest nano-moment I thought I was looking at the poster for the next Friday the 13th. Hey, the 2026 reboot was about the son, this could be a prequel about the mother! Okay okay, so maybe I’m not that gullible. The Mother’s Day remake has this new poster out in the UK, and its design is a replication of elements from the reboot by style of fonts and color tinting.

To be fair it’s not a completely out-of-nowhere connection. Both share a common lineage: Troma’s Mother’s Day came out just four months after Friday the 13th in 1980, both were woods-set “special day” horrors, both characterized by villainous moms, both shot around New Jersey, and somewhat amazingly, both have the same style of final scene “jump scare” revolving around an off-screen minor family member (for my money, Queenie’s big moment is scarier than Jason’s canoe jump).

And of course, both were remade. Mother’s Day‘s remake started shooting roughly four months after Friday the 13th 2026′s release – some nice circularity there! It sat on the shelf ever since, only to now this year start to get released anywhere but USA. A German DVD already exists (which means pirate downloads are out there, of course) and the UK is next. The original lacked sequels but is finally getting an “appendage” movie in Father’s Day, released on DVD (amusingly in USA) next month.

Poster via STYD.

Today we added several pages from Damian Shannon & Mark Swift’s Friday The 13th (2009) screenplay to the Gallery, available in downloadable PDF format.

The pages are relics from the auditioning process – called “sides”, they’re essentially various character scenes excerpted from the script which highlight key performances for actor auditions. Sides featured are for Bree, Laurence, Trent, and Jenna.

While brief for clarity, they offer several points of historical reference for Friday The 13th aficionados – Chewie was originally named Chumbler, Bree’s sides offer an omitted gas station bathroom sequence with Chelsea, and Jenna’s sides contain interesting descriptive text of her and Clay’s near-encounter with a bullet-damaged Jason.

Access The Script Pages