The making of Friday the 13th, recounted by those that made it.

Having read both Peter M. Bracke’s exhaustive (and exhausting) Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th and David Grove’s own Making Friday the 13th: The Legend of Camp Blood, I wondered if there were any tidbits of information remaining to be shared about the creation, production, and release of the very first Friday the 13th movie. The one where Jason was not the killer.

Turns out there were quite a few tidbits still hidden underneath the last few unturned stones littering the torturous path that Sean Cunningham trod to make Friday the 13th into a reality.

The most interesting, to me, was just how labor intensive and technically complicated it was for photographer Richard Illy to create the Friday the 13th logo bursting through a pane glass image for an advertisement Cunningham wanted to place in Variety. There were no digital photoshop tools available in 1979. The logo had to be handmade, the glass was real, and so on and so forth…

Grove’s narrative is unvarnished and unapologetic. He makes no excuses or defenses for the hows and the whats and the whys of Friday the 13th. This was a project born from the desperation of Sean Cunningham’s last grasp at becoming a professional filmmaker, not a failed one.

Even knowing that Friday the 13th would succeed far beyond the craziest expectations of those working on it, many of which thought it would not even be finished, there were times in the book where I felt like I was reading a deep dive into the chaos of a planned movie that never made it through production.

But make it, it did. Big time.

Whether or not the world is a better place because Sean Cunningham managed to get Friday the 13th made is a subject for holier-than-thou stick-in-the-mud types like Gene Siskel, not horror geek fanboys like myself. I know Friday the 13th makes the world a better place, thank you very much.