et me give you some advice on
the film business – anyone who
sets out to make a franchise is
doomed. William Goldman
was right – no one in
Hollywood knows anything. None of us
knew what we had with Friday The 13th.
When you have a franchise it is luck,
not planning...”
So begins Sean Cunningham,
director of Friday The 13th and the man
who also produced such horror hits as
The Last House On The Left (1972) and
House (1986). Just a little over 40 years
ago, however, shortly before the first
instalment of the Jason Voorhees
mythology changed the face of
fear-films forever, Cunningham was
hoping to achieve something a little
different. In fact, he was looking to
move into children’s films.
Ironically, this strange decision is
also what led to the gory body-count
carnage of Friday The 13th...
“What happened is that The Last
House On The Left got a lot of attention
for being a successful movie that was
made for not much money,” the
director tells Buff. “So right after that,
people began calling me and asking me
to make more films that
I would label as ‘puke in
a bucket’!” He breaks into
a laugh. “But I had kids
and I said to my wife, ‘I
don’t want to be the
puke-in-a-bucket guy’ – so
I made this little baseball
film called Here Come The
Tigers and then I talked
some backers into
investing into this soccer
movie called Manny’s
Orphans. We could not sell
that one to theatres, but
United Artists optioned it as
a potential pilot for a future television
series. However, that meant I had no
money coming in and I could not pay
off any of these guys who had given
me the cash to make it – and they were
getting impatient...”
As a result, and with Cunningham’s
career as a family-friendly visionary
looking increasingly slippery, it seemed
as if a little bit of puke in the bucket
would, at the very least, keep the rent
paid. “I had to figure out something
that we could do on the cheap andwhich might make a few
bucks, so I came up with
this title: Friday The 13th.
But what the hell was
Friday The 13th? It
sounded scary but that
was all I had...”
Still, it was better than
nothing and Cunningham
quickly got to work putting
together an advertising
campaign for a fright-
flick that did not actually
exist. “I took out this
advertisement in Variety that said,
‘Friday The 13th is the most terrifying
film ever made’, and then I added
that it was coming soon,” he laughs.
“Well, when we went to print, I got
a lot of attention. People did want to
make this movie and they invested in
it. I even got a call from one guy in
Germany who asked how he could buy
the distribution – he said he never
even needed to see Friday The 13th.
He just loved the title!”
Working at
Cunningham’s side during
this period was Steve Miner- the future director of
Halloween H20 (1998) and
Lake Placid (1999), but back
then, part of the old Last
House stable who had been
scraping to make ends
meet in the New York
exploitation scene. Miner
would, however, grab an
Associate Producer credit
on Friday The 13th and
direct the following two
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