Hatchet Job, Part II

I had signed a contract to novelize FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART VI, without ever having seen any of the films. I knew absolutely nothing about them. Paramount had promised to express mail the scripts for Part VI and all the previous films, as well, so I would know what had gone on before.

And they also graciously agreed to supply me with the videos of the first 5 films. (Remember videos?) However, these had not arrived as yet and I needed to start thinking about how to approach the project. Fortunately, I knew just where to go.

I called Steve Rasnic Tem.

Steve, for those of you who might not be familiar with his work, is both a poet and a horror writer of considerable repute. His work has been widely published in dozens of anthologies and magazines, as well as novel form. I'd known Steve for some years and knew him to be a true connoisseur of horror. If there was something he didn't know about the field, then no one knew it.

"Steve? I just got a job to novelize the latest FRIDAY THE 13TH film and I don't really know anything about the series. What can you tell me about it?"

Silence.

"Steve?"

"Uh...yes. Well...."

He had seen the films. He had taken his kids to see them. (Steve's that kind of guy.) He gave me a brief synopsis of them on the phone. I began to feel apprehensive. The next day, the scripts arrived. They all read more or less like this:

ANGLE - JASON
Advancing menacingly. He begins to raise the axe.

ANGLE - AXE
Wet with blood. Lightning flashes.

CLOSE-UP - JENNIFER'S FACE
She screams.

CLOSE-UP - AXE
Descending...

They all went on more or less like this for about 120 pages or so. Wide margins. Lots of empty space. And I was supposed to transform that sort of thing into a novel with a length of at least 50,000 words.

In a week.

Somewhere in Heaven, Chico Marx was laughing his head off while Harpo tooted his squeeze bulb horn and stuck his tongue out. By the time my girlfriend came home, I had chain-smoked about 5 packs of cigarettes and developed a pronounced facial tic. (NOTE: this was back in the late 80s. There have been some changes in my life since then. That girlfriend and I parted amicably after about 5 years together and I eventually got married for the second time. I had a drug problem back in college, and I overcame it. I am also a recovering alcoholic with 20 years of sobriety under my belt. However, I had started smoking at the age of 10 and by the time I quit, some 15 years ago now, I was up to 4 packs a day. Of all the bad habits I had developed and managed to get rid of over the years, smoking was by far the most difficult to quit. And it was probably the most worthwhile thing I've ever done.)

The next day, the videos arrived. Okay, I thought, those were only scripts, after all. Maybe actually seeing the films would give me something more to work with. I warmed up the VCR (remember those?) and sat through all 5 of them in a row. By the time my girlfriend got home from work, I was sitting on the floor, slowly rocking back and forth and going, "Uhnnnh... uhnnnh...."

Okay, Siskel and Ebert aside, let's be charitable and say they worked as films. (For younger readers, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were film critics whose very popular TV show ran for years. They have both since died, tragically... oh, boy....) After all, they made a ton of money at the box office and a lot of people enjoyed them. But as books? That was another story.

Writing them as books, I was faced with certain problems that seemed damn near insurmountable. For one thing, there was the main character. (Dare we call him the protagonist?) Jason Vorhees HAD no character. He was a hockey mask and a machete. Nothing more. He did not speak. He did not emote. We knew nothing about him as an individual. Only that his mother had been killed in the first film and he apparently was murdering the entire civilized world in revenge. He also had drowned as a child and, starting with the second film, he comes back as a murderous, hulking adult, with no explanation of how he happened either to escape from drowning or come back from the dead.

He also seemed to be invulnerable. You just couldn't kill the bastard. And they tried. Boy, did they ever try! He was hanged, shot repeatedly at point-blank range, axed, stabbed, attacked with a chainsaw, hit by a car, torn apart by a motor boat propeller, they did everything short of dropping a nuke on him, and I'm not sure that would've worked, either. He made the Terminator look like Woody Allen. Yet there was no explanation for WHY he was impossible to kill.

We didn't know a great deal about his victims, either. Most of them were teenagers, camping in the woods. More often than not, Jason got them immediately after they'd had sex. Or just as they were about to have sex. Or even WHILE they were having sex. Clearly, what we had here was a sort of Catholic morality play. You engage in premarital sex, you go to Hell. In various unpleasant ways. Steve Tem ventured the theory that impressionable young people seeing these films could grow up to become premature ejaculators. (I really don't know about Steve, sometimes....)

Question: how to transform a script like this into a reasonably decent novel? By now, you might not think so, but I do have standards and I was going to try my damnedest to make it a good novel. Without being allowed to add any subplots or otherwise "pad" the material. I gave it some hard thought, then I called Paramount.

I asked if it would be okay to flesh out the characters of Jason's victims. Make them more than simply victims, get into their personalities some more, reveal what they're thinking, what their backgrounds were, how they really felt about each other, in other words, make them more fully developed people the readers could identify with and care about.

Well, yeah, they guessed I could.

What about Jason? I asked. Could I explore his past a little? Make him a more realized character? Give him a history? A personality?

What did I mean personality? (The concept seemed rather new to them.)

Well, you know, I said, get into his head and write from his point of view. Show you what he's thinking.

This struck them as a really novel concept. They thought it would be "neat." (Yes, they really did say "neat.")

How about if I explained how he came to be the way he was? What forces and traumas drove him to insanity and to become a relentless killing machine? Could I come up with a rationale for why he doesn't die?

They seemed dubious, but allowed as to how that might be interesting. As long as I didn't stray from the concept.

Great. Now, at least, I had something to work with. I could give Jason a personality, make him something more than just a hockey mask and a machete. Or a spear gun. Or a knife. Or a cleaver. Or a chainsaw....

And I had about a week in which to do it.

Clearly, this was going to require a rather unusual mindset. I considered going to a sporting goods store and buying a hockey mask, so that I could wear it while I was writing and get into the proper frame of mind. Only my girlfriend said that if I did that, I could start looking for another girlfriend. Bad enough she had to deal with an eccentric writer every day. No way was she coming home to a guy wearing a hockey mask.

Okay. Scratch that idea. What else could I do to get into the proper mood?

Of course. Go out and get a bunch of Heavy Metal tapes. (Remember tapes?) Black Sabbath. Motley Crue. Billy Idol. All of that Satanic stuff that was supposed to rot your brain and subliminally convince you to commit suicide. Wait until my girlfriend left for work, because all she listened to was classical stuff and that yuppie wallpaper music they called "New Age," then sit down at my trusty Apple Mac, put the tapes into the stereo (remember stereos?) and really CRANK 'em. Crack the plaster on the walls.
Serial killer music. Screaming prose to screaming guitars.

For some reason, Billy Idol turned out to be perfect. "White Wedding." "Rebel Yell." "Flesh for Fantasy." His vocals and Steve Stevens' wailing guitar combined to create precisely the right atmosphere for butchering teenagers. I played Billy Idol almost exclusively while I worked. My girlfriend would come home to find the house shaking, the neighbors barricading their doors and windows, and me standing up behind my desk, lip drooping in a sneer while I punched the air and yelled, "FLESH! FLESH!" She locked me in the office and stopped talking to me. No problem. I didn't need food. I didn't need sleep. I was in Work Mode!

The trouble with the way I write is that I'm what you might call a "Method Writer." Like a method actor, I really get into my characters and sometimes my personality tends to get a little weird around the edges. About halfway through the project, my girlfriend came home to find that I had busted out and was waiting in the darkened lobby with a butcher knife. Moving stiff-legged, like Frankenstein's monster, I stalked her through the house for about 10 minutes until she hit me with a mop. (NOTE: after I wrote this and it was published in THE BLOOD REVIEW, a number of people asked me if this really happened. Okay, I exaggerated a bit for comedic effect. I am not a complete loony, but there was a kitchen knife involved. What really happened is that we were in the kitchen and I was washing dishes. I happened to pick up her kitchen knife to wash and, jokingly, I started making stabbing motions in the air and making those "whoosh-whoosh" sounds that are on the movie soundtrack. And my girlfriend, not altogether jokingly, picked up a large frying pan and brandished it with a threatening look. Since she was probably more dangerous with that frying pan than I was with the kitchen knife, I quickly put it back into the sink....)

After I came to, I complained that she wasn't being very supportive. She replied that if I did that again, I'd need support, all right. Like a truss. (NOTE: And I'm not sure after all these years, but I do believe that was a verbatim exchange.) I allowed as to how I was, perhaps, taking my work a bit too seriously. Living with Jason for 10 to 12 hours a day can get a bit intense. However, I decided to tone things down a little. One of my hobbies is pistol shooting and I had taught my girlfriend how to handle a gun. Big mistake. When we go to the range now, the cops line up to watch her. She can shoot the eyes out of a snake with my .44 Magnum and, unlike Jason, she pointedly reminded me, I WASN'T invulnerable. (NOTE: this is actually true. I did teach her how to shoot, and she became incredibly proficient at it. The cops really did line up to watch her at the range, marveling at how "a little girl like that" -- police officers not being the most enlightened sorts when it comes to gender equality -- could handle a .44 Magnum. My eyesight has grown worse over the years, so that I now wear trifocals, and my skills have suffered somewhat as a result, but I still enjoy target shooting. And I've taught a number of women to shoot over the years, as more and more of them have become less afraid of guns and more afraid of men. Not coincidentally, I find that women make much better students than men when it comes to shooting instruction. I suspect it's because, unlike men, they LISTEN.)

All right. Get the image. What kind of a kid was he? QUIET. Born on Friday the 13th, of course. At the stroke of midnight. He never cried when he was a baby. Ever. His mother worried about that. At night, she'd come into his room to check on him and there he'd be, lying in his crib, perfectly still, his eyes wide open and staring. Spooky eyes. As he got older, the other kids avoided him. They didn't quite know why. There was just something ... different about him.

No, wait. Not all the kids avoided him. The school bully decided to exert is authority and push him around a little. Jason simply looked at him. Heavy eye contact. That night, an ambulance came and took the bully away. For some reason no one could figure out, the bully stuck his hand in the garbage disposal and turned it on....

Jesus! Did I really write that? Low whistle. Okay, we've got something here, God knows what it is, but let's go with it.

As a kid, Jason never spoke. To anyone. Not ever. It worried his teachers. Most of them simply left him sitting in the back of the classroom and tried not to look at him. The school psychologist knew that Jason wasn't autistic. Autistic children don't really respond to their surroundings. Jason responded. He simply didn't speak. After several futile sessions with him, the school psychologist lost it. He grabbed the kid and shook him, shouting, "I KNOW you can talk, you little freak! You CAN, can't you?"

And Jason looked at him and spoke, for the first time in his life. He simply said, "Yes." They took the school psychologist away and put him in a rubber room. All of a sudden, he inexplicably went deaf and kept screaming, "WHAT? WHAT?" at the top of his lungs.

Billy Idol was singing "Eyes Without A Face." I was starting to feel a little creepy.
Okay, so far, we've got a kid that makes Pugsly Addams look like Beaver Cleaver. Onward. He's a little older now. At camp. We know from the first film that he went swimming in the lake alone. The counselors were all busy doing what camp counselors always do. Having sex, of course. So no one was watching little Jason and he drowned. His mother, driven insane by grief, becomes a savage killer and starts doing things like hiding under beds and pushing arrows up through people's throats.

At the end of the first film, the sole surviving camp counselor decapitates her, gets into a canoe and drifts out onto the lake, presumably because it's safe out there. Morning comes. She's in a fugue state. Suddenly, the hideously decomposed body of a small boy erupts out of the lake and pulls her in. Cut to her waking up in a hospital bed. It was all a dream about the boy. Or was it? Fade to Black.

In the next film, Jason comes back as an adult, wearing a pillow case over his head because he's got a case of psoriasis like you wouldn't believe. (The hockey mask comes later.) What happened in between? We're told he's been living in the woods for years, like an animal. But what's happened to his face to make him look the way he does? No explanation. Did he drown or didn't he? You got me. Hmmmm.....

Okay, let's try for some continuity. Suppose he DID drown. Suppose that what happened to the female counselor in the first film was NOT a hallucination. A decomposed Jason did rise up out of the lake and pull her in, only she got away. (Not for long, though. He gets her later.) Why? How? Get the image. There he is, a little boy, drowning. The water closes over his head as he sinks beneath the surface and slowly floats down to the lake bottom. To all intents and purposes, he's dead. His body starts to decompose.

Only somewhere, deep inside, some primal spark of life fights to survive. Fights the oxygen deprivation to the brain. Fights the damage to the tissues. How? His cells are capable of regeneration. He's a mutant. A freak of nature. Like his strange father, who was never sick a day in his life, Jason's body can repair itself. Like a starfish, when you tear off one of its legs, it can grown a new one. Only given damage that's serious enough, maybe the regeneration isn't perfect. The leg might grow back misshapen.

Time passes. His bloated body eventually starts to rise to the surface at about the same time the counselor floats out on the lake in her canoe. He comes to a sort of primitive consciousness, pulls her in, but he's still weak. She fights him off. He manages to reach the shore and drag himself up out of the lake, where his body convulses as he starts to vomit stagnant water from his regenerating lungs. He pukes up snails and maggots and little worms....

My girlfriend comes home and offers to take me out to dinner because I've been working so hard. Only for some peculiar reason, I've lost my appetite.

The book starts to come together. I use the exact dialog in the script, but I add what's called "interior dialog," what people are thinking, and I fill in some of the gaps that result from camera cutting sharply from one scene to another to keep the action moving. Only in a book, you can keep the action moving in other ways. I lengthen Jason's scenes by getting into his head and showing the reader his point of view. It's primitive. Disjointed. All that oxygen deprivation while he was on the bottom of the lake has damaged his brain. It's almost on the reptilian level. He hears voices. Specifically, his mother's voice. Urging him on to kill.

I find myself starting to get into this, enjoying it. My girlfriend seems to be getting edgy. She says there's a strange, manic glint in my eyes. (NOTE: she actually did say this.) I'm pulling all-nighters to meet the deadline. At night, she can hear me, cackling wildly in the office. She keeps the revolver on the nightstand, loaded with Winchester Silvertips.

Much to everyone's amazement, my own included, I managed to deliver the novel on time. I actually wrote it in a week. (It seemed much longer, somehow.) My agent even called and said, with some surprise, that it wasn't all that bad. She'd read it to her 5-year-old daughter as a bedtime story. (I don't know about my agent, sometimes....) (NOTE: I don't know if it was true, and I certainly hope it wasn't, but she actually DID say she did that.)

The upshot of the whole thing was that I was asked to write the novelizations for Parts I, II, and III, as well. I did them all in a week apiece. (That's the trouble with being a showoff. You do something once; they expect you to do it again.) I even got some fan mail from Jason's horde of admirers. One letter was written in crayon. Another was written in red ink. (At least, I HOPE it was red ink....)

They never asked me to write Parts IV and V. (And since then, of course, there have been more.) I guess the novels didn't do quite as well as they had hoped. Frankly, I wasn't too surprised. I didn't think the audience for those films actually did much reading. But not when people see my list of credits, they see that I've written four FRIDAY THE 13TH books. Out of all the novels I've written, those invariably are the ones that people ask about. I'm really not sure why. I'm usually afraid to ask.

Anyway, I'm much better now and writing other things. My fingers no longer twitch nervously whenever I see my girlfriend picking up a knife to cut some salad. I've stopped waking up in the middle of the night and screaming, "FLESH! FLESH!" But I don't watch hockey games. Every time Friday the 13th rolls around, I get really quiet for some reason.

And it's been quite a while since I've gone camping.

(FINAL NOTE: Now, over 20 years later, people STILL ask me about those books. Recently, a friend of mine, a co-worker who has moonlighted at one of those Halloween haunted attractions in the woods things, asked me if I would consider showing up there and signing autographs. I declined, politely. This same friend told me that all these years later, those novels have reached collector status and when I went online to check, I was astonished at what they were going for. And, ironically, I don't get a penny of any of those sales, because the job was "work for hire" and I never got a dime in royalties, just a flat fee upfront. And while it wasn't all that much, if you look at it this way, it really wasn't bad for a week's work. And while I never saw any of the other films in the series -- seeing the first 6 was quite enough -- I'm told they worked some of the stuff I wrote in as background into the films that followed. I never got anything for that, either. But it was an interesting experience. One I'm not sure I'd want to repeat, however....)