Hearts of Darkness: The Making of the Final Friday
It’s all in the circumstances of childhood, be it happy or tragic, how one person succeeds and another stumbles, the events which lead one person to be a leader, a doctor, a scientist, or simply content to build a home and raise a family, or the traumas which take another person and put them on a course of murder, mayhem, bloodshed, their names associated with shocking acts of violence and degradation which echo down the years.
The description could apply to Jason Voorhees, taunted and bullied as a child until he drowned in 1957, his mother Pamela taking revenge on later visitors to Camp Crystal Lake until her own death, Jason then rising from his watery grave to continue her work, but also Adam Marcus, a friend of the family of Friday the 13th producer Sean S Cunningham whose own family came from a background of theatre and performance, he and his brother Kipp child actors who took whatever opportunity came to them.
Those circumstances eventually leading to twenty-three year old Marcus making his directorial debut with Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, released in August 1993 as the ninth in the sequence, it was the first to be distributed through New Line Cinema rather than Paramount who retained the rights to the Friday the 13th banner and any established characters other than Voorhees himself, resulting in a title which undeniably linked with the previous films while sidestepping legal complications.
The story detailed in documentary Hearts of Darkness: The Making of the Final Friday, director Michael Felsher has assembled an enthusiastic cornucopia of victims and survivors across cast, crew and interested parties, including Marcus himself, Steven Williams (Jason hunter Creighton Duke), Kane Hodder (Voorhees), Kipp Marcus (police officer Parker), Rusty Schwimmer (diner owner Rusty B), Bill Dill (cinematographer), Robert Kurtzmann and Howard Berger (effects artists) and Vincente DiSanti (creator of Never Hike Alone), all of them telling tales out of school.
Attempting a new direction with fresh ideas, essential for a ten year old series and also something of a condition of the continuation, Jason Goes to Hell was ambitious and broke the pattern of the previous films, resulting in a division in the fanbase, some appreciating the ideas while others rejected it entirely, voice given to both sides of the argument in Hearts of Darkness though Marcus recalls the initial reception was enthusiastic, the naysayers not appearing until the rise of internet forums and their predilection for blinkered overt negativity to gain attention.
A tale of “executive typists” and jumping through hoops to get greenlit, of fire extinguishers filled with fake blood, of the pride in melting bodies and the first film in the series to have a black heroic lead, of a thousand camera setups on a thirty day shoot, of hastily written scenes dropped in to pad the short-running cut with post-modern commentary, of the frustration that much of the best gore was flatly refused by the censors, of a final scene which didn’t pay off for another decade, even for those who curse the film, Hearts of Darkness is fascinating and essential viewing.
Glasgow Film Festival continues until Sunday 9th March
