Original FRIDAY THE 13th Star Betsy Palmer Once Revealed The Tragic Backstory She Came Up With For Mrs. Voorhees
It’s pretty crazy to look back and see what the Friday The 13th horror film franchise has become since the first film debuted in 1980. That movie was very different and unique for its time, and there was nobody running around in a hockey mask killing people. No, the killer in this movie was Mrs. Pamela Voorhees, the mother of a young boy named Jason who drowned in Crystal Lake.
Mrs. Voorhees was played by Betsy Palmer, who grudgingly took the job because she needed some money after her car broke down. She did not find the project appealing, and she described the script at one point as a "piece of sh*t."
She was paid $10,000 for 10 days of shooting for the film. As the years passed, Palmer embraced what she brought to the film and her status as a horror icon.
In an effort to bring something more to the role she was playing, Palmer came up with a backstory for Mrs. Voorhees, and it’s a pretty tragic one. This backstory gave her something to work with while shooting the film. She once shared this story with The Dissolve, saying:
"I traced Pamela back to my own high school days in the early 1940s. So it's 1944, a very conservative time, and Pamela has a steady boyfriend. They have sex, which is very bad of course, and Pamela soon gets pregnant with Jason. The father takes off and when Pamela tells her parents, they disown her because having [children] out of wedlock isn't something that good girls do. I think she took Jason and raised him the best she could, but he turned out to be a very strange boy."
He sure did! I like that, though, and there’s an understanding of how these immoral camp counselors led to Mrs. Voorhees becoming "very psychotic and puritanical in her attitudes.”
While I’ve enjoyed many of the films in the Friday The 13th franchise, the first one is the best one.
Via: /Film