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Here’s what we all know about Jason Voorhees: he lives at Camp Crystal Lake, he likes to kill partying teenagers, and he wears a hockey mask. Yet, none of those things were true in the original 1980 Friday the 13th, as the killer in that movie was Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), who was murdering teens at Camp Crystal Lake after young Jason’s death years earlier. It took a few more movies for Jason to become the character we know and love today.
In particular, Jason doesn’t put on a hockey mask until midway through the third entry, 1983’s Friday the 13th Part III. And the iconic face wear only came into play because someone working on the film happened to be a fan of one of the worst sports teams of the early ’80s, the Detroit Red Wings.
Jason, Masked
When producer Sean S. Cunningham first got the idea for Friday the 13th, he only had a title and a grandiose tagline. “The most terrifying film ever made!” declared the ad that Cunningham put in Variety, despite the fact that not only had said film not been made, but he didn’t even have a script. All Cunningham had was a desire to get a bit of the success that Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad enjoyed with John Carpenter‘s low-budget, holiday-themed slasher Halloween.
That cart-before-the-horse approach has resulted in many unexpected elements of the Friday the 13th franchise, including its ambling approach to building the main character. The hockey mask comes into play in the third movie, not initially because of Jason, but rather because of perhaps the most irritating character in slasher movie history. Larry Zerner plays Shelly, the prankster best friend to hunk Andy (Jeffrey Rogers) and blind date companion to the disappointed Vera (Catherine Parks). Although she clearly isn’t attracted to Shelly, Vera is at least polite when turning down his advances. In response, Shelly either pulls elaborate stunts that annoy everyone or he sulks about the fact that people don’t like it when he does the exact thing they tell him they don’t like.
For his final stunt, Shelly grabs a hockey mask, a diving suit, and a harpoon gun. He scares Vera with it, who once again tells him that she doesn’t like being scared, but also explains calmly that people would want to spend time with him if he actually treated them well. Instead, Shelly goes off to pout, a pity party that thankfully gets cut short when Jason arrives to cut his throat. Even better, Jason takes the harpoon gun and the mask for himself. While the gun doesn’t return after this entry, the mask stays forever.
Jason’s hockey mask has become such an accepted part of horror lore that nobody really questions its origins. When watching Part III with fresh eyes, however, one has to wonder: why wear a hockey mask in the water? The answer involves the Detroit Red Wings.
A Different Type of Dead Thing
In 1926, the National Hockey League was looking to expand further into the United States and sought applications from teams in Detroit and Chicago. In addition to the Chicago Black Hawks (now Blackhawks), the NHL accepted the Detroit Cougars, in honor of the recently-folded Victoria Cougars. The Cougars struggled in its first few years, so badly that they changed the name to the Falcons in 1930 in hopes that the rechristening would inspire the players. When that didn’t work, new owner James E. Norris called the team the Red Wings, and gave them a distinctive logo that honored their Motor City roots. Even better, Norris hired legendary coach Jack Adams, who turned around the team’s fortunes.
In 1936, the Red Wings won their first Stanley Cup, and would win seven more over the next few decades. Their teams would include some of the greatest names in sports, including Ted Lindsay, Alex Delvecchio, and, of course, Gordie Howe. The highlights of those years were enough to make the Wings favorites, even when the team returned to their losing ways.
That was certainly the case in 1980, the year that Jason Vorhees first hit our screens. Starting in 1967, the Wings entered a 20-year slump, a period marked by poor general manager decisions and dissension among the players. Combined with the recession that hit the blue-collar city, Detroit stopped caring about their hockey team. Owners tried to lure fans to the Detroit Olympia and, later, Joe Lewis Arena with new car giveaways, but fans dismissed the product on ice as the Detroit Dead Things.
Yet, as bleak as things were, the team still had its fans. In fact, three of them were working on Friday the 13th Part III, including Martin Sadoff, the man responsible for the film’s 3D effects. According to Crystal Lake Memories, when director Steve Miner noted that the script by Martin Kitrosser and Carol Watson called for Jason to don another mask, Sadoff ran to his vehicle and grabbed the replica Terry Sawchuk mask he had and the rest is movie history.
Winging it With Jason
Well, almost. Miner liked the hockey mask idea, but found the original one fit too small on the head of Jason actor Richard Brooker. Makeup effects director Doug White created a larger mask based on the original, which he decorated by using a drill to make a hole design. But the original Red Wings elements remained in the form of two crimson triangles painted onto the mask.
Over the years, Jason’s hockey mask has been altered and reimagined. It acquired a giant gash from a machete sunk into Jason’s head at the end of The Final Chapter, and Jason X turned it into a metallic faceplate. But fans and filmmakers alike keep coming back to that original mask from 1983.
1983 turned out to be a big year for the Red Wings too. That was the year that then GM Jim Devellano drafted a rookie from British Columbia named Steve Yzerman. In 1986, Yzerman would be named the Wings captain, thanks to his scoring touch. But Yzerman’s real impact came when legendary coach Scotty Bowman joined the team, and instituted a system that required Yzerman to be more of a playmaker than a scorer. Instead of balking, Yzerman took on the new role and captained a team that included Russian superstars Sergei Fedorov and Vladimir Konstantinov.
Under Yzerman’s leadership, the Wings became one of the most dominant teams of the 1990s and 2000s, winning three Stanley Cups during that period. Today, the Wings are (hopefully) coming out of another Detroit Dead Things slump and are on their way to their first playoff appearance in a decade. And who is leading their return to the postseason? Why, it’s their General Manager, Steve Yzerman.
Things haven’t been as good for Jason, as legal squabbles have stalled the franchise at twelve movies. But if the upcoming A24 prequel series Crystal Lake can revive interest in Friday the 13th, then maybe Jason can join his favorite hockey team in a return to prominence.
The post Friday the 13th: How a Real Hockey Team Led to Jason’s Iconic Look appeared first on Den of Geek.
