Today is Friday the 13th – spooky! Now that you’re sufficiently scared, it’s the perfect time to share with you these 15 little-known facts about Jason Voorhees and the Friday the 13th film franchise:
15. Jason is an avid Twitter user, where he tweets amusing anecdotes under the handle @Sitting_By_The_Lake.
14. To get the actors in the mood for sex scenes, Betsy Palmer would sit off-camera playing erotic Spanish ballads on her acoustic guitar.
13. Jason’s original weapon was going to be a rubber chicken.
12. In order to appeal to a more Millenial crowd, Jason will be renamed Jacen for upcoming entries in the series.
11. Jason Voorhees’ birth name was actually Jayson, but his first grade teacher spelled it wrong and it stuck.
10. Unknown to most fans, Jason’s killing spree was meant to be a satirical representation of Democrats’ tax-and-spend policies.
9. Test audiences were equally scared by the title Monday the 6th and it ultimately came down to a coin flip for which name stuck.
8. For reasons still unclear to this day, the original script to Freddy vs. Jason featured a very graphic love scene between the two horror icons, totaling 13 pages.
7. The hockey mask from Friday the 13th Part III later went on to star in its own short-lived ABC sitcom.
6. Only the first movie actually takes place on Friday the 13th. The others all take place on the 12th or 14th.
5. They called it Jason X in the same way you might remember “solving for X.” Basically, no one actually knew what number they were on anymore.
4. Jason XXX featured ten times as much sex AND ten times as many dismemberments, with all of the severed body parts being used as sexual props.
3. “His name was Jason” was not originally intended as a line of dialogue, but was actually actress Betsy Palmer struggling to remember lines and characters during filming.
2. Actor Kane Hodder only agreed to play Jason if all proceeds of the film were donated to UNICEF.
1. An animated family feature starring Jason titled Funday the 13th has been stuck in development hell since 2003.