#Kevin Bacon Reveals Weird Secret Behind Iconic Friday the 13th Death Scene

Kevin Bacon has had a long and illustrious career appearing in all sorts of genres and types of movies. One of the first films he appeared in that ended up really taking off was the original Friday the 13th, which kickstarted Jason Voorhees’s long and illustrious career on the big screen. In a recent interview, Bacon revealed that his interest in doing a role in the film was less motivated by artistic ambitions than a simple need to pay his rent.

“Some of the movies that I’ve been in were very specifically by choice. Friday the 13th, that’s just because I needed to pay the rent, really. It ended up exploding. I don’t know how many they made.”

In Friday the 13th, Kevin Bacon plays the role of Jack, who was one of the first victims in the franchise to die the kind of gory death at the hands of a serial killer that the series has since become synonymous with. As the actor goes on to explain, the infamous scene of Jack’s death after getting shot in the throat by an arrow was very difficult to put together, and almost got ruined due to technical complications.

“Tom Savini (legendary makeup effects artist), I guess that’s probably the movie that put him on the map. What I remember was that, I have sex with the girl, and then smoke a joint, which means in horror language that they’re dead. I’m lying there, and the hand comes out from underneath the bed and pins my head down, and then an arrow comes shooting out from the back, underneath the cot, through my neck and out through the front. So, they built a fake neck and chest and then it was my face. I was on my knees kind of underneath the bed with my head tilted back and this fake neck and chest. I got under the bed, and they lit it, and they applied the makeup. I mean, it was a really long time in a tortuous kind of position.”

If that wasn’t uncomfortable enough, it turned out that the shot was so difficult to set up with all the machinery involved in it that Bacon only had one take to get the whole thing right, and then the machinery collapsed in the middle of that one take. Which was worse than facing off against Jason Voorhees in person.

“They also said, “Just know we only have one of these necks.” So, there really was no take two. There was an effects person underneath the bed that was supposed to pump the blood once the arrow went through. I’m acting – you know, I don’t know how you act, like, getting stuck with an arrow, but I just was, whatever, doing what I could – and the hose broke on the blood pump. So, that person I believe grabbed it and started blowing it with their mouth, since it was only one take. As a result, the blood has a weird kind of trajectory.”

Fortunately, his experience on the film did not put Bacon off horror movies, and he went on to star in many noteworthy entries in the genre, including Tremors, Hollow Man, and the freshly released You Should Have Left, about a couple with their young child who are trapped in a strange countryside house with a dark past. This comes to us from Entertainment Weekly.

Topics: Friday the 13th