A recent documentary offers new insight into iconic moments from the Friday the 13th slasher series, in which actor and stuntman Kane Hodder donned the hockey mask of undead killer Jason Voorhees.
"I still think it's accurate to say that I've murdered more people on film than any actor in history," Hodder says early in the 2018 documentary To Hell and Back: The Kane Hodder Story, which is now available for streaming on Shudder after originally premiering at horror film festivals and on DVD/VOD.
Hodder came to Voorhees relatively late in the series, first appearing in 1988's Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, which pits the Camp Crystal Lake killer against a telekinetic teenager (similar to Carrie White, of Stephen King's Carrie). By this point in the series, Jason was several movies dead, and had been resurrected by a lightning bolt in Part VI.
Hodder was brought on by director John Carl Buechler, whom he had worked with on the 1987 horror movie Prison. Buechler felt the stuntman was up to the rigors of the intensive special effects makeup required to capture Jason's rotting visage beneath his crumbling hockey mask.
Part VII: The New Blood is remembered for its ghoulish effects, including one of the most memorable deaths in the entire series, when Jason kills a camper named Judy (Debora Kessler) by dragging her sleeping bag to a tree and smashing her against it.
"I killed somebody with something that's not a weapon. That's pretty amazing," Hodder says in To Hell and Back. "And it was just such an impactful kill in the theaters. I went to Chinese Theater in Hollywood when the movie opened, just anonymously, and sat in the back and when that kill came up opening night I watched half the audience stand up and high-five each other and stuff."
The movie also features a for-the-time record fire-burn stunt, as Hodder's Jason writhes in flames sprayed telekinetically from a basement furnace. Hodder's 44-second burn set an on-screen record, but lighting yourself on fire has since become a popular Guinness World Records challenge and the longest burn now stands at five minutes and 41 seconds.
"We did the ignition of the character, on fire, with a propane cannon. Then I started stumbling around and doing my acting, which I always love doing," Hodder describes in To Hell and Back. "Ultimately, by the time I went down, because I was going by the feel of it, I had been on fire so long that the fuel was almost gone. I was on fire for 44 seconds. If you watch your watch for 44 seconds and imagine being completely engulfed in flames for that long, it's an incredibly long time."
What's even more remarkable is that Hodder was almost killed doing a similar stunt, years before becoming Jason, and continues to perform on-screen fire stunts even with burn scars over half of his body.
While The New Blood's slow pace ranks it somewhere in the middle of the series for most Friday the 13th fans, it's widely agreed that Hodder's depiction of Jason represents a high point for the series. In addition to Jason's rotting body—capturing the decay from his imprisonment on the bottom of Crystal Lake at the end of the previous movie—Hodder added a minor, but signature change to the killer's behavior.
"When Jason is staring at someone and not moving, he looks like a mannequin, so I said, 'What could I do to still do that same stare, but add life to the character?'" Hodder says in the documentary, recounting the decision to give Jason a chest-heaving breathing pattern. "To me that made it look like the character was about to spring at you at any moment."
Hodder stayed on as the character for three subsequent movies—Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and Jason X—then returned to the role to record motion-capture murders for the 2017 multiplayer video game, Friday the 13th: The Game.
To Hell and Back: The Kane Hodder Story includes more stories from Hodder's remarkable career and is now streaming on Shudder.
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