Trivia / Friday the 13th Part 2

• Acting in the Dark: Adrienne King didn't know Alice would be killed off and there was no script for her scene. So she showed up and ad-libbed a conversation on the phone with Alice's mother.
• B-Team Sequel:
  • Steve Miner, associate producer on the first film, stepped in to direct this film and the next one after Sean S. Cunningham refused to direct, because he did not like the Jason-comes-back-from-the-dead storyline that the studio was pushing on him. He said that was too stupid, and wouldn't work. He now admits how wrong he was, as the series flourished afterward with Jason as the villain.
  • Tom Savini was offered to return to do the effects, but he chose to do The Burning instead, also disliking the idea of Jason being the killer.
• Billing Displacement: Adrienne King gets a third billing, even though she has less than 10 minutes of screen-time and most of that is just a flashback to the first film. The credits don't even begin until after she's killed by Jason.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Warrington Gillette auditioned for Paul but didn't get it. When filmmakers saw that he had stunt training, he was given some of Jason's stunt work. Stuart Charno also auditioned for Paul and later Mark, before getting cast as Ted.
• Creator Backlash: Betsy Palmer, Tom Savini, Steve Miner, and Victor Miller all felt it was a dumb idea to have Jason turn out to be alive the whole time, leading to the Fridge Logic of why he didn't say anything to his mother. The first three eventually warmed up to the idea, however, especially Palmer.
• Creator's Apathy: Betsy Palmer only agreed to reprise her role as Pamela Voorhees if filming wouldn't be an inconvenience. The production went to her house and filmed her scenes there.
• Dueling Works: This came out the same year as Halloween II (1981), the second entry in the franchise that Friday the 13th was created to emulate. Both films also feature the killer murdering a cop with a hammer to the head.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • To achieve the effect of Jeff being impaled through the back while on top of Sandra, Bill Randolph had to kneel on the floor through a hole in the bed while wearing a prosthetic. He found it uncomfortable, and says the sound guy said "open your mouth" and blew some white powder in "and I was having a great time after that."
  • Amy Steel avoided Steve Daskawisz on set so that she could feel scared of him whenever Jason was chasing Ginny.
  • When filming the climactic scene of Jason jumping through the window behind Ginny, the window wasn't gimmicked properly and Warrington Gillette slammed into it instead of through it. That, coupled with the uncomfortable prosthetics he was wearing, meant that he was appropriately as angry as Jason should be.
• Flip-Flop of God: While Steve Miner claims the rat was the one who peed under the bed while Jason is searching for Ginny in the cabin, Amy Steel claims in the Shout! Factory commentary it was Ginny as an unknown executive wanted the moment in the film.
• God Never Said That: It was a persistent rumour for years that Alice was killed off at the start because Adrienne King requested for her role to be as small as possible, due to her experiences with a Loony Fan that nearly killed her. Adrienne however says in the Crystal Lake Memories documentary that her agent asked for a higher salary that the studio couldn't afford. She in fact didn't even know what her role would be (see above).
• Life Imitates Art: Ginny is an aspiring psychologist; according to The Other Wiki (as shown here), Amy Steel is a practicing psychologist (albeit in a different field than Ginny).
• Missing Episode: The film suffered several cuts by MPAA and for almost forty years, many thought that the deleted footage was lost forever. Finally, in 2020, Scream Factory revealed that the material was found (on a VHS tape owned by Carl Fullerton who did the makeup effects) and will be released as a Blu-Ray extra. Among the main revelations of these deleted scenes, the deaths of Alice, Scott, Mark, Jeff and Sandra are much longer and graphic.
• On-Set Injury:
  • Steve Daskawisz suffered several injuries during filming.
    • For the shot of Jason stabbing a pitch fork through the door, the door itself had not been gimmicked properly and so he hurt his wrist.
    • When jumping down a hill as Jason chases after Ginny, he accidentally landed on the pick axe he was carrying and broke some ribs.
    • In the fight in the hut, an exhausted Amy Steel mistimed a strike with a machete and cut his finger, requiring him to go the emergency room. He went in with a prop machete in his shoulder as a prank.
    • He also got rug burns around his eyes for having to wear the burlap sack for long hours, especially when they used tape to keep it from flapping.
  • Adrienne King got an injury when filming Alice's death scene, as the ice pick prop didn't retract like it was supposed to.
• The Other Marty: Good luck figuring out who played Jason during most of the film. Not even the cast is sure. The fact that multiple people filled in and for the longest time sole credit for the performance went to Warrington Gillete due to contract stipulations doesn't help either. We know for sure it was Ellen Lutter's legs in the beginning, Steve Daskawicz in the climactic fight, production assistant Jerry Wallace for many kill scenes and shots of Jason's limbs, head makeup artist Carl Fullerton for Jeff and Sandra's death and it was Warrington Gillete who jumped trough the window unmasked. The rest is anybody's guess.
• Production Posse: Most of the original crew from the first film returned to work on the sequel.
• Reality Subtext:
  • Lauren-Marie Taylor (Vickie) had a legitimate crush on Tom McBride (Mark), lending realism to Vicki flirting with Mark. Unfortunately for her, he was gay in real life.
  • As noted above, Adrienne King was dealing with a stalker at the time and admits that the stalker even held a gun to her head at one point. Knowing this makes Alice's death scene, in which she's killed in her own home by Jason, that much more disturbing.
• Shrug of God: How is Jason still alive? Did he actually drown? Why did he spend all this time living in the woods? How could his mother who spent decades stalking the camp never notice he was nearby? Half the crew asked these exact questions, and the other half said not to think too hard about it. Friday the 13th: The Game would later try to fix this via the Pamela Tapes. It still doesn't make a lot of sense, and its canonity is unknown. Jason didn't drown, but Pamela thought he did after several failed police searches and had a mental breakdown.
• Similarly Named Works: Oddly, there's an adult film named Friday the 13th Part 2.
• Throw It In!:
  • No one knew how they were going to hide Jason's face for most of the movie until costume designer Ellen Lutter suggested the pillowcase, inspired by The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Even though no one else thought it was great, they used it because they couldn't come up with anything better.
  • As Ginny is climbing out the window to escape from Jason, the window pane in the scene genuinely broke, and Amy Steel slipped, landing on her arm.
• Uncredited Role: Wes Craven shot the footage of Betsy Palmer that Jason hallucinates in his shack.
• Underage Casting:
  • Marta Kober was only seventeen but lied about her age. As a result, when the production found out, a sex scene between Sandra and Jeff (in which she appeared topless) was heavily cut down.
  • Lauren-Marie Taylor was likewise just seventeen playing Vickie, and jokes that her mother "probably should have signed something" for the scene of her changing.
• Word of God: According to the Shout! Factory audio commentary, Steve Miner claimed the ending of the film was not a hallucination by Ginny and Jason did not kill Paul.

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