Jason Voorhees - Concept and Creation - Design

Design

The physical design of Jason Voorhees has gone through changes, some subtle and some radical. For Friday the 13th, the task of coming up with Jason's appearance was the responsibility of Tom Savini, whose design for Jason was inspired by someone Savini knew as a child whose eyes and ears did not line up straight. The original design called for Jason to have hair, but Savini and his crew opted to make him bald, so he would look like a "hydrocephalic, mongoloid pinhead", with a dome-shaped head. Savini created a plaster mold of Ari Lehman's head and used that to create prosthetics for his face. Lehman personally placed mud—from the bottom of the lake—all over his body to make himself appear "really slimy."

For Part 2, Steve Miner asked Carl Fullerton, the make-up effects supervisor, to stick to Savini's original design, but Fullerton only had one day to design and sculpt a new head. Fullerton drew a rough sketch of what he believed Jason should look like, and had it approved by Miner. Fullerton added long hair to the character. Gillette had to spend hours in a chair as they applied rubber forms all over his face, and had to keep one eye closed while the "droopy eye" application was in place. Gillette's eye was closed for twelve hours at a time while he was filming the final scenes of the film. False teeth created by a local dentist were used to distort Gillette's face. Much of the basic concept of Fullerton's design was eliminated for Part 3. Miner wanted to use a combination of the designs from Tom Savini and Carl Fullerton, but as work progressed the design began to lean more and more toward Savini's concept. Stan Winston was hired to create a design for Jason's head, but the eyes were level and Doug White, the make-up artist for Part 3, needed a droopy right eye. White did keep Winston's design for the back of the head, because the crew did not have the time to design an entirely new head for Jason. The process of creating Jason's look was hard work for White, who had to constantly make alterations to Richard Brooker's face, even up to the last day of filming.

The script for Part 3 called for Jason to wear a mask to cover his face, having worn a bag over his head in Part 2; what no one knew at the time was that the mask chosen would become a trademark for the character, and one instantly recognizable in popular culture in the years to come. During production, Steve Miner called for a lighting check. None of the effects crew wanted to apply any make-up for the light check, so they decided to just throw a mask on Brooker. The film's 3D effects supervisor, Martin Jay Sadoff, was a hockey fan, and had a bag of hockey gear with him on the set. He pulled out a Detroit Red Wings goaltender mask for the test. Miner loved the mask, but it was too small. Using a substance called VacuForm, Doug White enlarged the mask and created a new mold to work with. After White finished the molds, Terry Ballard placed red triangles on the mask to give it a unique appearance. Holes were punched into the mask and the markings were altered, making it different from Sadoff's mask. There were two prosthetic face masks created for Richard Brooker to wear underneath the hockey mask. One mask was composed of approximately 11 different appliances and took about six hours to apply to Brooker's face; this mask was used for scenes where the hockey mask was removed. In the scenes where the hockey mask is over the face, a simple head mask was created. This one-piece mask would slip on over Brooker's head, exposing his face but not the rest of his head.

Tom Savini agreed to return to make-up duties for The Final Chapter because he felt he should be the one to bring Jason full circle in terms of his look from child to man. Savini used his design from the original Friday the 13th, with the same practice of application as before, but molded from Ted White's face. Since Jason is not the actual killer in A New Beginning, it was not necessary to do any major designing for Jason's look. Only a head mask to cover the top and back of the head, like the one Brooker wore while wearing the hockey mask, was needed for the film. Make-up artist Louis Lazzara, who cites A New Beginning as almost a direct sequel to The Final Chapter, did base his head-mask on Tom Savini's design for The Final Chapter.

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood sought to make Jason more of a "classic monster along the lines of Frankenstein." From the beginning, Buechler tried to tie the previous films together by having Jason's appearance reflect that of the damage he received in the previous installments. Buechler wanted the motor boat damage from Jason Lives, and the axe and machete cuts Jason received in Part 3 and Part 4 to part of the design for The New Blood. Since Jason had been submerged under water in the previous entry, the effects team wanted Jason to appear "rotted", with bones and ribs showing, and for Jason's features to have a more defined feel to them. Howard Berger was inspired by Carl Fullerton's design in The New Blood, and wanted to incorporate the exposed flesh concept into his model for Jason Goes to Hell. Berger designed Jason's skin to overlap with the mask, to make it appear as if the skin and mask had fused and the mask could no longer be removed. Gregory Nicotero and Berger sculpted a full-body, foam latex suit for Kane Hodder to wear under the costume. The idea was to reveal as much of Jason's skin as possible, because Nicotero and Berger knew the physical character would not be seen for most of the film.

Stephen Dupuis was given the task of redesigning Jason for the tenth Friday the 13th film. One concept brought into the film was Jason's regenerative abilities. Dupuis gave the character more hair and more of a natural flesh appearance to illustrate the constant regeneration the character goes through; Dupuis wanted a more "gothic" design for Jason, so he added chains and shackles, and made the hockey mask more angular. Jim Isaac and the rest of his crew wanted to create an entirely new Jason at some point in the film. The idea was for the teens to completely destroy Jason's body, allowing the futuristic technology to bring him back to life. What was referred to as Über-Jason was designed to have chunks of metal growing from his body, bonded by tendrils that grew into the metal, all pushing through a leather suit. The metal was created from VacuForm, the same material used to increase the size of the original hockey mask, and was attached by Velcro. The tendrils were made from silicone. All of the pieces were crafted onto one suit, including an entire head piece, which Hodder wore. The make-up effects team added zippers along the side of the suit, which allowed Hodder to enter and exit the suit within 15 minutes.

By the time Freddy vs. Jason entered production there had been ten previous Friday the 13th films. Make-up effects artist Terezakis wanted to put his own mark on Jason's look—he wanted Jason to be less rotted and decomposed and more defined, so that the audience would see a new Jason, but still recognized the face. Terezakis tried to keep continuity with the previous films, but recognized that had he followed them too literally, then "Jason would have been reduced to a pile of goo." Ronny Yu wanted everything surrounding the hockey mask to act as a frame, making the mask the focal point of each shot. To achieve this, Terezakis created a "pooled-blood look" for the character by painting the skin black, based on the idea the blood had pooled in the back of his head because he had been lying on his back for a long time. As with other make-up artists before him, Terezakis followed Savini's original skull design, and aged it appropriately.

For the 2009 version of Friday the 13th, effects artist Scott Stoddard took inspiration from Carl Fullerton's design in Friday the 13th Part 2 and Tom Savini's work in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Stoddard wanted to make sure that Jason appeared human and not like a monster. Stoddard's vision of Jason includes hair loss, skin rashes, and the traditional deformities in his face, but he attempted to craft Jason's look in a way that would allow for a more human side to be seen. Stoddard took inspiration from the third and fourth films when designing Jason's hockey mask. The make-up artist managed to acquire an original set piece, which he studied and later sculpted. Although he had a model of one of the original masks, Stoddard did not want to replicate it in its entirety. As Stoddard explains, "Because I didn't want to take something that already existed, there were things I thought were great, but there were things I wanted to change a bit. Make it custom, but keep all the fundamental designs. Especially the markings on the forehead and cheeks. Age them down a bit, break them up." In the end, Stoddard crafted six versions of the mask, each with varying degrees of wear.