The twisted 35-year-saga of “Friday the 13th” has grown so long — 12 feature films, video games, a TV show — that it’s hard to remember how it all began. Was masked killer Jason Voorhees a zombie? A psychopath? A deranged hockey player?
It turns out the killer in the first “Friday the 13th” film, released in 1980, wasn’t Jason at all. His mother, Pamela Voorhees, was the one doing the machete-ing, seeking revenge for the death of her son, who drowned as irresponsible camp counselors canoodled.
Betsy Palmer, the actress who thought playing Pamela would be a blip in a decades-long career, has just died in hospice care at 88, as her manager confirmed to the Associated Press.
A slasher flick wasn’t what Palmer — born Patricia Betsy Hrunek in East Chicago, Ind., in 1926 — wanted to be remembered for. She was a serious actress, appearing in summer stock with Paul Newman and on television with James Dean (whom she dated for nine months). But drama didn’t always bring steady work. Game shows — or, as some were known in the golden age of television, “panel shows” — did.
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“Since I can’t do dramas as often as I did when I started out in TV, I think a panel show is ideal for me,” she told the New York Times in 1956. “It keeps me alive — in front of the public.”
Though she did do a stint as the original letter-turner on “Wheel of Fortune,” as CNN pointed out, the panel show that proved most memorable was “I’ve Got a Secret.” Palmer was among the luminaries who tried to guess what everyday folks weren’t telling.
“I don’t only get recognized for Friday the 13th,” she told Movieweb in 2009. “I was on a TV show called I’ve Got a Secret. I was on that show for 10 or 11 years. The older people always remember me from that. Still, some of the young people have seen it.”
But it was Palmer’s role in a film far removed from the world of “I’ve Got a Secret” that perhaps made the biggest impression. “Friday the 13th” — low-budget, poorly acted, packed with sex-crazed, scantily clad teens — helped define the slasher genre. Bursting with two-dimensional characters and a paper-thin plot, it was a little bit disturbing and more than a little bit ridiculous.
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“The real iconoclastic part of Friday the 13th was taking Mom and apple pie and standing it upside down,” screenwriter Victor Miller said in a documentary about the making of the film. “And saying, ‘You’ve never seen a mother like this.'”
Palmer didn’t do the movie for love. She did it for a Volkswagen Scirocco.
Share this articleShare“I said, “What a piece of s—!” she told Movieweb in 2009 of her reaction after reading the script for the first time. “‘Nobody is ever going to see this thing. What an awful thing this is.’ It was only 10 days work, so I thought, ‘I’ll do it so I can get my car.'”
Palmer doesn’t even appear in the preview. (Though a young Kevin Bacon, as Victim No. 11, does.)
Though her initial negative view of the film may not have shown it, Palmer’s character was the seed from which a slasher franchise grew — the big bang of “Friday the 13th.”
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“Friday the 13th changed the horror genre significantly by removing any chance of identification with or concern for the victims beyond the most basic humanitarian feelings,” S.T. Karnick wrote in National Review in 2006. “Yet there is always at least one character whose personal history and motivations are explored in some detail: the killer.”
After the initial film, Palmer put in an appearance in one sequel, then quit the franchise. She continued to work for much of the next three decades, putting in guest appearances on shows such as “Knot’s Landing,” “Newhart” and, more recently, “Penny Dreadful.”
Over the years, Palmer made peace with the image she left on the popular imagination: that of a psychopathic supermom.
“The audience just loves this woman,” Palmer said in 2009. “I have never been able to understand that. I ask them, ‘Why do you love her so much? Why?’ And they tell me, ‘We understand why you did it.'”
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