Friday The 13th's Betsy Palmer Invented Her Own Dark Backstory For Mrs. Voorhees
"Friday the 13th" wasn't originally intended to go on to manifest multiple murderous sequels featuring Jason Voorhees as a machete-wielding madman. The famed hockey mask didn't even make it into the films until "Friday the 13th Part III." No, the initial killing spree at Camp Crystal Lake was carried out by Jason's mother, Mrs. Pamela Voorhees, played by the illustrious Betsy Palmer.
Rather famously, Palmer wasn't exactly thrilled initially to be participating in a fairly low-rent horror film surrounded by young, up-and-coming starlets whose acting experience paled in comparison to her rather impressive filmography dating back to the Golden Age of television during the early '50s. The budget for the first "Friday the 13th" didn't really allow for a big marquee name, and Palmer wasn't even the first choice to play the role. Oscar winners Shelley Winters and Estelle Parsons were approached before Palmer eventually accepted the part after getting ahold of the script during a stint on Broadway. Piercing an arrow through Kevin Bacon's neck and getting decapitated by Adrienne King was understandably unappealing for the performer.
Ultimately, fate stepped in and Palmer found herself in need of some quick cash after her car broke down on her way back home to Connecticut. She was paid $10,000 for 10 days of work. As the years passed, Palmer eventually came to embrace her newly found icon status among the ravenous fanbase that would line up for her autograph at various horror conventions where she would greet attendees (myself included) with a warm, motherly hug.
Being the consummate professional she was, Palmer also created a complete backstory for Pamela Voorhees to help bring a little more weight to the character and elevate Victor Miller's screenplay that she once described as a "piece of sh*t."
ki-ki-ki ha-ha-ha ma-ma-ma
Of course, there was no way of knowing the kind of cultural impact "Friday the 13th" would have on a mainstream that was ready to champion the horror genre after the phenomenal success of "Carrie" and John Carpenter's "Halloween." For Palmer and the rest of the cast, they were just shooting a badly lit slasher movie in the middle of the woods at Camp NoBeBoSco in Hardwick, New Jersey. Thanks to the twist reveal of Mrs. Voorhees as the real killer and Tom Savini's groundbreaking gore effects, suddenly, director Sean S. Cunningham had a budding franchise in the making.
With her background in theatre, Palmer studied the Stanislavsky method which compelled her to invent some crucial details for the character. Those little additions may have been part of the reason Mrs. Voorhees ended up being so memorable. Palmer previously spoke with The Dissolve about her process as an actor:
"I traced Pamela back to my own high school days in the early 1940s. So it's 1944, a very conservative time, and Pamela has a steady boyfriend. They have sex, which is very bad of course, and Pamela soon gets pregnant with Jason. The father takes off and when Pamela tells her parents, they disown her because having [children] out of wedlock isn't something that good girls do. I think she took Jason and raised him the best she could, but he turned out to be a very strange boy."
Indeed, he did. The promiscuity of the camp counselors led to Mrs. Voorhees becoming "very psychotic and puritanical in her attitudes," according to Palmer's added backstory. The rest, as they say, is horror history, and the time-tested equation that sex always equals death continues to be proven over and over again decades later.
The mother of horror
After making appearances on the talk show circuit for years, the monumental success of "Friday the 13th" gave Palmer a newly found fame as the proverbial mother of horror. Her brief cameo in "Friday the 13th Part II" essentially passed the torch to her loyal son Jason to continue the family tradition of murdering innocent teens in increasingly operatic ways. But she'll always be the Mom horror fans never had.
Before passing away in 2015 at the age of 88, Palmer was remembered as always being incredibly giving and generous to her devoted following, and her numerous appearances at horror convention Q&A's were often hilarious, heartfelt, and always brutally honest. She may have never expected to have Pamela Voorhees become her most famous role, but she eventually came to love being associated with the "Friday the 13th" franchise even if she was never too fond of the film itself.
Aside from Palmer's own inherent likability and her unhinged but darkly sweet performance as Mrs. Voorhees, moviegoers have actually come to understand her motives more so than perhaps any other killer in slasher history. Who could blame her for dealing with the tragic loss of her son in an unavoidable drowning accident by enacting revenge on clueless camp counselors?
Mrs.Voorhees certainly wasn't one-dimensional, and neither was Betsy Palmer.