How 'Friday The 13th: The Game' Captured Jason Voorhees And Recreated His Masks

In nearly every Friday the 13th movie there’s a moment when Jason Voorhees’s face is exposed, revealing the deformity, wounds and rot underneath. His mask is often torn off when he’s most challenged, the terms of engagement seemingly narrowed down to that instant, where the young would-be victim turns the tables and uncovers the real Jason.

Except unmasking Jason doesn’t expose him. Not at all. Unmasking Jason doesn’t expose a sociopathic bid for fame, like Scream. His “real” face doesn’t shine out pathos or pain, like the phantom of The Paradise. Unmasking Jason doesn’t end the horror, solve the mystery, stop the hurting or bring closure. Friday the 13th is never an episode of Scooby-Doo.

Instead, tearing off Jason’s mask is like tumbling down a well. Instead of a human face and human relief, under Jason’s mask is more horror. Underneath is the same roiling anger that brought his machete upon you in the first place. Its impassive cover may be gone, but there is nothing more to Jason’s soul, no humanity to bring into the light. He’s pure brute: conscious, unconscious, inside and outside, top to bottom. Underneath Jason’s mask is more Jason. And now you’re really screwed.

Though rarely seen, Jason’s true face — a truth that changes in every new entry — is just as important to the primal, gleeful sadism of Friday the 13th movies as the hockey mask (which he did just fine without in Friday the 13th Part 2). And so it’s just as important to the team behind Friday the 13th: The Game, busy with the finishing touches on the most precise entry in the Friday the 13th series, where every nuance of Jason’s mask and face has been captured in archival detail.

Speaking with iDigitalTimes, Friday the 13th: The Game Executive Producer Randy Greenback described the unbelievable lengths taken to birth Jason on to his new, blood-slick, virtual killing floor. Both developers, Gun Media and IllFonic, know how crucial it is to capture every nuance of Jason Voorhees if players are to immerse themselves in Camp Crystal Lake and its surroundings. Earlier this year, we learned how the team was working with Jason actor Kane Hodder (in Part VII, VIII, Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X) and special effects makeup legend Tom Savini (Friday the 13th, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, The Burning) to capture the killer’s exact movements and murder motions.

But it starts with the mask.

“The biggest thing and the most iconic thing is of course the mask,” Greenback said. “And that's probably the most difficult thing to get right.” At first that sound a little unbelievable. Isn’t the mask right there on screen as a reference? But that reference only goes so far.

“All of the artists at Illfonic have the Blu-ray discs from all the films, so they can scrub through all the scenes. So if they're working on Higgins Haven they can go through and capture stills at as high a resolution as possible,” Greenback explained. But Jason is often in shadow or in motion. He’s not a man who stands in the clear light of day for your examination.

There are even multiple prop masks, with minor variations between each, in every movie. “They were all made and they all have differences from scene to scene to scene. Just deciding what is the dominant mask people remember from the movie that we want to feature in the game is a huge decision,” Greenback told iDigi. “And then to do it justice, and to ensure you're hitting the right look and all the bumps, crevasses, marks, mars, blood-splatter, anything that's on it… but not all the scenes showed you all parts of the mask or the character at any one point. So now it’s like, ‘oh, we have to figure stuff out.’ That’s the hard part.”

And don’t forget that Friday the 13th: The Game doesn’t just feature one Jason, but Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th Part 2, Part 3, Part VI: Jason Lives, Part VII: The New Blood, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (plus a new Jason we’ll get to in a bit). That means the same design challenges are repeated across seven Jasons: mask, face, body and signature weapons.

They needed information beyond what the movies could provide; as much data as they could get. “They all need to be as accurate as possible. If one is suffering and we see that we don’t have enough reference, instead of saying ‘that's good enough’ we hit the pavement and make some calls and figure out who we can go to to get that one up to par.”

This proved difficult. While the Friday the 13th series is cemented in the bleaker annexes of the canon, it wasn’t always that way. “When they were on these sets they didn't realize they were making pop culture history. Horror history. So it wasn't documented, things weren't archived. It was more like 'let's have fun, let's make a movie, let's get it done' and very little thought about the future and preservation.”

“If pictures don't exist or masks aren't in the hands of people who want to show them off, we have to rely on production pictures and stuff from behind the scenes. And those were all so many years ago that the resolution is really piss-poor and the pictures aren't really detailed,” Greenback said. “We have to find more information, find other pictures and see it from a different angle. Whether it's a mask or an undermask or a weapon.”

Each presented their own challenges. Greenback described Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives as “the trickiest one.” “Part VI there’s very few production shots, under the mask especially. There aren’t any full-body shots at all. Anywhere.”

In the hunt for more Jason reference points, they went straight to the source: the Friday the 13th creator. “We talked to Sean Cunningham to ask who might have them or to go through his old boxes of memorabilia and stuff like that to see if he might be able to turn stuff up.”

The search expands from there. “We ask the actors who played those parts who were on the set if they took any pictures. It's very laborious and time consuming.”

The dedicated fanbase steps in where the movies fall short. “We talk to other people who have the screen-used masks and we get them to take photos and pictures.” Particularly useful was the collection belonging to Mario Kirner’s Friday the 13th Prop Museum.

Heavy scrutiny smooths out the final imperfections. “Ronnie Hobbs, one of the co-creators of the game, is pretty much our authenticity master. We all enjoy the movies, we all watch them, but he's been fanatical,” Greenback said. “He has this eagle eye. He knows what the details are that we're looking for. And he can call out and mark up a screenshot of a mask in the game and say 'no, no, no, the holes in the mask on the set are not perfectly round, they're slightly oval-shaped.”

The near-final designs speaks for themselves:

Friday the 13th: The Game backers can check out the Jason models in more detail in the Virtual Cabin. “It’s kind of our way to have this museum of the game,” Greenback said. “We want fans, hardcore fans of slasher films of the 80s, we want them to know that we get it.”

With Jason Voorhees perfected, it’s time to kill some teenagers.

But Friday the 13th: The Game doesn’t just aim to recreate Jason Voorhees and Camp Crystal Lake. Remember that seventh Jason we mentioned earlier? Friday the 13th: The Game won’t just be the most accurate recreation of past Jasons, it will herald the birth of a new one. “Tom [Savini] is still designing his Jason,” Greenback said.

They’re still working out exactly where Savini’s new Jason will fit into the lore and movie series timeline. “It’s going to be a big reveal and I don’t think anybody is going to expect it,” Green back said. “We're revelling in the fact that we get to contribute to the tapestry of the franchise.”

Gun Media recently announced even more ambitious plans for Friday the 13th: The Game, adding a single-player mode, a new map from Friday the 13th: Part 2 and new playable characters, including Jason-killer Tommy Jarvis. This has pushed back the game’s release date (a beta release will be expanded by the end of the year), but gives Gun Media and Illfonic more time to perfect the game’s “hide and seek, plus murder” multiplayer.

That’s the ultimate objective driving Friday the 13th: The Game ’s intensive research and design. “Not matter where you go, no matter what you're doing — whether you're dying at the hand of Jason or you're trying to escape and get a car started — it feels like you're in one of the movies,” Greenback said. And yes, those who can survive will get to rip off Jason’s mask. “It's your horror movie.”