Characters like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers have long outgrown their respective film franchises. These days, the characters – and, importantly, their masks – are almost as iconic as the faces of Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald. What was once terrifying – shark black eyes, disproportionately large murder weapons – is now kitsch.
We now look at these bogeymen more as pop culture icons than the products of actors nailing a role. Which means we’re collectively overlooking the performances of the people behind the masks.
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“People in Hollywood have certainly been condescending towards me in meetings,” admits Kane Hodder, the stuntman-slash-actor who has portrayed hockey-masked killer Jason Voorhees more than anyone else within the Friday the 13th franchise. “They think that just because we don’t have to remember any dialogue that it somehow isn’t acting – but boy, is that incorrect!”
The way Hodder’s Jason charges towards his victims around Camp Crystal Lake (and then in deep space, in 2001’s Jason X) was more emotionally complex for him than it might appear.
Years before he nabbed his fantasy role of Mr Voorhees – Hodder has played Jason five times and is “dreaming” of a sixth – he was making inroads as a stuntman. In the first year of his new career, Hodder did an interview with his local newspaper (“a ‘local boy makes a success in Hollywood’ kind of story”) and decided to integrate a fire stunt into the meeting to impress the journalist. He almost died in the process, burning 48 percent of his body when the stunt went awry, leaving him with third degree burns.
This meant that, during a scene where Jason stalks Tina (played by Lar Park Lincoln) – the scream queen at the centre of 1988’s Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood – while on fire, Hodder wasn’t just acting. He was also conquering the demons from his past accident.
“I guess I identified with Jason, as he was also an outsider who came back [from the dead],” Hodder says. “It was easy for me to tap into his anger and his bodily pain, because I felt that in some way too. In some of the other Friday the 13th films, Jason looked a bit like a mannequin, but I wanted him to look more like a real person and to move with purpose. From the breathing to the body posture, my whole mission was to make the character look more threatening. Because of the things I went through in my own life, Jason’s emotions were something I knew I could tap into.”
Hodder fully embodied the character, being interviewed as Jason by US chat show host Arsenio Hall and even persuading Rob Hedden, director of 1989’s Friday the 13th Part VIII, to not film a sequence where the masked killer kicks a barking dog. “I just knew that action wasn’t in Jason’s character,” he argues convincingly. “Jason doesn’t harm animals – he wants to get revenge on summer camp workers for letting him drown as a child.”
The actor believes there’s still a fundamental misunderstanding outside the horror community around what actually goes into shaping these roles (fwiw: Hodder is treated like a god at horror conventions). “I was sometimes underneath three-and-a-half hours of heavy make up,” he says. “With the hockey mask, you are only breathing in your own exhaled air, so it’s hard to catch your breath because your oxygen intake is so limited.” Filming at night behind that mask meant relying on instinct alone when it came to movement.
With voice and face acting off limits, actors like Hodder are limited in what they can achieve. “Take those two things away and it’s much harder to get things across; you’re effectively talking with your eyes,” he says. “I would go into a room by myself and punch walls and throw things to fire up my energy. Sometimes you had to go to a really dark place. Yes, these are massively rewarding experiences, but they can also be exhausting.”
Though Nick Castle, who played Michael Myers in the original 1979 Halloween movie, downplays his similar experience – calling it a “fun favour” for a film school friend, the fresh-faced director John Carpenter – he acknowledges that these kinds of roles can also be taxing.
“Remember that most of the time the person under the mask isn’t just acting, but also taking a lot of the blows, as they will have experience as a stuntman,” says Castle, who went on to become a screenwriter and director. “It’s like two jobs in one.”
Playing Myers was a unique challenge because it’s “unclear what motivates him to kill”, with Castle instead tasked with becoming an elemental force. “For Michael, you have to cut away all of his humanity and just become this energy.”
On the potential origins of his creepy performance, Castle suggests: “What was scariest to me when I was a kid was what lurked in the shadows. That could be the darkness in the closet, walking home, or even getting lost in the woods; it’s just the fear of the unknown. In a sense, Michael embodies that kind of fear that I used to have. In the script he’s referred to as ‘The Shape’, as there’s a blankness to him, and you have to sort of embody that.”
Castle has always been a feline lover and regularly shows off his black cat Michael Meowers on social media. My comparison between Michael and an animal predator is something he welcomes: “Michael’s head tilts and his breathing quickens when he goes in closer for the kill, just like a panther’s does.”
The actor is responsible for the infamous jump scare in Carpenter’s Halloween. When Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) strikes Michael down, thinking she’s put an end to his rampage, the lifeless killer suddenly sits up and tilts his head menacingly towards her. The move – which Castle says he improvised – has been ripped off by WWE’s The Undertaker and just about every supposedly “downed” Hollywood killer ever since.
The now 73-year-old, who had a brief cameo in 2018’s brilliant Halloween reboot, jokes that this move would mess up his back nowadays. But it serves as a reminder that the actors behind the masks craft unique mannerisms and idiosyncrasies that help shift to the course of pop culture, even if they don’t get the credit for it.
R.A. Mihailoff played the notorious chainsaw killer Leatherface in the 1990 film Leatherface: The Texas Chain Massacre 3, going from construction work to earning $1,800 (£1,390) a week in the role. The actor and former professional wrestler insists it’s “weird” that the actors behind masked killers help to sell a movie yet still get dismissed by critics.
“There’s this generally accepted belief that any idiot can pop on a mask and stumble around, but it isn’t true,” says Mihailoff, echoing Hodder and Castle. “Remember that if our performances aren’t convincing, it’s harder to make the film into a success.”
