I was a big fan of Fangoria in the mid-to-late 80s. I still have most of my issues I bought back in the day. So I went into the archives here at the Cavalcade HDQ and found issues of Fangoria that featured the movie maniacs I’m talking about this month. I was able to find issues featuring all of them. So, today, I’m looking at Fangoria #68 from 1987. It featured a cover story about Jason Voorhees.
This is also the issue which featured the movie maniac beach party comic strip I posted on Day 1 of AWESOME-tober-fest.
The Jason cover story is an investigative interview with the actors who portrayed Jason in the first six installments of the Friday the 13th franchise. It’s called The Six Faces of Jason and features some cool behind the scenes pics of the making of the franchise up to that point.
Here are the first 4 pages of the article. You can click these images to see them BIGGER on Flickr.
Unfortunately, this is a two part article so they only cover the first three movies in this issue. I assume Parts 4-6 are covered in the next issue, which I don’t have.
The actors interviewed in this particular issue are:
1. Ari Lehman who played the child Jason in the original Friday the 13th.
2. Warrington Gillette who played the unmasked Jason at the end of Part 2. However, this article doesn’t mention that Steve Daskewisz played “bag head” Jason throughout the rest of the movie.
3. Richard Brooker who played the first Jason to get the hockey mask in Part III.
Presumably, in the second part of this article in the next issue, they would interview:
4. Ted White who played Jason in The Final Chapter.
5. Tom Morga who played Jason in a hallucination in Part 5.
6. CJ Graham who played Jason in Jason Lives.
The most famous Jason, Kane Hodder, wasn’t a part of this article because he didn’t play Jason until 1988’s Part VII: The New Blood. The article is an interesting look back at the previous movies and gives small insight into actor experiences and casting. One piece of trivia I learned from this article was that only one of these six men were offered the chance to play Jason a second time. And he refused. The article in this issue didn’t mention who specifically, so I have to assume it’s one of the last three guys.
Cavalcade of Awesome 