Happy Halloween!

 

Here's a random photo of a movie mold Uber Jason mask (left) and a replica from Darb Designz.

I Finally Found a PERFECT Part II Sweater

 

This is absolutely huge for me. I've been looking for the exact manufacture of the original sweater used in Friday the 13th Part II since I bought the screen-used head in 2015. It took me six years to locate one. And it was only $30 on eBay.

The sweater I found is pretty mysterious. There is no tag on the collar and it looks like there never was one; the only tag is near the waist and just says "dry clean or hand wash with care." As near as the seller could figure, it was a 1970s fisherman's sweater made of Shetland wool in the color of Heather Green (a gray with a tiny bit of a greenish tinge). It seems to have coarse brown and white fibers woven in. The sweater is very chunky and was clearly a male medium or large like the movie sweater. 

Over the last six years, I've spent countless hours on eBay looking for the perfect cable knit sweater. There are a ton of vintage sweaters that are close, but this is the only one I've ever seen that is a perfect match to the movie sweater:

• It has the same fat cables that connect with a left-to-right twist and the same plain fields of about three inches between them. The cables sit in their own "channel" with just a half cm or so width around them in the same fashion. 
  

• It has the same number of cables around the torso: four down the front, four down the back. 

• It has the same number of cable links from collar to waist: five complete links and two half links at either end of each cable. 

• It has the same broad, plain strips descending the arms, with a single cable running down the top of the arm from the top of the shoulder to the wrist cuff; the cuffs, waist pattern and collar are all correct to the movie sweater.

Here's a comparison of the collars. Check out the perfect stitching match between the field, the cable, the channel separating the cable from the field strip and even the length of the cables that are coming directly off the collar. If you look closely you can see the movie sweater seems to have the same flecks of white and brown or black wool blended into the gray fibers.

Here's a comparison of the waist stitching. Notice that the field strips line up with exactly three vertical bands in the waist stitching and the cables have a two-band width, just like the movie sweater.

I actually didn't realize that the movie sweater even had the single cable pattern descending the arm until I saw this sweater. It prompted me to take a closer look at blu-ray screenshots. They're definitely there.

It's hard to tell from the photo, but the links on my sweater cables are big--nearly four inches long. The collar is slightly over an inch thick and the waist pattern has about a four inch depth. Every detail checks out with the movie sweater.

Another thing I noticed is the sweater is very stretchy. Since Amy Steel wore it over a shirt in the movie, this stretched it out considerably and made it look larger and the features somewhat fatter.

Here's a few more shots of the movie sweater.

Jason Goes to Hell Mask Up For Auction at PropStore

This is a LW-101 resin stunt mask created during production of Jason Goes to Hell by FX artist Bill Hunt and worn by the dummy that took the chest stab at the end of the film. This is up for auction at PropStore. Last photos are of the dummy with the mask on, taken on set in 1992 and a more recent photo of the same dummy when the mask was still on it. The mask will come with a COA from The Friday the 13th Prop Museum (Mario Kirner), who  previously owned the mask.

 

 

 

Screen-Used Reboot Cowl Pops Up

These photos were posted by collector Dirk Mueller recently. It's a screen-used cowl and part of a face appliance sitting on a biscuit foam bust of actor Derek Mears. The shirt may also be screen-worn. This was evidently worn under the mask during filming of the Friday the 13th reboot. Awesome piece, and excellent photos by Dirk. Here's a few more.

How to Do a Proper Pam Wig

 I've gotten this question a few times. I included fully completed wigs with every order of Mrs. Voorhees heads I did, but there may be copies out there that no longer have them. I've also noticed that most replicas have hair that looks off. Sometimes its too cottony or too stringy. Sometimes she almost looks coiffed, like she just got out of the hair salon. But almost always in need of improvement.

So I'm going to do a quick tutorial here to tell you exactly how I got the look I did. While not exact, its pretty close to what they did for Friday the 13th Part 2.

Here's a screen shot of how my personal copy looked in the fan film Voorhees.

The wig I used for this and every copy I sold was something I found on eBay. It was a light brown-gray wig classified as a "JF1971" model fashion wig from some Chinese manufacturer. Here is a screenshot of the advertisement.

This listing is long gone, so I don't know where you'd find one now. But any similar wig will do.

The first thing you have to do with a copy like this is cut the whole wig down to a four-inch length. You can start with a short-haired wig as well and don't have to cut anything of course, up to you. The whole thing should be roughly uniform in length.

Once you've got it cut down, you get a heat gun and blast the hell out of it. This will cause the fibers to fray out into a sort of "rats nest" texture, creating the fuzzy, thinned-out look you see in the original film wig. You can also pull hair out to thin it even more, but that's not something I did for any of my copies.

Then you have the most time-consuming part: one your fibers are sufficiently heated, they will tend to stick together in clumps. So you have to spend quite a bit of time pulling them apart to make the hair look fuller. You can of course leave a few clumped up so that you have some stringy elements as well. Variance helps to create a more natural, chaotic look. But pulling hair fibers apart will help to create a very dirty version of the grandma perm that the movie head had.

 From there, it comes down to styling. The wig hair will end up really stiff at this point so whatever styling you do will stay put. You can use your hands or a brush to curl the hair back, away from the face to get something approximating the movie look.

There's a lot of ways you can customize it. Yours might turn out better than mine. But don't skimp on the heat gun. It's the most essential part of the look.

New Acquisition: Part 8 Direct Cast

 

Just bought this from Marcos Medina--its a rare resin casting that came directly off the front of the hero mask used in Friday the 13th Part 8. These castings came from Beyond Disgusting Studios, who got an old mold from an unnamed professional FX artist in Hollywood. At right is a clear vac blank produced by BDS by creating a buck from one of the direct castings. Amazingly no distortions or size increase happened in the vac pulls. As you can see, they're perfectly sized, although some modification had to be done to reduce the super-wide spread of the original mold and return it to the correct width.

Here's a recent shot of Mario with the movie mask that both of these came from.

New HD Photos of the Part 6 Hero Mask

 

These were posted by Instagram user levi86athan (Justin Ray), owner of the hero mask. The dark mess on the back, he explained, is evidently the remnants of zombie skin tone makeup worn on C. J. Graham's face during filming, and the foam bits came from one of the foam latex cowls he wore. These are some of the best photos we've ever seen of the main hero mask, really awesome of him to post.