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.