What The Chilling Whisper In Friday The 13th Is Really Saying
For the entirety of my twenties and a chunk of my thirties, I knew the inebriated pleasure of debating the most trivial subjects known to humankind via what we used to call the "bar argument." Oh sure, people still knock back beers and fiercely debate the Hegelian messaging of the "Airport" franchise, but there was a time, a glorious time, when an elbow-tipping blowhard could loudly assert as fact that "The White Shadow" was an "All in the Family" spinoff, and no one could pull a rectangular device out of their pocket to authoritatively prove they're utterly full of horse pucky. Short of pulling Norman Jewison out from behind the jukebox for a McLuhan-esque correction, this dolt could double and triple down, and all you could do was yell at them. We've lost so much.
The best bar arguments tended to revolve around song lyrics, but movie quotes ran a very close second. Oftentimes, it came down to exact phrasing (e.g. Gold Hat's insistence regarding the production of "stinkin' badges" in John Huston's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"), but occasionally the disputes pertained to something more opaque. And in the pre-internet days, some of these disagreements seemed downright unresolvable.
Case in point: the haunting whisper from the "Friday the 13th" franchise.
My participation in this squabble began long before I was able to legally drink. There was more than one elementary school lunch dominated by kids, who had no business watching slasher films at their age, declaring with full-throated confidence that Jason Voorhees was taunting his soon-to-be victims by uttering "Kill-kill-kill, Ha-ha-ha." Others vehemently countered that the utterance was "Ch-ch-ch, ah-ah-ah."
Everyone was wrong, but the not-knowing was part of the fun. Alas, we now know precisely what he was saying.
An iconic cue with a Polish assist
In a 2015 interview with Gun Media, Harry Manfredini, who wrote the score for nine of the first 10 "Friday the 13th" movies (he sat out "Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan"), said that he wanted a striking cue to kick in every time director Sean S. Cunningham cut to a shot from the killer's POV. At the time, Manfredini was obsessed with the work of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (whose music you've heard in William Friedkin's "The Exorcist," Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," Peter Weir's "Fearless" and numerous David Lynch projects), and concocted the eerie whisper.
As you'll recall, once Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) is revealed as the killer, she begins to channel the spirit of her dead son Jason. Finally, she's speaking in his literal voice, sputtering "Kill her, mommy! Kill her, mommy!"
According to Manfredini, he shortened this phrase to "Ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma" for the whisper.
So now, when you're on your third Schlitz and you get to arguing about the "Friday the 13th" movies, you can consult your smartphone and end the debate tout de suite. What's the fun in that? True, you can always bicker over which of the 11 movies (including the 2009 remake) is the worst, but everyone knows the answer is "Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood." It's a brave, boring new world we've created for ourselves.