The Shocking Incident Behind the ‘Friday the 13th’ Stunt That Blinded an Actor—What Really Went Wrong?
Ever wonder what it’s like to take a prop arrow through the eye on a horror movie set? Well, back in 1980, Harry Crosby—the son of Bing Crosby and surprisingly one of the camp counselors in the original Friday the 13th—got a little more than he bargained for. Picture this: latex appliances, classic guitar serenades in the makeup shop, and then a mishap involving some famously “unsafe” fake blood that left poor Harry with a burned eye. Yeah, not exactly your average day at Camp Crystal Lake. You might say the iconic slasher film’s behind-the-scenes gore had a few too many real-life stings! Curious about the sticky details and how this horror moment almost turned into a real disaster? Dive into the full story here: LEARN MORE.
Back in 1980, one of the camp counselors in Friday the 13th was played by Harry Crosby, the son of Bing Crosby, as Bill. “Besides Betsy Palmer – who was just as sweet as could be – the most famous person on the set was Harry Crosby, who was Bing Crosby’s son,” Taso Stavrakis, makeup artist Tom Savini’s assistant, recalled in 2022. “When we were in the shop sculpting and painting, Harry Crosby would come in and play his classical guitar.” He also left the shoot with a burned eye, courtesy of that same shop.
A Toxic Secret Ingredient
Bill dies off screen. What the audience sees is his body, found pinned to a door by arrows, one of them through his eye, and getting that shot meant fitting Crosby with a latex appliance over the eye, a prop arrow, and a coat of Savini’s fake blood.
That blood was its own small recipe: Karo syrup, red food coloring and Kodak Photo-Flo, a photographic wetting agent. Its job was to help the blood soak into clothing, and Stavrakis credited it with the blood’s color and viscosity, so it was in the mix on purpose. What the crew didn’t have was blood made to be used around eyes. Savini said years later, on Netflix’s The Movies That Made Us, that he hadn’t known such a thing existed.
The Aftermath of the FX Mishap
The blood pooled under the appliance and got into Crosby’s real eye. “So our unsafe blood had an opportunity to fill up Harry’s eyes under the appliance used to keep the arrow looking like it was in his eye, and it surface-burned poor Harry,” Savini later said. “Not a proud moment.” Crosby was in intense pain when the appliance came off, and the burn left him temporarily blinded and needing hospital treatment. As Mental Floss has reported, he was ultimately fine.
The story got bigger once Netflix told it. The Movies That Made Us devoted the second episode of its third season to Friday the 13th in October 2021, with Crosby, Savini and Stavrakis all on camera, and the outlets that retold it over the next two years kept adding to the damage: one headline had him “Blind For Months,” and another site wrote that the crew hadn’t known the Photo-Flo was in the blood at all.
Savini’s own phrase, “our unsafe blood,” says otherwise. The creator of the series, Brian Volk-Weiss, summed up the production for the New York Post that month: “Making this film, everything was lowest common denominator.”
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