If you think about it in terms of a screen-time-to-audience-impact ratio, Ari Lehman is one of the greatest film actors of all time. If you don’t count his first role, in “a movie about orphans playing soccer,” you’re left with all of two seconds of acting–but millions have seen those two seconds, and none of them can forget it. Lehman is the last thing you see in the original Friday the 13th, as the algae-and-rot-mottled Jason flinging himself out of Crystal Lake at the last surviving camper. It’s still one of the most genuinely scary moments in horror history.
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Lehman basically lucked into the part. He says he sneaked into the audition for the soccer movie–Manny’s Orphans, also directed by Sean Cunningham–and that he got cast as Jason in Friday the 13th partly because Cunningham’s wife objected to seeing their son in the unseemly role. He quit the biz just as easily. After Friday the 13th he dedicated himself to studying and playing music, and in 2002 he moved to Chicago from New York City to further his career. “Nine-eleven punched a hole in the music scene,” he says, “especially if you’re playing Middle Eastern music,” which he was, along with backing up touring African musicians and reggae bands as a keyboardist for hire. He thought of his horror-movie past as just a bit of personal trivia until 2003, when he got an e-mail from Erik Lee Nash, who runs a horror-merch business and the Friday the 13th fan site Camp Crystal Lake Online. “He said, ‘Is this your autograph?’ I said, ‘No. Who’d want my autograph?’” It was a fake for sale on eBay, where it was going for $65.
Lehman, now 40, doesn’t look like the mass-murderer type. He’s smallish and he has long, curly hair and a handlebar mustache, which give his promotional photos a Vlad/Drac vibe but in real life come off as a little goofy. Plus he says “Dude, no way” a lot. He’s been fronting a Jewish-themed reggae group called the Ari Ben Moses Band since he’s been in Chicago, and when he started doing conventions he’d take his CDs to sell, which made him seem even more harmless. “They were digging my record, but I sensed this apprehension,” he says. “I thought, Why don’t we just do a Jason-related band?”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marty Perez.
