Light spoilers below for the first episode of The Bondsman for anyone who hasn’t yet streamed it with an Amazon Prime subscription.
Like relative few actors, Kevin Bacon excels in literally every genre. Award-earning drama? Check. Action-packed superhero flick? Check. Cult-chasing thriller? The pattern is clear. Nothing makes ME happier, however, than when he embraces his darker side for ‘80s classics like Friday the 13th and Tremors to the ever-underrated Stir of Echoes to his slimiest villain yet in MaXXXine, and then some. Bacon’s back for possibly his bloodiest role yet in The Bondsman, and his gory first-scene death would likely get a thumbs up from F13’s Pamela Voorhees.
Kevin Bacon talked to CinemaBlend ahead of his Prime Video series’ April 3 premiere, and the lifelong horror nerd in me was only too gleeful to ask about how his character Hub Halloran’s brutal throat slashing in The Bondsman compared to Jack Burrell’s iconic arrow-through-the-neck demise, our pick for best death in the first Friday the 13th. As seen in the video above, he shared a fun story about how the shoestring budget meant there wasn’t room to get anything wrong, even though things did indeed go wrong.
We’ve come a long way since Friday the 13th. You know, for one thing, Friday the 13th was – both in terms of its timing, but also in terms of its cost profile – extremely practical, effects by Tom Savini. And in the case of that death, I was on my knees underneath the bed, and it was a prosthetic neck that had been built. And my head was back like this — [demonstrates] — which was not the most comfortable situation.
Considering the general discomfort suffered by the young actor, whose only named role before that was in National Lampoon’s Animal House, I suppose it’s a net positive for his neck that director Sean Cunningham and his creative team didn’t have the money to take a few dozen cracks at getting the moment ju-u-u-ust right. Bacon continued:
They had two people under the bed, one to poke the arrow and the other to pump the blood, and the hose broke on the blood pump. So I kind of hear them under the bed going, ‘Oh shit.’ Somebody starts blowing on it, which is why it kind of goes [makes glooping noises]. And, you know, they only had one prosthetic, so it was very clear that we had to get it right the first time.
While I’ll admittedly never tire of seeing Jason swinging an occupied sleeping bag into a tree, Kevin Bacon’s Friday the 13th death will forever be disturbing to witness. The combination of his eyes staring out into nothing and the unnatural blood glooping is successful in a way that a perfectly executed moment might not have been.
Bacon talked to CinemaBlend in December 2024 about Friday the 13th fans will continuously approach him at events and elsewhere with photos from that particular scene for him to sign, even if he’d maybe prefer ones where he doesn’t look quite so tortured.
Kevin Bacon Says His Death In The Bondsman Went Exactly The Way An Actor Would Want It To
Even though it doesn’t sound like Kevin Bacon went through a ton of prep work for his first horror appearance, he went through the full gamut of stunts, effects, and makeup for The Bondsman, where his bounty hunter Hub Halloran is killed by rival criminals and then resurrected by the Devil himself in order to track down demons to banish them back to hell. (Wait, what if that was what Jason Voorhees was doing in the F13 movies?)
In any case, few sequences looked rougher for the Death Sentence vet than when Hub gets viciously murdered before viewers are even aware of what’s happening. Thankfully though, it wasn’t rough at all for Bacon himself. As he put it:
So when it came to the prosthetic on The Bondsman, you know, a beautiful neck cut, I think. I mean, I think it’s great. And you know, wearing it for you, as an actor, you want prosthetics to look great, but you also want as little time in the chair as possible, and you want them to be comfortable. And this was both of those things. I didn’t have to drink through a straw or anything.
Would it have been amusing to see Hub having to put a straw into his neck to drink in the premiere? Maybe, maybe not. But everything about The Bondsman is a bloody blast regardless, with an A+ ensemble cast that includes Jennifer Nettles, Beth Grant, Jolene Purdy, Maxwell Jenkins and Damon Herriman. (Seeing Bacon and Herriman on-screen together just made me want Bacon to retroactively be added into Justified at some point.)
All eight episodes of The Bondsman‘s first season are available to stream now, so you better do it before the mythological wind spirit that’s huddled in the corner over there gets up and possesses you.