Amy Steel‘s Ginny is the “final girl” in Part II, during which she, riddled with nerves from the frenetic shoot, accidentally slammed a machete down on stuntman Steve Dash‘s finger. “And I was so horrified,” Steel recalled to The Line Up. ”We went to the emergency room, and he’s dressed as Jason, and I was mortified. And he just said, ‘Are you kidding this is great! Another scar!'”
Like King, she too had to film her climactic scene, in which Jason grabs Ginny and they crash through a window, multiple times. “I was thinking this is the worst moment of my life, and they had to do a lot of re-sets because they had to put the window back together,” Steel said. “So it would be an hour, hour and a half between takes. I think we did it at least three times. When the director came back a week later and told me we had to do it again, I was so upset.”
She passed on Part III, both because she was exhausted and wanted to be taken seriously as an actress—and so far, there had only been one scream queen to rule them all, Jamie Lee Curtis. But Steel called not being in it “one of my biggest regrets.”
Steel continued acting but gave it up in the early 2000s and became a family therapist. Asked to share the appeal of horror movies from a psychologist’s perspective, she said, “I think the fear takes you out of your own life, your own problems. It’s an escape. When you’re watching a scary movie, you’re grasping on to the person next to you. I think they bring people together.”