Jason Voorhees was his usual murderous self in the fourth Friday the 13th movie, but behind the scenes the actor playing the hockey mask-wearing killer played hero to one of his young co-stars.In the book Crystal Lake Memories, Ted White, a veteran stuntman who plays Jason in 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, explains how he fought to protect actress Judie Aronson (who plays the doomed skinny-dipper Samantha Lane) when director Joseph Zito allegedly tried to keep the mostly naked actress in cold water for too long while filming her character’s death scene.”It was extremely cold. We’d go through four or five takes, and they weren’t exactly right,” White recalls. After Zito allegedly refused several requests from Aronson to get out of the water temporarily, White had had enough. “Finally, I said, ‘That does it. Get the girl outta the damn water right now or I walk. I’m not gonna put up with this bullshit any longer. She’s an 18-year-old-kid and she’s dying in that water, and you’re telling her no?'”White says his threat was enough to buy Aronson a temporary warm-up break, but Zito has a different take on the story, insisting it was White, not Aronson, who was complaining about the cold. “Yes, I bullied him into staying in the lake, when naked Judie was willing to stay there, and tough guy Ted wanted to get out. That’s a pisser. Ask Judie about that.”Well, turns out they did. “No, that’s not true,” Aronson says of Zito’s account. “When half of your body is in the water for that many hours it becomes really unbearable. I cried. I tried not to. I was a little bit delirious. I was out of my mind. I remember saying ‘I can’t do it anymore, I just can’t go on’… they would not let me stop. I should have gone to the hospital, but I didn’t. I was sick like a dog after that.”Read More: Why It’s Been Over a Decade Since Freddy or Jason Killed AnybodyZito goes on to admit that it’s possible White advocated for Aronson to somebody else on the crew. “He might have had a conversation with the assistant director. … But she was okay. I don’t want you to think we were completely crazy. … It wasn’t like we just thought, ‘Hey let’s go to a freezing cold lake and put a naked girl in it.’ Ted was right to be concerned, but we were too.”When asked what advice she’d give to young actresses, Aronson is very clear: “Always read your scripts before you accept the part. Never accept any part that takes place in water for long periods of time – I’d make sure to put that in the contract now.”‘The Final Chapter’ Was Really Supposed to be the Final ‘Friday the 13th’ Movie. LOLFrank Mancuso Jr., who produced both The Final Chapter and its 1982 predecessor Friday the 13th Part III, fully intended for the fourth movie to be the end of the series. “There was a moment in time where I hated the Friday the 13th movies because that’s all everybody ever affixed me to,” he explains in Crystal Lake Memories. “I entitled [the movie] The Final Chapter because I really wanted it to be done and walk away. … It became a chore.”However, the logic of Hollywood economics soon set it. The movie cost just $2.2 million to make and earned $33 million a the box office. So Paramount Pictures simply ignored the seeming finality of Jason’s death at the end of The Final Chapter and hired another producer to create Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, which was released less than a year later.Watch the ‘Samantha’s Death’ Scene from ‘Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter’The Best Horror Movie From Every YearCounting down a century’s worth of monsters, demons and things that go bump in the night.Gallery Credit: Michael Gallucci