Blairstown Diner

Blairstown Diner is a traditional American diner at 53 Route 94 in Blairstown, New Jersey. The diner opened in September 1949 and was originally owned by Charles Simonson. Its prefabricated stainless-steel dining car was manufactured by the Paramount Dining Car Company of Haledon, New Jersey, while a local contractor constructed the concrete-block foundation on which it was installed. The diner has remained in operation through several changes of ownership and retains the characteristic stainless-steel exterior, counter and booth layout associated with mid-twentieth-century New Jersey diners. Its greatest cultural recognition comes from its appearance in the original Friday the 13th, which was filmed around Blairstown, Hope and nearby Hardwick Township in 1979. The connection subsequently made the diner a landmark for fans of the film, and its later use in another independent horror production was deliberately intended as a reference to that history.

Blairstown Diner has appeared in Friday the 13th (1980) and Plasterhead (2006). Both productions use the real interior as well as the recognisable roadside diner setting. Friday the 13th uses it as the local restaurant where Camp Crystal Lake owner Steve Christy waits during a severe rainstorm, while Plasterhead returns to the location more than twenty-five years later as a deliberate homage to the earlier horror film.

In Friday the 13th (1980), Blairstown Diner is the restaurant where Camp Crystal Lake owner Steve Christy stops during the thunderstorm while the newly hired counsellors remain at the camp. Steve has left Crystal Lake earlier in the day to collect supplies and is still away when the weather deteriorates and the killings at the camp continue. Inside the diner, waitress Sandy tries to persuade him not to go back out into the heavy rain. Steve refuses because he is worried about the six new counsellors he has left at the camp, describing them as inexperienced and needing him there. Sandy jokingly suggests that he owes her a night out before Steve pays and prepares to leave. Both the exterior and interior of the real Blairstown Diner were used for the sequence. After leaving, Steve encounters car trouble and eventually receives a lift part of the way back towards Camp Crystal Lake. He continues on foot after the police officer driving him is called away, only to be murdered shortly before reaching the camp. Blairstown Diner should not be confused with the restaurant seen earlier when Annie arrives in the area: that sequence used a different building in Hope, New Jersey, while Blairstown Diner appears later during Steve’s nighttime scene.

In Plasterhead (2006), Blairstown Diner represents a restaurant in and around the fictional rural West Virginia community of Rolling Glen. The horror film follows four New Jersey college students travelling towards Miami who take a detour after finding a discarded purse and become trapped in an area associated with the local legend of Ray Williams, a truck driver who was brutally attacked by townspeople years earlier and supposedly survived as the masked killer known as Plasterhead. The diner is used for scenes involving the characters and local residents as the story establishes the small-town environment, and the location later becomes part of the violence when Plasterhead enters the town and attacks people at the restaurant. The choice of Blairstown Diner was intentional rather than coincidental. Director Kevin Higgins and producer Brian Salerno were fans of Friday the 13th and wanted their film to contain a direct connection to the 1980 slasher, leading them to film inside the same diner used for Steve Christy’s scene.

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