When Adam Marcus, director of the 1993 film Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, announced that the slasher sequel might be getting its own spinoff movie that would focus on the supporting character Creighton Duke, it was honestly a little hard to judge just how serious the filmmaker was about this somewhat loopy proposal.
The ninth installment of the Friday the 13th series is hardly the most beloved flick in the franchise. What’s more, these movies have long moved on from Jason’s clash with the amusingly twisted bounty hunter, with subsequent films taking the hockey-masked killer into space and Freddy Krueger’s dream world, before the property got a full on reboot in 2009.
All the same, Marcus evidently isn’t letting this idea go just yet, and has even addressed one of the key questions that the project was inevitably going to have to tackle. That is, how can Creighton Duke make a return after getting bear-hugged to death in Jason Goes to Hell? Answer: Duke didn’t die after all.
“Creighton Duke didn’t die. There’s the answer. He did not die. The way I shot it was to give you this moment of ‘Oh no!’, but honestly, he exhales, but you don’t really see the light go out of his eyes. And to that end, my new production company Skelton Crew is basically doing something to resurrect Creighton Duke as a standalone character.”
This isn’t the only knowledge bomb the director’s dropped recently about the 25-year-old horror film. Late last year, Marcus took it upon himself to let the world know that Jason is in fact an Evil Dead-style Deadite, and just this past December, the filmmaker also disclosed the tragic backstory that first established Duke’s vendetta against Jason.
Though we’re still a long way from seeing an actual movie getting made, Marcus’ affection for the unhinged bounty hunter is well documented and pretty unmistakeable (he even reportedly wanted to bring the character back for Freddy vs. Jason), so we certainly can’t put it past him that he may genuinely go through with this Jason Goes to Hell spinoff. And with Jason himself currently the subject of a messy legal dispute, a Creighton Duke movie might be the only Friday the 13th-related release we’ll be getting in the next few years. If so, here’s hoping this whole strange undertaking is crazy enough to work.
