‘You need to be scared of them again’: The director of a hit horror that had people spewing in the aisles eyes a crack at a dormant legend

We’re closing in on a decade and a half since Jason Voorhees was last spotted in live-action, and while there’s a streaming series in active development focusing on the hockey mask-wearing mass murderer, a return to the big screen for Friday the 13th remains stuck in the quicksand of development hell.

It’s not for a lack of interest, that’s for sure, with some of horror’s heaviest hitters coming right out and admitting they’d love to be the ones to bring the franchise out of its lengthy sabbatical to splatter blood and entrails all over the multiplex.

Blumhouse has long been casting envious eyes at the property, but in an interview with SlashFilm, Terrifier mastermind Damien Leone – responsible for the box office sensation sequel that literally had multiple people vomiting in the aisles – outlined what he would do were he given the keys.

“I’ve been on record for quite some time now saying if I could ever remake one slasher film, it would be Friday the 13th. Jason was always my favorite slasher since I was a little kid, and I think that there’s a way to … I mean, my approach would be to keep it in the ’80s, honestly. I would have it take place in the early ’80s. I would try and make him as scary as possible because I feel like that’s something they kind of lost as the movies went along. You just start getting too comfortable with these villains and you need to be scared of them again.”

The prospect of Art the Clown’s architect taking a crack at one of the genre’s most enduring icons is a mouthwatering or stomach-churning prospect depending on how you feel about Leone’s back catalogue, but if you want to shock people, then there are few more qualified candidates to live up to that promise.