Aside from Gun Media’s recently-released licensed horror game, it’s going on ten years since the masked psychopath known as Jason Voorhees stalked our nightmares thanks to Marcus Nispel’s Friday the 13th movie reboot.
That’s not to say that the franchise is necessarily dead, far from it; in fact, Paramount has been toiling away on a big-screen redo since 2013. Things look to have been progressing at a brisk clip, too, until the studio delayed its horror revival three times in as many years, and the last update from the Powers That Be revealed that production on the origin story had ostensibly shut down.
Still nothing to report on that front just yet, but while appearing on the latest episode of the Shock Wave podcast (with a tip of the hat to Bloody Disgusting), series creator Sean Cunningham revealed that the spinoff TV series based on Friday the 13th is “still percolating” on the fringes of development.
Mind you, there are still creative hurdles to overcome, after Cunningham acknowledged the difficulty of repackaging an old-school slasher horror pic – one that orbits around Jason Voorhees and his reign of terror around Camp Crystal Lake – to be a serialized piece of content.
“The Friday the 13th series is still percolating and we’ve got a very good handle on how we want to do it. You need really smart showrunners. I think the thing about Friday the 13th as a TV franchise… you have that problem – how the hell are you going to deal with Jason? Is he going to come out of the woods every week and smash another teenager against a tree and nobody is going to notice? Nobody knows who did it?”
A spinoff series based on Friday the 13th first set up shop at The CW, before it was abruptly pulled from the network’s lineup. Nevertheless, Sean Cunningham isn’t about to throw the towel in just yet, and went on to speak about how engineering a product for the fans is of paramount importance.
“You have to service the fans. You can’t ignore them. Friday the 13th, at least in part, is going to be about Jason. So, how do you make sense of all of the contradictory stories that are out there, between Jason going to space, or versus Freddy, and all these other things? The assumption is this. Crystal Lake is a town that really exists, and a long time ago they had a series killer named Jason Voorhees, and then some Hollywood creep comes out and makes this exploitation horror movie called Friday the 13th.
And then they make another one, and another one, and it just crushes the town. The town becomes the place that Jason built. And the stuff that happened, they know what really happened. The rest is Hollywood lore. There are people there that lived through it, and they’ll tell you what really happened. And so, what you can do is set up Crystal Lake as, more or less, like the town in JAWS – Amity Island. You have the town with all its prime movers in the town, but the town is located in an area that would allow Jason to exist in whatever form. But other things as well.”
After recent misfortunes on the silver screen, perhaps a TV show based on Friday the 13th is the best avenue to explore? Not that we’d be against seeing another film, but the small screen could certainly suit Jason well if the series is handled properly.
What do you think, though? Should the property have another go at lighting up theatres, or is it destined for television? Do let us know.
