This is the 12th article in a series revisiting one Friday the 13th movie every Friday the 13th. Read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, and 11.
Jason Voorhees had been to Manhattan. He had been to Hell. He had been to outer space. He had even walked away from a Nightmare on Elm Street crossover with Freddy Krueger’s severed head in his hands. For nearly 30 years—and despite two separate movies that explicitly promised to be the final chapter of Friday the 13th—the franchise had refused to die.
But for all the weird ways filmmakers had toyed with Jason Voorhees over the years, there was one last obvious place Jason hadn’t gone yet: back to the beginning for a full-blown franchise reboot. And in that way, 2009’s Friday the 13th remake could hardly have been better-suited to its era. The year saw a murderer’s row of wildly unnecessary horror remakes: The Last House on the Left, My Bloody Valentine, Sorority Row, The Stepfather, and Night of the Demons. Compared to those half-remembered movies, rebooting a big franchise like Friday the 13th must have seemed irresistible.
But who could reimagine Friday the 13th for a new generation of horror fans? Enter Platinum Dunes, a production company cofounded by Michael Bay, which had already scored box-office hits with remakes like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror. By 2009, the Platinum Dunes formula was both time-tested and critic-proof: (1) Get a bunch of hot young actors together, (2) flip around a slick, empty reboot of a beloved horror classic, and (3) profit handsomely for your trouble.
In theory, the insanely convoluted chronology laid out in the previous Friday the 13th movies presented a problem. Jason Voorhees isn’t even the killer in the first movie. He doesn’t get his hockey mask until the third one. Can you really reboot the original movie without including any of the elements that, over the years, had come to define Friday the 13th?
The script for the reboot—by Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, who also wrote Freddy vs. Jason—had a simple solution: Remake not just the first Friday the 13th movie, but the first four Friday the 13th movies, with a script that attempts to jam the franchise’s most iconic bits into one feature-length story. The real purpose of the remake wasn’t finding a fresh spin on Friday the 13th; it was condensing the series’ most notable elements into a single, digestible package.
Of course, even for a franchise in which almost every movie could be summarized as "Jason kills horny teenagers," cramming four separate Friday the 13th movies into one required some fairly heavy compression. So the remake condenses the entire first movie into a two-minute black-and-white prologue, as Pamela Voorhees helpfully summarizes the plot for a terrified teenage girl she’s trying to kill: "You’re the last one! I’ve killed all the others! You need to be punished for what you did for him! You let him drown! Jason was my son! You should have been watching him!"
It is a legitimate contender for the most bluntly expositional monologue in cinematic history, and it only ends when the teenager uses a machete to slice off Pamela’s head. Meanwhile, the adolescent Jason—who watches all of this from the bushes—decides to keep his mother’s severed head, which he imagines telling him to avenge her death on every teenager who gets within a mile of Camp Crystal Lake.
Cut to the present day: A bunch of idiot teenagers are looking for a mythical field of weed to steal, smoke, and sell. One of the actors in this gang is Ben Feldman, just a few years before he’d go on to greater fame in Mad Men and Superstore, joining fellow Friday the 13th alums Kevin Bacon and Crispin Glover in the Too Good for This Shit Club. After a standard-issue quota of boobs and blood—alongside a weird Blue Velvet reference that feels like a sign of the screenwriters’ boredom with this material—Jason arrives and slashes up the teenagers’ campsite. (For the record, the gnarliest death goes to America Olivo’s Amanda, whom Jason zips into a sleeping bag and roasts over a campfire.)
But at the last minute, Jason ends up sparing and kidnapping one would-be victim: Whitney Miller (Amanda Righetti), who looks uncannily like his own dead mother. It’s a modified version of a plot point from Friday the 13th Part 2, which is not quite enough to justify how incredibly contrived and stupid it is.
The remake’s most novel idea is its quasi-revisionist take on Jason Voorhees himself. This Jason—played for the first (and apparently last) time by stuntman Derek Mears—is a deranged survivalist. He doesn’t speak, but his murders are apparently motivated by a desire to protect his home at the now-closed Camp Crystal Lake, and to hold on to the new "mother" he has found. He’s smart enough to set some fairly elaborate traps, and he sprints after his victims instead of stalking behind in a menacing walk.
The dead weed teens and the Whitney kidnapping sequence turn out to be yet another prologue, because 25 minutes into the movie, we suddenly cut to six weeks later. Our new hero is Whitney’s brother Clay, a sexy bad-boy biker played by Supernatural’s Jared Padalecki. Clay believes—correctly—that his missing, presumed dead sister is actually alive. (Apparently the families of the dead weed teens didn’t care as much, because nobody comes to Crystal Lake knocking on doors trying to find them.)
Clay quickly crashes into a different group of horny college kids, who have come up to Crystal Lake to party in a lavish cabin. Their ranks include quintessential nice girl Jenna (future Arrow star Danielle Panabaker), wacky stoner Chewie (Aaron Yoo, fresh off Disturbia and 21), and lovable idiot Nolan (Veronica Mars’ Ryan Hansen).
They’re all dead by the end of the movie, of course. But as usual, there’s one kid who deserves a special spotlight. This time, it’s Trent (Travis Van Winkle). Even in a franchise that has had more than its fair share of smug, douchey rich kids, Trent is a special case—so hilariously, cartoonishly evil that it feels like the whole movie is just an elaborate wind-up to his big gory death scene. Trent is introduced loudly whining that Clay is holding up the line at a gas station by questioning the attendant about his sister’s tragic disappearance. He spends most of the cabin party freaking out about his friends spilling beer on his dad’s stained oak table. And when he inevitably cheats on Jenna, he spends the entire sequence mumbling to himself about the breasts of the girl bouncing around on top of him: "Your tits are just so juicy, dude. You got perfect nipple placement, baby."
Unfortunately, Jason Voorhees eventually corners Trent and skewers him with the hook on the back of a tow truck, eliminating Friday the 13th’s only real source of entertainment. The entire third act is a dutiful slog, as Clay finally finds Whitney in Jason’s underground lair. The reunited siblings team up to kill Jason via a wood-chipper and a machete, dump his body back into Crystal Lake, and hang around on the dock just long enough for one last jump scare, when Jason pops out of the water to kill them.
And—it seemed safe to presume, at the time—to kill again, and again, and again. Following the release of the remake, a sequel was swiftly announced and dated for release in the following year, on Friday, August 13, 2010. And while I personally think the already dubious Friday the 13th remake has aged like milk, a sequel still made perfect sense. Apart from the crossover Freddy vs. Jason—which had the benefit of attracting fans of both franchises—the remake was the biggest success yet, opening to a whopping $40 million, and eventually turned out to be the highest-grossing Friday the 13th by tens of millions of dollars. Better still, the sequel would have been the 13th Friday the 13th movie: a benchmark that would have been toasted by longtime franchise fans and given Platinum Dunes the world’s easiest marketing hook.
And then…nothing. August 13, 2010, passed without that promised new Friday the 13th, and despite occasional assurances from producer Brad Fuller, another installment never materialized. For now—and for who knows how long—2009’s Friday the 13th is the final Friday the 13th movie.
Which leaves this column with one more question to answer before we close up shop for the foreseeable future: Why hasn’t Jason Voorhees been seen in over a decade?
At least part of it can be attributed to a sea change in the horror market, which was already shifting when 2009’s Friday the 13th arrived in theaters. That same year, an indie horror movie called Paranormal Activity became a word-of-mouth smash, grossing nearly $200 million worldwide on a reported budget of $15,000 (and, of course, instantly spawning a franchise). The entire Platinum Dunes model hinged on churning out cheap-and-easy horror movies, but even their cheapest and easiest reboots cost around $10 million, and that was before you factored in marketing. Compared to Blumhouse—the mostly horror-centric production company founded by Jason Blum—the Platinum Dunes model was needlessly flabby. But a brief test balloon for a found-footage Friday the 13th, which presumably would have been cheaper, was almost instantly shot down by angry fans.
So where else could the franchise go? Some rumors—like Quentin Tarantino’s purported interest in making "the ultimate Jason Voorhees movie"—were probably always false. Other ideas, like a Friday the 13th TV series on the CW, never made it past the pitch phase. As recently as 2015, producer Brad Fuller was describing a back-to-basics Friday the 13th about Jason Voorhees killing horny, weed-smoking teens at a summer camp. Channel Zero creator Nick Antosca and Prisoners screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski reportedly penned their own unproduced takes on a new Friday. LeBron James—a noted Friday the 13th super-fan—is still rumored to be interested in producing a reboot via his SpringHill Entertainment production company.
But at the time of this writing, there’s one big impediment to literally anyone who wants to make a new Friday the 13th: a lawsuit between Victor Miller, the screenwriter who originated the franchise, and Horror, Inc., a company founded by series producer Sean S. Cunningham. The details are too complicated to recount here; the relevant part for anyone who isn’t Miller or Cunningham is that Friday the 13th is on hold until either a decision or a settlement is reached. The most up-to-date analysis I could find—from Friday the 13th: Part 3 in 3-D star-turned-lawyer Larry Zerner, no less—is that a final decision might be reached by June 2020.
Is there still room in the horror landscape for Friday the 13th? As someone who has spent nearly six years of his writing career taking a very deep dive into this franchise, I believe the answer is yes. But if you need harder evidence, look no further than 2018’s Halloween, which jettisoned seven middling sequels (and an underwhelming mid-aughts attempt at a reboot franchise) for a back-to-basics follow-up that earned strong reviews and $250 million on a $10 million budget, with two more direct sequels on the way.
We’re in the midst of a golden age for horror movies. It’s easy to imagine how a talented, passionate filmmaker could cherry-pick the best stuff from Friday the 13th’s 40-year history for a sequel that could make Jason Voorhees terrifyingly relevant to modern-day moviegoers.
I began this project on Friday, June 13, 2014, and for now, it ends today, on Friday, March 13, 2020. The next Friday the 13th happens to be in November 2020, which is an impossibly tight turnaround for even the most optimistic filmmaker. Maybe all the impediments to a new Friday the 13th will finally have been brushed aside by Friday, August 13, 2021—and if that happens, you know I’ll be here to recount every last slash of Jason’s machete.
Coming (we hope) on a future Friday the 13th: Jason Voorhees returns.