Spoilers for the Friday the 13th remake within!
Remaking Friday the 13th is actually more complicated than you might think. After all, there’s no Jason Voorhees in the first film – his mom is the killer. And there’s no hockey mask until Part III. It took until Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter for the classic Jason look and mythology to be really finalized. So what do you do when attempting to make a 21st century version? Do you really remake the first, with Mrs. Voorhees as the killer? How do you deal with the now cliched aspects of the slasher genre? Do you even need to bring back any elements from the original films, or do you just do a reboot?
I talked about this with the Platinum Dunes guys, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller, last year when they were promoting The Hitcher. They were still working these issues out, but with the movie shooting in February, they’ve obviously hammered them out.
And I know how.
The new Friday the 13th is going to open with Jason as a legend in the Crystal Lake area. Five kids out in the woods looking for a bunch of weed they planted and stumble upon the deserted Camp Crystal Lake. Sitting around the fire that night, the dweeby one (there’s always a dweeby one) tells the legend of Jason Voorhees. After that the Survivor Girl and her boyfriend wander off into the woods, where they find a shitty old cabin. Inside are some clues, like a bed with the name Jason carved in it. An old picture of a girl who looks just like Survivor Girl.
And Mama Voorhees’ head.
Cue Jason. He murderizes the other four kids, and as he grabs Survivor Girl… slam into the opening credits.
This sounds like a terrific way to revive the series. We get right to the point, and it opens damn strong. From there the movie essentially becomes a rehash of the first four movies, but who is going to complain about that? One of the big changes is that the script attempts to explain some of Jason’s supernatural aspects – the script goes out of its way to specify that he’s a human being, not a zombie or a superman – including revealing that our favorite hockey masked killer has a series of hidden tunnels under the woods and the old camp, which is what allows him to pop up at the most inopportune moments.
As a die-hard fan of the series, I have to say that I like what I am hearing. Friday the 13th was never great cinema, and the sequels bastardized the concept worse than Platinum Dunes could ever hope to do.