In an exclusive piece from Bloody Disgusting, co-creator of the Friday the 13th franchise Sean S. Cunningham has recently announced his plans to get a reboot of the hockey mask killer up and running. It comes after the franchise’s long-running legal disputes finally came to a head, ultimately granting Victor Miller the rights to the characters and story of the first Friday the 13th film. While the legality of a reboot remains up in the air, writer Jeff Locker has assuaged some concerns. Should the upcoming prequel series Crystal Lake do well, the duo are hoping that any bad blood between Cunningham and Miller will be put aside to give Jason the big-screen return he deserves. If not, a Plan B for a sequel to the original film is also in development.
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The last full Friday the 13th film was released in 2009, almost fifteen years ago. You could argue that, alongside the triumphant returns of Ghostface and Michael Meyers, now is the best time for Jason Voorhees to rise from the grave once again. But should we see a Friday the 13th reboot come to fruition, what exactly do we want to see in it?
A Modernized Jason Voorhees
Paramount Pictures
While reception to the 2009 reboot was mixed, most can agree that the version of Jason Voorhees it depicted — an agile, trap-making dweller of Camp Crystal Lake — was a welcome improvement. Jason himself has become something of a modern folklore character, a spirit that wanders the campgrounds in a perpetual state of anger. It would make sense, then, that he’d commandeer the grounds and litter it with traps that only he could narrowly avoid. It gives him a calculated edge while making Camp Crystal Lake a legitimately dangerous location to run around in.
Even if a new reboot doesn’t go down that exact path, we have an idea of what a modernized, remade Jason Voorhees could look like. The slow, lumbering killer has been thoroughly played out. Maybe give the character some more agency. Make Jason utilize his supernatural nature a little more prominently. Humanize Jason, or maybe even make him into more of a figure than a tangible person. The concluding film in the recent Halloween trilogy, Halloween Ends, accomplished something similar to great success.
Getting Back to Basics
The way films are made now is completely different compared to when Jason stomped around Camp Crystal Lake. If you were to marathon the Friday the 13th films, chances are you’d be put off by the number of inconsistencies, retroactive changes, and other bizarre changes that are only ever brought up once and then brazenly forgotten about.
Remember when Jason somehow turned into a child at the end of Part 8, only to somehow return as a full-grown man in The Final Friday? Water is supposedly meant to scare Jason, yet in several moments throughout the series, it never seems to faze him until it magically becomes a major plot point in Freddy vs Jason. What about the multiple people throughout the series with psychic powers? How about The Final Friday, where Jason’s spirit is all of a sudden the thing to worry about, and it can only be killed through the use of a magical dagger? By the time Jason goes to space, you wouldn’t even really be shocked, considering the franchise already had no regard for its own continuity.
But why would they? It’s hard to salvage something already so far gone, and without a plan in place to naturally guide the character through multiple films, you can’t exactly blame them for throwing just about everything they could at the wall. A reboot of Friday the 13th would allow the franchise to get back to its roots, ignoring the years of messy fluff that made up the first ten entries while setting a stable plan for future films.
Inspiration from Other Franchises
Warner Bros. Pictures
Much like how Ghostface and Michael Meyers hit it out of the park with their respective comebacks, we can possibly expect the Friday the 13th reboot to adopt a similar approach. After all, seeing as how the franchise took direct inspiration from Halloween to begin with, it’d be appropriate. We just have to hope it’d be less blatant than the recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot.
A time skip to the modern day, for example, opens the door for a lot of opportunities beyond just creative kills. The reboot could comment on its own legacy by having teens laugh off the idea of a machete-wielding maniac, or it could highlight a bizarre sub-culture of those obsessed with true-crime stories and spree killers. Relatives of slaughtered camp counselors could confront a possible dramatization of their real tragedy, tackling how a monstrous killer became a pop-culture icon that people dress up as on Halloween.
There’s a lot you could do with Jason Voorhees beyond just having him kill teenagers. While that’s what the lumbering Crystal Lake killer is most closely associated with, the average moviegoer nowadays wants something with a bit more depth to tide their interest. Even fans of the franchise as is would likely agree that the series needs some kind of new spark to keep it alive. Should the upcoming prequel series Crystal Lake somehow fail to accomplish this, let’s hope that a reboot could fill the void left by 14 years of legal conflicts.
