That FRIDAY THE 13TH Horror Series Project Isn't Dead Yet and New Details Have Been Revealed
It's been awhile since we learned that a Friday The 13th TV series was in development for The CW. Unfortunately, the network dropped the project saying:
“We didn’t believe it was a sustainable script or a sustainable series. It was a very good pilot, but not a sustainable series.”
Well, that didn't stop series creators and writers Steve Mitchell and Craig Van Sickle from refining the project and shopping it around. They won't let their vision die and are still developing the series.
During a recent interview on Shock Waves podcast, Friday The 13th franchise creator Sean S. Cunningham talked about what they are trying to accomplish. He is working on the series with Mitchell and Van Sickle and he explains that they are looking to develop a series that will make fans happy and build a nightmarish world with great characters.
"The FRIDAY THE 13TH series is still percolating and we’ve got a very good handle on how we want to do it. CBS and The CW both said, 'yeah, that’s good!' I don’t quite know what I’ll do there, but I’m really looking forward to it because it’s, again, taking this thing that appears one way, but you can do it this (other) way too, and really keep it interesting."
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?
And then you’re trying to balance the human stuff. And then you have the family at the core of it. You’re not (always) following Jason around. It’s (also) the town and the town politics. It’s just such a rich pallet (of storytelling). And I’m really looking forward to it."
It's not like these guys don't have an understanding of the character and I have no doubt that they have the ability to make a great series that fans will love. Cunningham goes on to share some new details on his vision for the series and I really like their take on it.
"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.
I would describe it as a place where if THE X-FILES’ Mulder and Scully wandering into this county, they never would of left! There’s so much weird shit going on!"
I'd watch the shit out of this series! I don't know why a network wouldn't eventually pick it up. There's a big fan base that would love to see this happen. Hopefully a network or streaming service sees the potential and picks it up. This is a series that didn't belong at The CW anyway. This needs a better, more hardcore network or streaming service backing it up for it to reach its full potential.
Via: JoBlo