Send Help Screenwriters Reveal Plans for Lost Friday the 13th Sequel
The Friday the 13th remake almost had a nasty sequel with a fitting title.
One of the great tragedies of horror cinema is that the Friday the 13th franchise does not consist of 13 movies. Worse, it has been stuck at 12 entries since the release of the 2009 reboot film, simply called Friday the 13th. But if the screenwriters of that movie, Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, had their way, we would have had a 13th Jason movie years ago.
Speaking to ComicBook.com about their current movie Send Help, directed by Sam Raimi, Swift and Shannon revealed some details about their planned sequel. “It would have been Friday the 13th Part 13. We had big ambitions for it,” Shannon recalled. “I think it was called The Death of Jason Voorhees. Camp Blood: The Death of Jason Voorhees.”
That title will certainly raise some eyebrows among F13 fans, because Jason Voorhees has died several times. There was the excellent Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, which ended with Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) killing the masked murderer, a death that producers at Paramount intended to stick. And then there was Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which began with Jason getting blown up to little bits by the FBI… only to reveal that he is in fact a demon worm that hops from body to body. Heck, the whole franchise is based on the premise that Jason is dead, since it was his drowning as a boy at Camp Crystal lake that sent mama Pamela Voorhees on a killing spree for the first film.
However, it’s important to remember that, a.) strict continuity has never been part of the Friday the 13th franchise; and b.) that Camp Blood: The Death of Jason Voorhees would be a sequel to the reboot film. The 2009 movie paid homage to the first three films by opening with Pamela (played by Nana Visitor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fame) being beheaded at the end of her murder rampage. Then, it went into an extended sequence of Jason killing people while wearing a bag over his head, as he does in Friday the 13th Part 2, before he gets his hockey mask in the movie’s present day, replicating the arrival of the mask in the third film.
Even though the remake did well at the box office and, according to the screenwriting duo “everyone loved” the script for the sequel, it never happened because of legal trouble. For years, original Friday the 13th screenwriter Victor Miller has been locked in a lawsuit with producer Sean S. Cunningham, which has halted production of any new movies. Whenever it finally releases, the long-in-development television series Crystal Lake, starring Linda Cardellini as Pamela before young Jason’s death (or “death”), will be the first new entry since the 2009 movie.
For Swift and Shannon, that’s a shame because they had something really nasty cooked up for their sequel. “There were bigger kills. They were crazier,” teased Swift. “We had a really awesome zipline kill that I always loved,” added Shannon.
What does that mean? Swift and Shannon don’t elaborate. If we’re lucky, we’ll get to see some of those acts of violence in a thirteenth movie. But good luck rarely has anything to do with Friday the 13th.
Send Help is now playing in theaters worldwide.