So I’ve been reading ‘Crystal Lake Memories’, the big book of ‘Friday the 13th’. It is, without a doubt, the best book ever written. My sincere hope is that the same folks – or heck, some different folks, I don’t care – do the same thing with ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’, ‘Night of the Creeps’, ‘Halloween’, etc., etc.
Not that the aforementioned memories are necessarily pleasant. For the most part, everyone who worked on these movies pretty much hated the idea – not even the experience, afterwards, but going in they were dreading it. Sean Cunningham, who kicked the whole thing off as writer/director/producer, wanted nothing to do with it. But the money people wanted a knock off of ‘Halloween’ and, well, he needed the money, so… He was not a horror fan – he wanted to make important films. Then, curse of curses, Paramount bought the movie and it became a phenomenon. Thing is, the idea of the setting was pretty ingenius. Or at least, it worked for me, as I always had anxiety about summer camp. Not so much that I would be murdered, but a sense of general unease. It just set me all off balance.
So that may have something to do with my fandom. That and I saw these movies at such a young age that the scares weren’t funny or cheesy to me – they were for real, yo. I always knew they weren’t great, but something about that unpolishedness made them scarier to me. And probably only to me.
As the book lays out how the sequels came about, interview after interview contains quotes along the lines of “Well, I’m no horror fan” or “Well, even though it was a horror movie, I needed the work”. Just an amazing amount of disdain for the genre. This whole series, this icon of horror, created by people who are actively ashamed that they ever had anything to do with it. People who prayed the movies would tank. It kind of pokes a hole in that theory about making movies you’re passionate about.
And as I’m reading this stuff, I think about the obvious lies I read back in the 80s, the articles in Fangoria where the director would be talking about this being the best Jason yet and how they’re having a blast, etc. I mean, now I know that that kind of stuff is all lies and marketing, but back then it made me believe that being on the set of one of those movies must’ve been the best thing ever.
I still believe that. If Paramount came to me with a $4mil budget to make a ‘Friday the 13th’, would I hem and haw and say things like “Despite the fact that this is a horror movie, I will take it seriously”? Hecks, no. I would do it in the stab of a throat. Whoa – you see that? I’m so ready.
Subscribe by RSS
Subscribe to Email
Follow on Facebook
Follow on Twitter
That movie is a classic. I love how underlit the nighttime exteriors were (although, I’m sure it was because of budgetary constraints more than artistic choice). A wonderful movie where performance was incidental. Good stuff.
Sounds like a cool book. Just for shits and giggles, what would you do for a story if Paramount DID give you 4 mil to make a new sequel?
Heath – yeah, that’s totally a part of it. They didn’t plan to make it look like that, they just had no choice. And that look totally worked for me!
Shawn – I’d take it back to Camp Crystal Lake. I’d make it about campers again. I think that only Parts 1, 2, 3 and 6 were set in the actual camp. But that’s the setting that works for me. So no matter what, that’s where it would have to be.
And the major trick would be the characters. I’d do my damndest to make them as likeable as, say, the kids in ‘Dazed and Confused’. I mean, if those kids started getting murdered, that would’ve shaken you up.
But story wise – that’s a good question. You can’t do a “final showdown” type of thing, because obviously there’s no weight to it. You have to somehow overcome the story about Jason really being a body hopping alien, which is an idea just terrible beyond words. And I wouldn’t want to make it a movie where we have to say “With this movie, we decided that parts 8 through 10 never hapened”. You can’t do that. It’s like asking a jury to forget horrible photos of a crime scene. If you saw those hunks of crap, you can’t just forget them.
But it would be kids going to camp, encountering horrible bloody death first-hand with some of them living to tell the tale.
I’d also love to incorporate some of the early Friday the 13th Universe – bring back the survivors from the other movies? Or maybe set it in 1981?
Man, that’s a huge question, Shawn. I guess I should work on an better answer. Just in case.
Well, if you’re going to blog about it…
I wonder how much the ’80s had to do with the success of the big three: Halloween, Friday, and Nightmare. Surely someone somewhere has written about the culture being ripe for that kind of slasher flick. I don’t know if those movies would find the same level of infiltration into the pop culture stratosphere today, you know? So many choices now and things seem to have a much shorter shelf life.
Just wonderin’.
Well, I think there is that argument to make about the time being ripe for it. But maybe the other thing to think about is – had ‘Halloween’ or ‘Friday’ never been made until this year, thereby never starting the slasher trend, maybe they’d be just as popular. Is it a time thing or a subject matter thing?