Just as the original Friday The 13th took John Carpenter’s Halloween and made it into something cruder, but equally successful, so the proposed TV spinoff of the rebooted reboot of the long-running horror series is taking the original Friday The 13th and making it into something more meta. (You know, for the teens.) How successful it will be remains to be seen.
Cinema Blend has new details about the series, apparently shared by franchise producer and original Friday The 13th director Sean S. Cunningham at the Monster-Mania horror convention this weekend. First is the idea that the show will take place in a fictional town that is supposed to have inspired the Friday The 13th movies, making it a fictional place that fictionally inspired a real series of films, which in real life were totally fictional, but within the fiction are based on fact. Further complicating matters is the second idea, namely that masked hockey-and-ax-murder enthusiast Jason Voorhees will not be the killer on the show, because on the show he is a fictional character. Instead, the town’s hormonal adolescent populace will be menaced by the “real” Jason, described as a “more serious backwoods-inspired killer.”
And as for the fans thinking, “Didn’t they already do the realism thing in Jason Goes To Hell, and the ‘Jason isn’t actually the killer’ thing in several of the Friday The 13th movies?,” they should be reminded that the Friday The 13th series is not really for people who don’t like to see the same thing over and over again, and someone who knows those pieces of trivia really ought to know that as well.
Cinema Blend also reports that The CW is interested in picking up the series, which sounds rather ridiculous on the surface. But it could actually be a good thing—being forced to conform to broadcast standards will require this newest incarnation of Friday The 13th to abstain from showing nudity and all but the most PG-rated violence, which means that at least something about it will be different.