Brad Fuller, who is currently doing press for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows, told The Reel World that he’s got some ideas for Paramount’s rebooting of the Friday The 13th franchise, ideas which unfortunately do not include Leo, Don, Ralph, and Mikey taking on the Crystal Lake slasher in Manhattan. No, Fuller intends to answer the questions that nobody has asked with a Jason Voorhees origin story.
“It’s an origin that no one has seen before,” Fuller says. “Obviously Pamela’s there, but it’s a little bit different from what you’ve seen before.” If one were to judge Fuller’s intentions by the revamped origin of the Ninja Turtles, Jason Voorhees will now be the product of a secret government experiment to wipe out teenage sex and drugs, headed by Dr. Pamela Voorhees during the new puritanical reign of Ronald Reagan. Or maybe witchcraft or some shit.
Interestingly, this is the exact opposite of what Blumhouse appears to be doing with their recently announced reboot of Halloween. The horror-centric production house is bringing back original writer and director John Carpenter as an executive producer on the reboot; about the project, Carpenter states that “Halloween needs to return to its traditions” and that “Michael is not just a human being; he’s a force of nature like the wind. That’s what makes him so scary.” (Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween remake gave Myers the full origin story treatment, much to the chagrin of some audiences.)
This will be the second Jason reboot in which Fuller has participated. He produced the dull (save for the pre-credits sequence) 2009 reboot, and has also had a hand in bringing back the DeFeo family, Leatherface, and Freddy Krueger, disappointing anyone who, while looking at their cable guide, gets excited that A Nightmare On Elm Street or The Amityville Horror is just starting, only to find out it’s the remake.
It’s long been rumored that the next Jason Voorhees adventure would be found footage, and apparently this change in direction was prompted by a need to use the only concept more played out than that: the origin story. It all seems like an awful lot of work when a simple, brutal tale of Jason knocking off sexually active teenagers in various states of undress would probably sate the Friday The 13th fan base at this point. Perhaps John Carpenter said it best at his recent Blumhouse press conference: “Be true to the original spirit of the movie. Don’t get carried away. Tell a simple story. Tell a scary story.”
These kinds of movies do have built-in deadlines, and Friday The 13th is slated for release on January 13, 2017.
[Via Cinemablend]