BAD wrote:Jason Voorhees Gets A TV Series!

There once was a Friday the 13th TV show, but it had nothing to do with Jason Voorhees or Camp Crystal Lake. In it a hottie named Robie (and some dudes) hunted down cursed artifacts that had been sold by an antique shop; the title was deemed usable, but nothing else from the films made their way into the long-ago show.

Now Friday the 13th is coming back to television... and it's bringing Jason with it. Sean Cunningham, director of the original film, is apparently emboldened by the success of Hannibal and Bates Motel and has decided to bring the hockey-masked killer to the small screen.

How the hell do you make a TV series about Jason Voorhees? The details are sketchy. It'll be "a storyline that re-imagines Jason in multiple time periods." So a flashback structure? It'll also focus heavily on the town of Crystal Lake:

"The series is contemporary, focusing on the eclectic characters of Crystal Lake who are forced to confront the return of the killer, as new secrets about his wacky family are revealed."

So one part soap opera, one part undead serial killer. Like everything on the CW, in other words.

How does this work with Paramount rebooting the series again, this time as a found footage feature? What if this TV show is a better Jason Voorhees story than the movie? How weird is it that Jason's getting a weekly series?

DH wrote:CW Plans "Friday the 13th" TV Series

The CW is officially developing a horror/crime thriller series based on the long-running slasher film franchise "Friday the 13th".

Steve Mitchell and Craig Van Sickle, creators of the 1990s NBC series "The Pretender," are developing the property which aims to reimagine the masked Jason Voorhees in a more grounded and realistic context.

The story will deal with the ongoing quest of a detective's search for his missing brother, a search tied to a long thought dead serial killer who has now returned to wreak havoc in the new Crystal Lake.

Legion of Leia has further plot details which says Crystal Lake isn't a remote woods area now. Instead it's a thriving town full of young rich types and old regulars who grew up there.

Their source says: "It's like the town from Jaws. It's like Amityville 20 years later, and someone says, 'I think the shark is back.' Everyone is like, 'Oh, s--t. We can't have the shark back, we finally grown up as a town and we have all this mythology, but it ruined our city.'"

The series won't ignore the film's either: "We're going to basically acknowledge that the people came to this town after these killings happened, and they made all these movies. And now the town has a stigma. Our show is, here's the true story. Here's the real story of Jason. It's been taken and exploited. So we have the young crowd who doesn't know who he is except for what they've seen in the movies. The older crowd is afraid of him. We have a lot of people who have scars from him."

This marks one of several film-based TV shows in development at The CW with others including "The Notebook," "Little Women" and "Frequency" along with the Archie Comics inspired "Riverdale".

Alexhead wrote:"in a more grounded and realistic context." You know, whatever the hell that means.

Alexhead wrote:Well if it doesn't have that, why watch?

darkness wrote:

Alexhead wrote:Well if it doesn't have that, why watch?

Believe it or not, aside from the crossover one with Freddy, the one in space is the only Friday the 13th film I've ever seen.

iHorror wrote:Friday the 13th TV Series Story Details Revealed; “True Detective Meets Twin Peaks”

There’s nothing hotter right now than turning popular horror movies into TV shows, and up next on the chopping block is The CW’s small screen adaptation of the Friday the 13th film franchise. We learned about the project earlier this week, and now details have been revealed.

The network has hired Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle to pen the Friday the 13th TV series, and Legion of Leia‘s Jenna Busch caught up with Mitchell yesterday and pressed him for details. He revealed a whole lot, describing the series as “True Detective meets Twin Peaks… on acid.”

“What we really wanted to do when they came to us and said, hey let’s do Friday the 13th – I don’t think we really wanted to do a show about a guy with a machete chasing girls in tube tops,” said Mitchell. “We couldn’t do that on a weekly basis. So then we started thinking, so why don’t we do something – because everybody will think, how can you do something with that? – we thought, let’s surprise them.”

“Reimagined as a sophisticated, horror/crime thriller, Friday The 13th is about the ongoing quest of a detective’s search for his missing brother that is somehow tied to Jason Voorhees, a long thought dead serial killer who has now returned to wreak havoc in the new Crystal Lake,” the writer continued. “The masked Jason is being reimagined with a stronger feel of grounded reality.”

Mitchell dug even deeper into the specifics of the plot…

“Crystal Lake is not just Crystal Lake anymore. Just this place out in the woods. It’s this thriving town, sort of like Silicon Valley. There are these rich people, a lot of young rich people with a lot of money and a lot of time, neither one well spent, and there’s the old people who grew up in this town. It’s like the town from Jaws. It’s like Amityville 20 years later, and someone says, ‘I I think the shark is back.’ Everyone is like, ‘Oh, shit. We can’t have the shark back!’we finally grown up as a town and we have all this mythology, but it ruined our city.’”

“So what ends up happening is, a cop comes into town, looking for his brother. He realizes his brother was there searching into the past murders, and realizes that his personal story is tied into Jason’s personal story. Part of the fun of the show is exploring, is this Jason or is this a copycat? Is it possible that Jason has been around all these years? Is Jason a monster? Is he real? Is he a serial killer? And really exploring who and what Jason is, is part of the whole thrill of the show.”

So, will the Friday the 13th TV series acknowledge the movies we all know and love? Indeed it will, taking place in a world wherein they exist – just as they do in ours.

“What we’re going to do is basically acknowledge that the people came to this town after these killings happened, and they made all these movies,” Mitchell noted. “And now the town has a stigma. Our show is, here’s the true story. Here’s the real story of Jason. It’s been taken and exploited. So we have the young crowd who doesn’t know who he is except for what they’ve seen in the movies. The older crowd is afraid of him. We have a lot of people who have scars from him. The underlying thematic of the whole thing is that Jason is a monster in this town. He openly wears a mask. But everybody in this town wears a mask. Underneath those is the monster.”