A new Friday the 13th series will follow a cop with a personal connection to Jason Voorhees
It was reported last year that the Friday the 13th franchise was eyeing a potential return to the small screen. Today, Deadline confirms that the new Friday the 13th series has found a home at The CW, where it is being actively developed by “The Pretender” creators Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle. Speaking with the former talent, Legion of Leia learned quite a bit about the shape the new Friday the 13th series plans to take.
Unlike the late ’80s television show that borrowed only a name from the slasher film franchise, the new Friday the 13th series will have a direct tie to Jason Voorhees and Crystal Lake.
“I don’t think we really wanted to do a show about a guy with a machete chasing girls in tube tops,” Long Mitchell tells the outlet. “We couldn’t do that on a weekly basis… 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.”
It sounds like the new Friday the 13th series will take place in a world where there was an actual Friday the 13th film franchise. The films were simply inspired by actual events.
“What we’re going to do is basically acknowledge that the people came to this town after these killings happened,” Long Mitchell explains, “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. 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.”
Friday the 13th is also headed to the big screen with an untitled 13th chapter slated to hit the big screen on May 16, 2016. Check back for updates on both iterations as they become available.
