Editorials
Campfire Tale: Why the ‘Friday the 13th’ Reboot is a Fitting Final Chapter
To make it clear right out of the gate: I do not want them to ever stop making Friday the 13th movies. I don’t even care who “they” are. I don’t want to ever see the last of Jason on the big screen, to know that franchise has run its course and to have to live with the awareness of the fact that its time is over. I don’t want that at all. I want all of these ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s movie monsters to survive, even thrive. I think we’re entering into the Dracula and Frankenstein stage of characters like Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, etc. Sure, those two titans of the Universal era originated in classics of literary horror long before their respective cinematic debuts, but both of those characters’ popularity really started to spark on the stage, which led in both cases to their films. Even after all this time, it is the cinematic portrayals of Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster originated by Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff that are immediately what come to mind when their names are invoked. That’s the era we’re heading into with the modern monsters as well. This is when we start to shed the skin of franchises as we know them, easier to do now that every one of these movies has been remade at least once. Continuity might not be intact, but seeing the glass half full, any of these characters could be entering their Hammer phase, and that’s not a terrible thought.
But over time, the probability of a new Friday the 13th, in particular, starts to look less and less likely. The lawsuit that has prevented a new movie may or may not be ending soon, but it’s seemed as if it would come to a close so many times before with no avail. Add to that the fact that Friday the 13th: The Game has finally, officially received its last update. The height of the game’s popularity would have, without a doubt, been the perfect time to push a new Jason flick into production, but instead it became the only new Friday the 13th content of any kind we’ve seen in a decade. The game reintroduced Jason into the mainstream, at least for a short time, and now that moment is kind of over. Jason’s only continuing to fade from the public consciousness, most merchandise bearing his iconic hockey mask typically meant for collectors already familiar with the franchise. Nothing’s really being made to introduce new people. Because of that, the chances basically increase day by day that when the lawsuit resolves and there’s even the option to make a Friday the 13th movie again, it won’t really be a viable brand to consider reviving in the way that it had been only a couple of years ago.
And if—and it could very well be and hopefully is a big if—all of that comes to pass, let’s look at the most recent Friday the 13th. A movie that will turn twelve in three months. A movie that, when phrased like that, isn’t all that unreasonable to think of as the last one we might ever see. People are torn on Marcus Nispel’s Friday the 13th. When you see reactions online, people either seem to love it or hate it, though that’s admittedly the response to just about anything right now. I personally like it. I think it is exactly what the people behind it set out to make: a throwback to the early days of the series, when Jason was an icon, when these films dominated the box office, and Friday the 13th was, in general, on top. The throwback attitude of it is its greatest strength, but also the only thing that kind of holds it back. The drive to make stock characters who you know are just there to get picked off and the fact that they’re intentionally shallow pulls me out a bit because while that’s certainly the cultural memory of the early movies, it was honestly some of the earnest character moments and unexpected interactions that made them shine.
Still, there are a slew of strengths, beginning with the drawn-out showstopper of an opening sequence. Jason is as fierce as he’s ever been and Derek Mears gives one of the most intense and all around best portrayals of that character in his forty year history. The arrow kill is one of the absolute best moments of the movie. It comes out of nowhere at exactly the right time. Couple that with Jason driving the machete up through the floor in the extended prologue and I truly do not get the criticisms that the deaths in this flick are lackluster. The scene in which Jason sharpens his machete while flashing back to the memory of his mother’s death might legitimately be one of the best character moments for Jason, ever. It is the pure distilled essence of who he is, encapsulating everything about him while also showcasing the toll his trauma has taken on him. Every time he sharpens that machete, every time he sets out to do what he does, he reflects on that pain. And he is so overtaken with rage in this moment that he starts lashing out at his own environment because he has no one there to hurt.
More than any of that, though, I want to take a step back and examine the movie as a whole, because if it’s the last Friday the 13th we ever see, it’s really not a bad way to go out. This movie came out right in the height of the ’70s and ‘80s remake boom of the 2000s, kicked off largely by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both that remake and this one share a director in Marcus Nispel, and both are more conceptual remakes than overt ones. They center on a new cast of characters, taking the situation into account more than anything else. But as much as it changes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre still feels like a remake of the Tobe Hooper classic. And that template would be adhered to by most remakes that followed it over the next few years. Friday the 13th, however, abandons this template almost completely. It is not, by any stretch, a remake of the original movie. The basic events of the original are covered quickly in the opening, much like the recap in Friday the 13th Part 2. Structurally, 2009’s Friday the 13th has much more in common with sequels than it does any remake.
This is obviously due to necessity. Remaking Friday the 13th in the traditional sense would be like when my friend introduced me to the original as a kid after weeks of telling me stories about Jason and about the movies. I thought I was going to see Jason and when I didn’t, I felt tricked. Great as Betsy Palmer’s performance is, it’s not what people think of when they think of Jason, or even when they think of the title. The movie was always going to revolve around Jason and always going to feature him wearing a hockey mask, because that’s the character that people know. We all know this. And yet, at the same time, the 2009 movie is very much Friday the 13th as if it were being presented to you for the first time. The details are different, the memory of what that was is a little hazy, and so the story takes a new—yet utterly recognizable—shape. And you know what? That’s great.
Friday the 13th is, after all, a campfire story at its core. It always has been. It’s a story that gets told and retold. It’s “The Hook.” In one version, it might end with nothing more than a bloody hook in the car door. In another, the boyfriend’s fingernails are dragging along the roof of the car after he’s been gutted and hung upside down, or it’s the sound of his feet after he’s been hanged from a tree. The reboot is not so much a remake of any kind, or a throwback to any specific film as it is a passing of the mic to the next generation, putting them on the spot to tell the campfire story as they grew up hearing it. This is Friday the 13th as we remember it, as so many heard about it secondhand, a story dictated by cultural memory. It’s just like an urban legend. The details change, they go off course, sometimes as far as Manhattan, even as far as space, but the story never really changes.
After Elm Street, Hell and so many other locations, it’s admittedly nice to have a movie that’s just Jason back at the lake and doing his business again. As wild as the journey has been, the Friday the 13th saga, if left here, ends pretty much as it started. The unruly teens, the abandoned lake, the camp with a terrible past, it’s all here. All the same elements are in play and still work like gangbusters. The only real addition is the Jason myth, truly introduced in the second and built up more and more with each successive entry, a boogeyman so tailor-made to be spoken of by the light of a campfire that it’s almost amazing he didn’t genuinely begin as such in the first place. This was certainly not designed as an attempt to take one last trip to the lake, to tell a quintessential Jason story, to provide a feature that is more or less the distilled essence of Friday the 13th. But that’s exactly what it is. And even with obnoxious Trent and lines like “Say hi to mommy in Hell,” I can’t help but think about the ending: a killer believed to be dead, and a rare moment of calm on the lake. A quiet lull and one last jump, as Jason bursts up from underneath the dock to remind us all that the nightmare is never really over.
With that in mind, it’s honestly kind of moving to think that this saga might end exactly where it began forty years ago, with a boy jumping out of the water.
After fifty years of continuous writing, Stephen King has become a genre unto himself.
The unrivaled Master of Horror made a splash in 1974 with his debut novel Carrie and has been terrifying readers ever since. Two years later, Brian De Palma brought this shocking story to the screen with an equally electrifying horror film that remains a genre classic and a prototypical example of “Good For Her” horror. This dual debut seemed to open the floodgates, unleashing endless waves of Stephen King films.
From the highs of Misery, Cujo, and The Shawshank Redemption to the schlocky fun of Cat’s Eye, Creepshow, and Children of the Corn, the last five decades have seen just about every notable horror creator take a stab at the author’s massive collection.
In recent years, this singular subgenre has begun to burst at the seams, expanding to include Stephen King-esque fare. In 2016, brothers Matt and Ross Duffer debuted Stranger Things, a sci-fi series heavily inspired by two of King’s most famous books. The Netflix series remixes Firestarter and It by following a little girl with psychic powers and an intrepid group of kids on bikes who must battle an otherworldly foe and a sinister government agency. With its clever blend of modern effects and comforting nostalgia, this gateway horror series paved the way for Andy Muschietti’s It adaptation which remains the highest grossing horror film of all time.
Four years later, Mike Flanagan would create Midnight Mass, a spiritual adaptation of King’s second novel Salem’s Lot. Published in 1975, the book sees a tiny New England town torn apart by a centuries-old vampire. Though Flanagan’s story is perhaps more tender, both iterations of the classic horror tale follow close-knit communities shaken to their core by the presence of an ancient evil.
In addition to these recent hits, 2025 was a banner year for the Master of Horror. Audiences delighted in six mainstream adaptations, including the massively popular It: Welcome to Derry which chronicles earlier cycles of the titular clown’s reign. With this boost to King’s cultural cache, it’s no surprise that we’ve begun to see more unofficial adaptations of the author’s work and horror creators who build their own unique castles in King’s creative sandbox.
So what defines a Stephen King-esque story?
For the past fifty years, the prolific author has dipped his toes in nearly every subgenre from supernatural stories and grisly gore to western fantasy and science fiction. Including his vast catalogue of short fiction, King has tackled ghosts, demons, werewolves, zombies, aliens, mutants, and self-driving cars, not to mention bizarre monsters of his own creation. But what truly unites this vast array of horror is King’s focus on relatable characters. In his 2000 memoir/instructional text On Writing, the prolific author describes the amusement he finds in writing disparate characters, placing them in horrific scenarios, then exploring the ways they try to survive.
An unofficial Stephen King adaptation may take place in the author’s native New England — bonus points if it’s set in Maine — and reference his well-known heroes and villains. But what makes the King connection unbreakable is a character-driven story about average people who band together in the face of abject terror.
Weapons Captures Small Town Stephen King
Following his 2022 shocker Barbarian, Zach Cregger returned with Weapons, a sprawling story that begins in a doomed elementary school. On an otherwise ordinary day, Justine (Julia Garner) arrives at her desk to find that all but one of her students have disappeared. As the mystery grows increasingly violent, Justine and Archer (Josh Brolin), the father of a missing boy, find their way to the home of Alex (Cary Christopher), the class’ only surviving student. In some ways reminiscent of Salem’s Lot, Weapons swings wildly through the unfortunate town, introducing us to its flawed inhabitants as we watch their lives fall apart.
Cregger’s setup nods to a pair of King short stories. Both “Suffer the Little Children” and “Here There Be Tygers” tackle monstrous presences in elementary schools, but as Weapons reaches its final act, Constant Readers may remember another Stephen King tale. Featured in his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, “Gramma” introduces us to George, a little boy tormented by an aging witch. On an afternoon alone with his sickly grandmother, the frightened child gradually realizes that the imposing old woman has been waiting for an opportunity to cast a spell that will extend her own life by possessing his body.
Alex finds himself similarly tortured by his aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), a garish witch who orchestrates a desperate plot to sustain her own strength. Transforming humans into mindless weapons, Gladys has taken over Alex’s family home and lured his classmates to the basement. Holding them in a comatose state, she syphons off their energy to extend her own supernatural life.
Vastly different in many ways, both “Gramma” and Weapons hinge on a sinister witch who uses horrific magical spells to sacrifice the bodies of her vulnerable prey.
Hokum Echoes The Shining and 1408
It’s nearly impossible to watch a film about a haunted hotel without thinking of King’s third novel, The Shining. This icy story follows Jack Torrance, an angry writer struggling with his sobriety and a shameful incident haunting his past. Accompanied by his wife and young son, Jack has taken a job as the winter caretaker for the Overlook, a haunted hotel situated high in the Rocky Mountains. Snowed in, Jack finds himself tormented by dangerous ghosts who amplify his greatest fears.
Damian McCarthy’s Hokum follows a similarly troubled figure. Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is a surly writer who travels to the Bilberry Woods Hotel in rural Ireland to spread his parents’ ashes. Haunted by his own tragic past, Ohm finds himself trapped in the honeymoon suite, a decaying room that’s been permanently closed to protect visitors from a dangerous witch trapped within its walls. Visual nods to King’s text abound with woodcut figurines and an animated clock, mirroring ominous descriptions found in King’s text.
Another terrifying sequence sees Ohm staring with horror at a closed door, the only thing separating him from the approaching witch. As the door knob slowly turns, Constant Readers remember Jack’s narrow escape from the ghostly woman in room 217. And Ohm’s popular Conquistador books directly reference King’s long-running fantasy series The Dark Tower which follows a gunslinger named Roland Deschain tasked with protecting the nexus of the universe.
In addition to these thematic comparisons, Hokum bears striking resemblance to King’s terrifying short story “1408.” Collected in 2002’s Everything’s Eventual, the terrifying story follows Mike Enslin, a dejected writer who’s risen to fame penning essays about his adventures in haunted locations. Mike arrives at the Hotel Dolphin and bullies his way into the titular room, despite the manager’s dire warnings. McCarthy nods to this story with an ominously misplaced hotel room door, reminiscent of King’s entry to 1408, an unsuspecting portal that appears to move each time Mike looks away.
However, McCarthy’s most direct reference lies in a minicorder Ohm uses to capture notes. Trapped inside the dreaded honeymoon suite, this device offers well-timed messages while sitting next to a decomposing corpse. Mike records his time in 1408 with his own trusty minicorder. Described for the reader, his tape has captured the man’s slow descent into madness as the room prepares to swallow him whole. With conclusions that differ wildly in tone, both Ohm and Mike find their lives irrevocably changed by encounters with the supernatural realm.
Widow’s Bay Builds Its Own Version of Castle Rock
Katie Dippold’s Widow’s Bay has taken the idea of an unofficial King adaptation and turned it into an art form. The Apple TV series sees the residents of the titular island plagued by a curse that dates back centuries. Not only does the picturesque hamlet not accommodate wifi connections, those born on the island face certain death should they ever try to leave. Desperate to modernize the tiny town, Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) draws in waves of tourists just as a new cycle of terror begins.
Blending horror with deft comedy, Dippold makes cheeky references to King’s body of work. Tom warns that, “there’s something in the fog,” reminding readers of King’s 1980 novella The Mist. And Loftis’ own stay in the town’s haunted hotel sees him tormented by the ghost of a murderous clown. We even spy a vintage King hardback peeking out of a local book trade box.
In many ways Widow’s Bay feels like a new iteration of the author’s Little Tall Island, a tiny village off the coast of Maine. In addition to the 1992 novel Dolores Claiborne and a handful of harrowing short stories, this quaint fishing village is also the setting for King’s 1999 teleplay Storm of the Century. Premiering on ABC primetime, this tragic tale follows a terrified group of islanders who batten down the hatches for a dangerous Nor’easter only to find a more sinister threat lurking within.
Constant Readers may also be reminded of Castle Rock, the author’s favorite fictional town.
First introduced in the 1981 novel Cujo, the charming village becomes the star of Needful Things, King’s satire about consumerism. After several Castle Rock stories, we’re reintroduced to its residents as they gossip about the arrival of Leland Gaunt and the grand opening of his curio shop. Anything their hearts desire can be found in his varied inventory, so long as they’re willing to pay the price. Pitting cantankerous neighbors against each other, Gaunt ignites a wave of grisly violence by exploiting long-held resentments and feuds.
The town’s only defense against this supernatural threat is beleaguered sheriff Alan Pangborn. Still grieving the deaths of his wife and younger son, Alan struggles to connect with his older child and pick up the pieces of his shattered life. Also a widower, Loftis struggles to raise his own restless son and explain the strange details of his wife’s tragic death. Attempting to unravel the island’s dark secrets, Tom is aided by quirky residents including a surly fisherman named Wyck (Stephen Root) and Patricia (Kate O’Flynn), an earnest Town Hall employee. King’s own novels feature many of these proactive alliances with disparate characters combining their strengths to overcome insurmountable odds.
With Widow’s Bay renewed for a second season and Mike Flanagan’s Carrie series on the horizon, the future seems bright for new King adaptations, both spiritual and directly pulled from his catalogue. The prolific author also shows no signs of slowing down with two publications nearing release. His upcoming novel, Other Worlds Than These, is the long-awaited third Talisman book which teases direct ties to his Dark Tower world. Holly Forever will be a new installment of his crime series, offering a different kind of genre fare.
This embarrassment of riches spawning multiple worlds seems ripe for spiritual adaptation and will likely inspire horror creators for decades to come.
Kate O’Flynn, Stephen Root and Matthew Rhys in “Widow’s Bay,” now streaming on Apple TV.
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