It’s been more than a decade since Jason Voorhees last graced the silver screen. The ongoing litigation between series creator Sean S. Cunningham’s Horror Inc. and Friday the 13th (1980) screenwriter Victor Miller has put an end to NECA’s Friday toy line, kept Gun Media’s popular online game from receiving substantive content updates, and prevented any sort of new film project from getting off the ground.
When I spoke to writer-director Tom McLoughlin in October of last year, however, he told me he wasn’t letting Horror Inc. v. Miller stop him from writing a spec script for his own vision of the franchise’s next inevitable entry. Jason Never Dies may or may not see the light of day, but the man behind Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986) says he’s satisfied with his finished draft. I called up McLoughlin to chat about the screenplay, and he shared the first exclusive details about its ambitious but self-contained story.
Bloody Disgusting: When we talked in late October, it sounded like you were in the middle of the writing process. Now you’ve got a finished draft of the script, right?
Tom McLoughlin: I started it probably about a year, year and a half ago. And that’s when I finally had some ideas that I thought could make it unique, and not like any other Friday. But I’d been toying with the whole notion of doing another one for years.
When we finished [Jason Lives], Frank Mancuso at Paramount asked me, you know, “Would you want to do the next one?” And I said, “I don’t know what I would do yet. I tried to do something unique with Jason Lives, and I certainly would want to do that on a follow-up.” So then that was when he made the offer about, “Well, would you do Freddy vs. Jason?” And I said, “Before we even start talking about that, I don’t know how you’re gonna get Freddy if he’s at New Line.” He said, “Well, we’re working on that.” And of course they got the answer very fast: No, they didn’t want to surrender Freddy to Paramount, and Paramount didn’t want to surrender Jason to New Line. So that sort of ended that discussion.
Then he said, “Do you have any other ideas?” So I said, “You guys own Cheech and Chong — what about Cheech and Chong Meet Jason? Like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” And he laughs and goes, “I don’t know. It could be pretty funny if they were camp counselors or even just out camping, and you put the two things together.” Then he came back and said, “You know, the Friday people are probably not gonna like all the laughs with the Cheech and Chong world, and the Cheech and Chong people might not like these over-the-stop kills and stuff with Jason. So I don’t think we’re gonna go with that.” And I said, “Well, I’ll keep thinking about it.” What resulted after that was Friday the 13th: The Series, and I ended up getting involved with that as one of the story editors, and then writing and directing some of the episodes.
And every year, it’s gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, and I’m just shocked. It seems like it’s really at a peak right now, with the popularity of Jason. And maybe some of it is what I call the “James Dean Sydrome” — now that he’s gone, you want him all the more. But regardless, it’s such a huge, huge thing for people to want Friday so badly that fans are creating their own films, doing fan funding, and making things happen. And I have to say I’m very proud of these guys for doing it. It seems a little dangerous; if the lawsuit that’s going on settles and any of these guys are making any kind of money, I’d think they would at least get a cease-and-desist order.
BD: When you were working on the game, did that affect your thinking in terms of maybe coming back to these characters in a movie? Did one influence the other?
TM: No, not really. The game thing surprised me when that came in because, basically, it was an offer to write what I looked at as a radio-play version of Pamela Voorhees and the cops all talking on the night that Jason had disappeared into the lake. And while they’re talking, the cops are out searching the lake trying to find him, and Mrs. Voorhees begins to reveal all of her upset with the camp. It also comes up, in those tapes, that Elias Voorhees is her husband, but not Jason’s father. That she was actually raped during the marriage by this strange individual she gives a very infamous description about, and basically she’s saying, “If I never saw him again, I would be happy.” And so I thought maybe I wanted to do something again with the mythology. Who is this guy?
I think I started doing a few more conventions, and I kept being asked the same question: “Would you do another one?” And then I started thinking: If I was to go back into this world, what would it be? So, first off, I wanted to keep it grounded again, like I did in my other one — we’re at the camp, and something occurs that takes us through it. I loved the idea of Jason Never Dies as a title. And kind of playing off that a bit, in terms of what causes him to come back again. Who are the people that he’s involved with this time around? And how many of them fight back? How many of them are just victimized?
But one thing I’m doing that hasn’t been done before is I’m putting Jason in the snow. So, from the beginning of the movie to the end, it’ll all be in winter. And the camp is going to be a little different than what people will expect. As for the cast — because a lot of people have been asking me if it’s gonna be Tommy Jarvis coming back — Thom Matthews, who’s obviously Tommy in [Jason Lives], has been doing so many of these fan films that I don’t know if I can do something really fresh with him.
So I basically kind of abandoned the idea of bringing him and Megan back, and went for this idea that the people involved in this one are going to be complete innocents. There’s not going to be like I had in the other one, where they were making Jason jokes and all that kind of thing. They have no idea who this is, so it goes back to that: “Oh, my God, is this a monster? Is this an alien? What the hell is this that’s causing these murders?”
One other thing I’ll give away is that the entire cast is female, with the exception of Jason. And then there’s three or four other things that have not been done before, which I’ll hold back on so there can be some surprises.
But it’s been talked about for years — doing a film set in winter — because obviously blood looks real good on white snow. And I wanted to make sure that the kills are unique to that, in terms of where Jason is and what he gets ahold of, and how bodies are left. I tried to be as inventive as I could and still keep that dark sense of humor that I had in the [1986 film]. Maybe even a little darker in this particular version. It’ll have all the things that the fans have come to know and love, but with some twists within that.
BD: You said earlier that this script’s been in the works, in some ways, for 33 years. Because you’ve been sort of living with this guy. How has your understanding of Jason changed over the course of that time?
TM: What I tried to do on Jason Lives was to give him an actual, very clear agenda. Tommy brings him back from the dead, but in my mind, he was totally happy being down there at peace because of the tortured life that he had had, and how much anger and rage is coursing through his body. “Rest in peace” was a good thing. Tommy brings him back, and brings him back basically unkillable, and suddenly the whole mythology’s completely changed.
I’ve given him an agenda on this particular one that hasn’t quite been used before. Rather than just having him show up, kill, go someplace else, kill — there’s a little more of a story aspect to this. That’s the main thing that I thought, since I’d done it in Jason Lives, I wanted to find: another thing that creates the conflict in the story. And then have the story within that story through the characters, and what’s really going on, so that when you get to the end there’s a real sense of a showdown. Which I think is always the case, whether it’s the final girl or it’s Tommy, even though Megan was the one that ultimately chopped Jason up and kept him down there. She was still the final girl, but Tommy was the one driving the story.
BD: When you sat down to get the story on the page, did the words come easily?
TM: Remarkably, it came pretty easy. I guess ’cause I haven’t left the genre, in terms of going to see the movies and being part of the Masters of Horror group, where we all get together and talk about all things horror. And my girlfriend, Laura, is a complete eighties junkie — the music, the horror films. We’ve got Shudder on pretty much twenty-four seven in our house. It’s pretty amazing. I’m inundated with so much of it that when I started writing, it actually came pretty easily.
And then, as most writers know, it’s not about the writing; it’s about the rewriting and going back in and asking, “Can I make this happen sooner? Can I move this scene here? Can I come up with a sharper line?” That’s what took more time. I didn’t want to release this thing until I felt that the lawsuit was about to resolve itself, because in the middle of all that Victor Miller did win — he got the rights to do Friday the 13th — but there was still a pending appeal. The clock was ticking, and it looked like Sean Cunningham’s side wasn’t gonna act on that.
Literally just as I got the script to my lawyer and said, “Let’s see about starting to send this out,” the appeal came through. My lawyer basically said, “No, there’s no point putting it out there; Warner Bros. and New Line don’t even want to read anything right now.” So I just have to kind of wait it out.
BD: What is it about Camp Crystal Lake? You’ve got this little boy who drowned and then came back to life sort of mysteriously. Do you think he draws his power from that water, or do you have a different theory?
TM: I guess my theory is that that whole piece of property Camp Crystal Lake was built on has something about it — I don’t know what. It’s not quite the cliché Native American burial ground, but there might’ve been some sort of massacre that occurred there. Something occurred, there on that soil, of a dark nature. And so once it was built, and the kids were in there and stuff, nothing really happened until this sort of weird accident. Jason obviously either was drowned or got out, his body wasn’t found, and he grew up in the woods. All of that’s up to speculation because of the difference between part one and Part 2, going from this boy that was — could be a dream, could be real. It’s truly up to the viewer. And then he’s a man in Part 2.
So the rest of it is this kind of anger; it’s like those things you read sometimes where people are so driven that you could be hitting them with bullets or stabbing them or whatever, but the adrenaline’s so high, and they just keep coming. And that, to me, was sort of what kept him going all the way up till Part IV. There wasn’t anything of a supernatural nature, from my point of view. So when I got to [Part VI], that’s when I kind of made the shift. My sole marching order from Paramount was, “Just bring him back from the dead. Figure it out.”
And I went back to the Frankenstein model, because I’m a huge fan of the Universal horror movies, and said: “All right. That’s gonna resurrect him; bullets don’t really phase him; the impact might knock him on his ass, but there’s really no stopping him.” So now it gets into a much more supernatural thing, where you could animate a body and it could keep going and pursuing a particular agenda. And in each story, he should have another target that he’s going after. Or trying to just survive. Sometimes it’s that simple.
BD: Would Jason Never Dies tell us more about the Voorhees family?
TM: No. No. It’s not that I don’t have thoughts and ideas about that, because obviously what I did with the Pamela Voorhees tapes [in Friday the 13th: The Game] gave some different insights into it. But from keeping an eye on all the different fan films that are coming out, they’re working very hard to put more elements like that together. Trying to see what they can do within the camp, with either old-school Jason or the Jason that I created. One way or the other, they’re kind of mining that territory, and I thought I needed to come up with something really fresh. And I don’t want to send him to outer space; I don’t want to send him back to hell; I don’t want to put him in Cleveland. I wanted to keep him basically on the same turf and see what else I can do to twist the story and give the fans something different.
BD: We’re sort of a long ways from ’86. What’s Jason Voorhees’s place in 2019?
TM: When we were all making these movies in the eighties, we just thought, “We’re never gonna have the kind of monsters that Universal had, with Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Mummy. We’re just doing these things, and they’re gonna be forgotten three weeks after they’d been released.” Nobody counted on the life that was gonna carry on with VHS and Beta and laserdiscs and DVDs and Blu-ray. So now there’s a whole generation that is embracing these eighties monsters, and these are their monsters. I saw a baby bib the other day with Jason’s mask on it. I don’t know if we would’ve put Frankenstein on things that were for infants, but all of us young boys loved it through the fifties and sixties.
The monsters were the things that we related to and thought were so cool. They kind of empowered us, especially if you felt like you were a geek, as most of us did. I think, on a certain level, they represent the same kind of thing to this generation. There’s a cool factor; there’s the unstoppable factor; there’s a place to kind of put your rage. And it’s not so much that you want to go out and kill people as much as you just want certain problems to get solved. I just saw Quentin Tarantino’s new movie the other night, and — have you seen it yet?
BD: Oh, yep. Phenomenal.
TM: But without giving away the ending to anybody, there’s obviously a lot of wish fulfillment coming out of there, and that animal really helped. It really gave us that sense of: “All right!” And I think somehow Jason, Freddy, Pennywise — they’re the next generation’s lovable monsters. Because there’s a lot of people that just absolutely love Jason: boys, girls, kids, older people, baby boomers. Everybody seems to have an opinion about them, and either it’s very dark or it’s really fun. And those of us who consider it fun love to find others who feel the same way, and there’s a hell of a lot more of them now than there ever was before.
BD: Let’s say you get a call from Sean Cunningham. How do you think he’ll react to this story you’re hoping to tell with Jason Never Dies?
TM: I know Sean, and he’s always been complimentary about Jason Lives, but I don’t know, at this point, where his head’s at with all of this. An easy solution is to say everybody just wants more money, and I don’t know if that’s really true. There may be some sort of ego thing between him and Victor [Miller]. Obviously, if he comes up with the paperwork that shows Victor was basically a gun for hire, it throws the whole case into a different situation. But as long as it’s still at this point where [Cunningham] came up with the Friday the 13th idea, and Victor came in and wrote the script — and they kind of tweaked it, I guess, together — I don’t know how he thinks of the franchise in general. Does he want to see it become something different? Exactly the same? If Victor Miller gets the rights, is he going to go back and just make the first one again? I don’t know.
And [Jason Never Dies is] certainly new; you’d have to buy into the franchise and all that to fully enjoy it, but if you’d never seen one before, it still works on its own. There’s a little more mystery to it, and some of the explanations that come out in the last act basically put everything together. So it’s hard to tell, with Sean or Victor, what their feelings would be about what I want to do.
Alex Kane is a journalist based in west-central Illinois. He has written for Fangoria, Polygon, the website of Rolling Stone, StarWars.com, Variety, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter at @alexjkane.
