The Friday the 13th gifts just keep on coming in!
Here’s one to unwrap immediately…
Jason X screenwriter Todd Farmer, who also starred in the 10th Friday the 13th, shared with his blog readers his original treatment for the sequel that took Jason Voorhees to space!
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. How about this gem:
The original Jason X outline.
Here’s an interesting find from March 15th 1999.
If memory serves, the day before, we talked dozens of ideas. One of my favorites was Jimmy’s suggestion we set Crystal Lake in winter covered in snow. But there was concern that doing anything modern at Crystal Lake would screw up whatever the FVSJ team was planning over at New Line. I don’t recall which of the many teams that worked on FVSJ was working the script at the time. Cy and Ethan had left. I think it was the King of the Hill guys. Maybe. This was after SCREAM which had derailed FVSJ making everyone demand self-aware characters. If I recall, the King of the Hill guys had the ol’ “It was all a dream” 3rd act which led to the next team.
Anyhoo. We tossed out ideas for Jason takes Los Angeles. Jason takes the Middle-East. And I eventually pitched Jason Bladerunner, where Jason was found cryogenically frozen 500 years in the future. Though everyone involved loved the 500 years later part, the idea of creating “Future World” caused budget fears so I pitched the space truckers from Alien finding Jason rather than an Alien. Other horror icons “in space” were mentioned but I kept saying, “Right but Alien/Aliens”. The space truckers quickly became a class trip into space to make the cast younger. And I went home and started writing.
You can read the original outline here and then explode. Personally, I enjoy Jason X, and feel like a huge problem with the movie is the tone that resonates from the cheesy score. I would love to see Jason X restored just to see how effective it could have been. Either way, it’s still fun!
