Dear Lebron James: Don’t Reboot ‘Friday The 13th,’ Make a Prequel

It’s been a good month for the giants of classic slasher movies. The one that started the so-called Golden Age of slasher films, Halloween, just debuted a reboot to massive box-office numbers ($77 million!). And now comes the news that LeBron James’ production company, SpringHill Entertainment, is in talks with Vertigo Entertainment to reboot the Friday the 13th series.

For those needing a quick Friday the 13th primer: Jason was a young, neglected summer-camp kid who drowned in the lake while the camp-counselor teens busy necking or whatever, so first his mom went and killed a bunch of teens as revenge, and then Jason returned from the lake and went from skinny overlooked boy to hulking beast of a man who slow-stalked his prey to the ends of the Earth …and literally beyond. Jason Voorhees is the rare entity who has been to space and to hell, and in between he’s also fought Freddy Kreuger and rode a slow boat into Manhattan. Last anyone saw Jason was in the Michael Bay/Platinum Dunes-produced Friday the 13th reboot, which starred the likes of Jared Padalecki, Danielle Panabaker, and legendary pop star Willa Ford.

When that Platinum Dunes production of Friday the 13th happened, we were in the middle of a run of straightforward, blunt-instrument reboots, with Rob Zombie’s Halloween in 2007 and the Rooney Mara-starring A Nightmare on Elm Street in 2010. Now there’s talk of rebooting Friday the 13th again, in 2018, when the dominant horror narrative as of this past weekend is “character-focused reboot that’s respectful of the series’ origins.” David Gordon Green’s Halloween set itself apart by doubling down not on the supernatural invincibility of Michael Myers, as so many sequels did before, but on its treasured Final Girl, Laurie Strode. Jamie Lee Curtis is taking some deserved victory laps this week because she really was the center of the new Halloween and its marketing campaign.

Where that gets interesting when talking about a proposed Friday the 13th reboot is that of all the enduring horror franchises, Friday the 13th is probably the one that least requires fidelity to its characters or origin. A Nightmare on Elm Street had a central character in Freddy Kreuger who had to be honored. The roots of the Leatherface legend were always shown respect in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. Hell, even the Child’s Play movies eventually created a deep narrative throughline for Chucky and his eventual family. Friday the 13th was always the emptiest of empty calories in the slasher world, sending Jason far and wide to stalk another group of hapless teens gleefully served up to him on a platter. It’s not that there’s no way to do the David Gordon Green version of Friday the 13th; there just isn’t much in the way of a need. (Which is not to in any way denigrate all the dedicated hard work that went into those movies. Anyone who’s seen Crystal Lake Memories knows that those were movies made with care.)

Here’s the thing, though: of all the slasher franchises, Friday the 13th might have the most untapped potential when it comes to a prequel/origin tale. As anybody who’s seen the original Friday the 13th (or the first Scream movie) can tell you, it wasn’t Jason doing the killing that first time around. It was Jason’s mother, Mrs. Pamela Voorhees, who was the killer. Rather than make the new Friday the 13th (it’d be the 13th film in the series, for what it’s worth) a standard reboot or sequel, make it the origin story of Pamela Voorhees. Show a nervous, protective mother sending her kid away to camp despite her instincts to keep him close. Show her wariness of the crass, hormonal teens who will be in charge of his well being as she leaves him behind. Make it real and excruciating when she learns of Jason’s death. Make her fury and vengeance the uncontrollable monster that emerges from inside her. Cast your new Mrs. Voorhees movie with your pick of under-served actresses: Catherine Keener; Ashley Judd; Juliette Lewis; Thandie Newton; a comebacking Renee Zellweger. The possibilities are endless and it would be GOOD.

Or else just have a crazed blogger purchase Jason’s bones at auction and then leave them in a bag on the observation deck of the Empire State building, where an especially powerful lightning strike will animate them once again, and only Lebron James can save us from the resurrected masked killer. One of those two ideas.

Where to stream Friday the 13th (1980)