News recently broke that Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle, creators of The Pretender, will be penning CW’s new Friday the 13th TV series. Jenna Busch at Legion Of Leia scored an interview with Mitchell and he gave plenty of insight on the direction of the new show, providing her with this synopsis:
Reimagined as a sophisticated, horror/crime thriller, Friday The 13th is about the ongoing quest of a detective’s search for his missing brother that is somehow tied to Jason Voorhees, a long thought dead serial killer who has now returned to wreak havoc in the new Crystal Lake. The masked Jason is being reimagined with a stronger feel of grounded reality.
Mitchell then provides more details about Crystal Lake and how it’s different from the Friday the 13th film universe.
Well, here’s what interesting.we wanted to kind of reinvent it a little bit. Crystal Lake is not just Crystal Lake anymore. Just this place out in the woods. It’s this thriving town, sort of like Silicon Valley. There are these rich people, a lot of young rich people with a lot of money and a lot of time, neither one well spent, and there’s the old people who grew up in this town. It’s like the town from Jaws. It’s like Amityville 20 years later, and someone says, ‘I I think the shark is back.’ Everyone is like, ‘Oh, shit. We can’t have the shark back!’we finally grown up as a town and we have all this mythology, but it ruined our city.’
They’re taking the approach that the Friday the 13th films exist in their world. People came to Crystal Lake after the murders and then made films about them. Their show is the “real” story of Jason Vorhees, and older people in the town know who the real Jason is, while the younger people only know what they’ve seen in the movies. He goes on to describe it as a “cross between the first season of True Detective and Twin Peaks on acid.”
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. Part of the fun of the show is exploring, is this Jason or is this a copycat? Is it possible that Jason has been around all these years? Is Jason a monster? Is he real? Is he a serial killer? And really exploring who and what Jason is, is part of the whole thrill of the show.
Pitching anything as True Detective meets Twin Peaks is a sure fire way to get fans interested, and it’s easy to throw comparisons around when the pilot hasn’t even started production yet. However, it is comforting to know they’re at least aspiring for greatness, and have an angle that may end up working well for a Friday the 13th series. Let’s just hope the CW isn’t scared to keep up with NBC’s Hannibal in the gore-on-tv department.
Be sure to check out the full interview at Legion of Leia as it’s the most information we’ve learned yet about the new series.
