When I first made The Horror Doctor, I was fascinated with the idea of Strains and Mutations. By no means I have been particularly exhaustive when exploring what could have been in the horror genre – specifically the cinematic, which is where my Blog tends to go – but I feel that there is a somewhat healthy medium between looking at what happened, and speculating on what could have been in a genre as mutable as horror.
Halloween has come and gone, both the holiday and the series. And yes, I know that the day and franchise themselves will return – like all undead creatures or slasher killers tend to do. But consider the following.
Most horror fans probably know that John Carpenter and Debra Hill wanted to expand the Halloween series beyond The Shape – beyond Michael Myers. In 1982, Halloween III: The Season of the Witch came out. Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis were both presumably dead, destroyed in a hospital fire a year before, leaving Laurie Strode to recover from her trauma, and the terror of Silver Shamrock and its Halloween products for children and adults alike would make humanity fear Samhain again. But audiences wanted their clear-cut avatar of darkness. They wanted Michael back.
But just as Halloween returns, so does Friday the 13th. Again, most fanatics know that Sean Cunningham wanted to emulate the story beats of Halloween, and after the story of The Shape was seemingly over, he and writer Victor Miller introduced the world to the idea of Jason Voorhees in 1980. Interestingly enough, both Halloween and Friday the 13th came as their third films in 1982, but what is fascinating is that after the first Friday the 13th, the film series gained another producer in the person of Frank Mancuso Jr.
And it seems as though the creators of the second Friday the 13th film, director Steven Miner and writer Ron Kurz, also wanted to make the film series an anthology and changed their minds, perhaps the decision also had something to do with Frank Mancuso Jr. Mancuso Jr. not only produced Parts Two and Three of Friday the 13th, but he also helped create another series. Originally called The 13th Hour, this television series made by Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams was renamed Friday the 13th because Mancuso Jr. believed it would attract more viewers. And while Mancuso Jr. said that it was still a play on the idea of a dark and unlucky day, it can’t be denied that the title itself would bring in fans of a certain other franchise of the same name. But Friday the 13th: The Series is a different beast from its film namesake. Jason Voorhees never appears, or is even referenced in the show, unlike Michael Myers who actually exists as a fictional character in his own first Halloween film shown in Season of the Witch.
Friday the 13th: The Series is a television series released in 1987, after Halloween III: Season of the Witch and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, where two adolescents named Micki Foster and Ryan Dallion inherit an antique store filled with cursed artifacts given to their late, and aptly named, Uncle Lewis Vendredi by the Devil. This framework allows them to keep having some kind of new evil to combat every episode while also granting the opportunity to have antagonists, and allies that recur whenever the plot needs them. The series itself ran until 1990, and while it isn’t perfect – sometimes the various plot points grow contrived, awkward, and flat-out ridiculous – Friday the 13th: The Series functions as something of an assortment of different candies all wrapped up in the same grab-bag. I especially love the fact that the series not only starts off during Halloween, much like its how its spiritual namesake was inspired from another Halloween, the cousins even have the assistance of a former stage magician and occultist – a more benevolent Uncle Jack Marshak to help them deal with the cursed artifacts that they need to collect and from which to protect the lives of others.
Fittingly enough, at least from my perspective, what Halloween failed to do in film as an anthological series, Friday the 13th almost succeeded in accomplishing as a television serial. Perhaps if Laurie Strode had continued in other films unrelated to Michael Myers, or if The Shape had never truly been vanquished from the first film and recurred as a background character in others, or as a revenant that could potentially return in other settings even with Haddonfield as a determinator, both John Carpenter and Debra Hill might have almost achieved what they originally sought. It might also be possible that had Miner, Kurz, or even Mancuso Jr. kept Crystal Lake as a location, they could have built a larger world and referenced it in relation to another bit of folklore they could have built upon. I mean, look at Jason Voorhees himself and his transformation from a waterlogged deformed child, to an imitation of the Moonlight Killer, to the iconic hockey masked fiend we all know and fear.
Horror is a mythology and a process. Monstrosities, and their stories, do not come up ready made and whole. They are a messy process. And who knows if it might have been possible to lean into that development, into that dark and bloody journey of figuring out what something horrible is, and how it can be faced, and encourage audiences to want to follow along. Imagine it as another dark road not traveled. It’s awesome where we have already been, but these creative nightmares are always something fun on which to speculate.
The Horror Doctor 