The Unmade Sequel To 2009's Friday The 13th Opened With An Extended Winter Bloodbath
Just as the "Halloween" movies all take place in the fall, the "Friday the 13th" movies are summer films.
For the most part, all 12 extant "Friday" movies take place around Camp Crystal Lake, an overnight camp in the woods of New Jersey. Jason Voorhees, the campfire story goes, was left to drown in Crystal Lake as a boy when the counselors tasked with watching him were distracted by their libidos. He's now back to revenge-kill all horny teens. Once the summer is over, however, the campfire story ends.
However, Friday the 13th — that is, the famously unlucky calendar date — doesn't always fall in the summer. 2021 had a Friday the 13th in August, but the next one wouldn't arrive until May of 2022. 2023 was strange in that it had a Friday the 13th in both January and in October.
If Jason Voorhees prefers to attack camp counselors on the title date, then it stands to reason that he would be ready to kill any time of the year. Winter, spring, summer, or fall. All he has to do is maul.
In 2009, director Marcus Nispel made a better-than-decent remake/interquel to "Friday the 13th" that, if you squint a little bit, could be inserted in between "Friday the 13th Part 2" (1981) and "Friday the 13th Part III 3-D" (1982). The remake was written by Damien Shannon and Mark Swift, and it was a pretty massive hit, making $92 million on a $19 million budget. The "Friday" movies are trapped in a labyrinth of litigation, so no Jason films have been made since.
On Twitter, however — on Friday the 13th, natch — Shannon and Swift revealed that they wrote a sequel that would have featured at least one kill sequence set in the wintertime.
Friday the 13th: Camp Blood
Back in 2017, Shannon and Swift had already revealed that their sequel to Nispel's 2009 film was going to be called "Friday the 13th: Camp Blood," which bore the tantalizing title additive "The Death of Jason Voorhees." The pages revealed in 2017 featured a scene of characters playing ice hockey. Given that Jason Voorhees famously wears an ice hockey mask (specifically for the Detroit Red Wings), it's startling it took until now for the sport to appear on screen. That scene saw Jason (presumably to be played by Derek Mears, the actor who played Jason in the 2009 film) walking out across the surface of a frozen Crystal Lake to pursue him victims. There is also a moment when Jason thwacks his signature machete into a tree, only to be covered with falling snow from the branches above.
It seems, at least by Shannon's and Swift's vision, that Jason wasn't terribly affected by the cold.
The 2023 Tweets on Twitter/X revealed another summer camp-related kill. The screenwriters said that the opening sequence was to be set in the winter with the rest fast-forwarding to the following summer. They also shared pages of a murder that was to be set on a zipline. A character slid down a zipline cable, unable to slow down, as Jason waited at the bottom, a machete merely extended. He waited to skewer said character, and ultimately sliced her in half. "Her torso falls with a wet thud," the screenplay reads. Good ol' gross gory bliss.
The flashback
Shannon and Swift also revealed a previously unseen chapter in the life of Jason Voorhees: his childhood. The screenwriters conceived a scene wherein Jason's parents, Elias and Pamela Voorhees, have a difficult talk about what to do with their developmentally disadvantaged child. Elias, pained and drinking whiskey in front of a fireplace, reluctantly tells his son Jason that he's going to go live somewhere else. Pamela, feeling differently about the matter, staves Elias' skull in with a shovel. One might recall that Pamela Voorhees, as played by actor Betsy Palmer, was the only murderer in the original "Friday the 13th." Shannon and Swift evidently explained in "Camp Blood" that Pamela was a murderer long before that.
"Camp Blood" would also have been the first on-screen appearance of Elias Voorhees, a character that has been creeping around the edges of expanded "Friday" lore for decades. Evidently, there was to be a scene in a cemetery in "Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives" wherein Elias would pay a gravedigger to bury his son's body rather than cremate it. This scene would have covered a plot hole from "Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning" that stated that Jason was indeed cremated. No scenes with Elias were shot for "Jason Lives," although the scene was in the film's novelization written by Simon Hawke.
Elias was, from then on, the name of Jason's father in comics, video games, and other expanded "Friday" universe ephemera.
"Camp Blood" will likely never be made, not if Shannon and Swift were okay leaking pages of their script. Indeed, no "Friday" movies will be made until the legal mess surrounding the series can be resolved. In January of 2023, however, /Film reported that there was some progress. Time will bear out the rest.