After 16 years of sleep, Friday 13 comes from the bottom of Crystal Lake with a new Jason mask marking the 45th anniversary of the emblematic horror series
In large part because of a legal dispute of several decades between Friday 13 screenwriter Victor Miller and director Sean Cunningham, we have not seen a new film on Friday 13 since the criminally underestimated restart of 2009. To worsen things, the 2017 multiplayer horror game on Friday 13: The game was caught up in the trial and was closed without ceremony at the end of 2024.
Fortunately, the legal battle has ended, and even if I will not bother you with too much detail, essentially, Miller has the rights on the original scenario while Cunningham holds the rights on the emblematic character of Jason Voorhees as we know today, because only his form of child was seen in the Friday 13 of 1980.
As the gods of horror had it, this character is now the sinister face of the Jason universe, which has been entirely unveiled in a new video showing Harry Manfredini music, which composed most of the films of Friday 13 and Friday 13: the game.
To watch
This is also the first new official cinematographic mask Jason revealed since 2009, and the “Machete Metal” logo is also new. I will say that I am not particularly impressed by one or the other of these things, and I am uncomfortable to transform a series which started as a cheap and cheap Halloween scam in a cinematographic universe of Marvel style, but my excitement for the new Jason is properly involved.
So what is the Jason universe? Well, according to the production company Horror Inc., it is “a new era of the Friday 13 franchise”. At the moment, everything we know about this new era is the Friday 13th television series Prequel directed towards Peacock, which has just participated in production, but the word “universe” definitively suggests a future full of films, television broadcasts linked to Jason, and potentially games and comics.
Regarding the series of films, there was once a continuation of the development in development, but it was canceled due to the outcome, the legal drama. It should also be noted that Cunningham himself teased a “13th” film in 2022, but we haven’t heard of him since.
It seems inevitable that we will get a new film at some point now that the rights problems have been solved and, with 12 Jason films existing today, it would seem squarely cruel for the rights to deprive us of a 13th Friday 13. Imagine the pleasure they would have on the title.
You will not find Jason in our list of the best horror films, but it occupies a very special place in my heart.
