At this week’s Television Critics Association press tour in Beverly Hills, in which major US television and cable networks present their slate of upcoming programs, The CW revealed that it was developing Friday the 13th as a one-hour drama.
The series is set to feature a more grounded reimagining of the central character Jason Voorhees, who drowned as a boy at Camp Crystal Lake and supposedly reemerges decades later as a mass murderer. The plot will focus on a detective’s ongoing search for his missing brother, which is tied to Jason, “a long-thought-dead serial killer who has now returned to wreak havoc in the new Crystal Lake.”
FRANCHISE CRAZY
Since the franchise was launched in 1980, there have been 12 slasher movies — including the 2009 reboot directed by Marcus Nispel — novels, comic books, and tie-in merchandise. Jason’s hockey mask has become one of the most recognizable images in popular culture, and a new Friday the 13th film is planned for release in May 2016.
While there has already been a small screen version of Friday the 13th in the past, the 1987 TV show was about a quest to reclaim cursed antiques from their unwitting owners and wasn’t linked to any of the franchise’s characters. The CW thriller, meanwhile, will be based on director Sean Cunningham’s original movie and its numerous sequels. The CW is going a little franchise crazy, as it, too, has revealed potential adaptations of Archie Comics’s Riverdale, Little Women, and The Notebook.
TODAY’S REALITY
If the 1980’s Friday the 13th was created to cash in on the success of 1978’s Halloween, directed by John Carpenter, MTV’s Scream is an update of the Scream film franchise of the late 90s, which in turn injected the traditional slasher genre — popularized by Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street — with humor and self-awareness. 2015’s weekly series reflects today’s reality: A masked killer stalks a group of teenagers after a certain video becomes viral and leads to problems that open up the troubled past of the town of Lakewood. The trendy references to Instagram, cyberbullying, and bi-curiousity, as well as other current teen shows embed it in the present.
Though at times it feels as if the show has been stripped of all the snark that made the 1996 version such a hit, replacing that with extreme graphic violence, there are signs of similar meta-commentary in Wes Craven’s new production. In one episode, for instance, a character says, “You can’t do a slasher movie as a TV series.” Notwithstanding the attractive yet generic cast — which could be a statement about today’s generation as well — there’s enough blood and mystery to make it feel like a horror movie in weekly series form.
HIGH BODY COUNTS
Scheduled to premiere on Fox on September 22, the first season of Scream Queens will revolve around a series of murders involving the Kappa Kappa Tau sorority. “It’s Mean Girls meets Friday the 13th. I think it’s laugh-out-loud funny, it’s edge-of-your-seat scary and everyone is wearing Chanel. What other reasons do you need [to watch]?” said lead actress Emma Roberts to Entertainment Weekly. Depending on how much you loathe Glee or American Horror Story, however, it helps to know that Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk are also behind Scream Queens. You have been forewarned.
According to Rogerebert.com, “TV developers have learned that audiences like the thrill of not knowing who in the supporting cast will be around for the next episode. And that’s a model that’s likely to increase as other networks try to find similar, social media-shattering success in shows with high body counts and gore levels that would have shocked audiences just a few years ago.”
With Scream—which mixes the small-town teen melodrama of Gilmore Girls and One Tree Hill with the promise of Pretty Little Liars circa 2010 — renewed for a second season, can we count on a wave of hopefuls to imitate its success?