Retrofitting That Hockey Mask

WHEN the filmmakers behind the new “Friday the 13th” began plotting their resurrection of the gore-besotted horror franchise, they understood they were riding the knife edge of a series (and genre) with its own sets of rules. Campers die. People who have sex die. No matter how fast they move, the victims can never get away. And Jason Voorhees, the hockey-mask-wearing killer, never runs. He walks. But the producers knew they could not go wrong with sliding a topless waterskiing scene between the episodes of carnage and mayhem. Because in movies like “Friday the 13th” less is never more, particularly when it comes to showcasing comely teenagers (a k a the victims).
While very little about “Friday the 13th” can be called delicate, there’s a fine line between reinventing such an institution and alienating the people who make up its meat and potatoes. The genre demands those good-looking, feckless young men and beautiful, courageous women; the geysers of blood erupting from the imperiled campers; and Jason in a hockey mask, a machete in hand, slaughtering human livestock until someone drowns him, or feeds him into a wood chipper.
The level of devotion lavished on the films by their hard-core fans means a level of scrutiny that was once the exclusive purview of Kremlinologists and Talmudic scholars. This, despite a mythology-chronology that resists mental organization.
“These films have a ridiculously convoluted history,” said Devin Faraci, of the horror site Chud.com. Jason barely appears in Part 1. “He shows up in Part 2, gets killed in Part 4,” he said. “There’s an impostor in a Jason mask in Part 5. Jason comes back as a zombie in Part 6. Toxic sludge turns him back into a child at the end of Part 8. He gets blown up in the opening minutes of Part 9 and then becomes a body-hopping force of evil that gets sucked into hell. In Part 10 the earth is destroyed, Jason becomes a cyborg and lands on an alien planet. Where could the series possibly go at that point? A reboot is the only sane answer.”
A reboot is exactly what the new “Friday the 13th” is being called by the people behind the film, who have found a nicely profitable niche in taking classics of the genre and overhauling them. With “Friday the 13th” — opening, naturally, this Friday — the filmmakers have brought the franchise back to earth, literally, dropping Jason and some unsuspecting bait in the middle of Camp Crystal Lake. (“Why do people keep going there?” one viewer wondered aloud during a recent screening.) Jason is now a kind of hunter-survivor, traumatized by the death of his mother at the hands of a camp counselor and self-medicating on death. The rest of the characters? The less said the better, because the film takes great pains to derail expectations about who dies and in what order. The hope among the filmmakers is to emulate their successful 2003 “reimagining” of the seminal “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
“When we make one of these films, we go in hoping we can elevate it, not just from a production standpoint but with the actors,” said the producer Brad Fuller. In 2001 Mr. Fuller and his partner Andrew Form founded Platinum Dunes Productions with the director Michael Bay (“Pearl Harbor”). The first Platinum production, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” took in more than $80 million at the domestic box office. It was followed by the reimagined “Amityville Horror” of 2005 ($65 million); the 2006 prequel “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” (nearly $40 million), and, in 2007, an adaptation of the 1986 thriller “The Hitcher” (the lone disappointment, at $16 million).
While they did produce the current original thriller “The Unborn,” Mr. Form and Mr. Fuller, strategically speaking, are taking an approach as obvious and foolproof as producing can probably get. Rather than risk resources on new story concepts and characters, they exploit the name recognition of an established franchise, and its existing fan base while striving to expand them both. And the movies are inexpensive; none have cost more than $20 million to produce. “There’s a tremendous benefit to staying in the same genre and producing movies for the same amount of money over and over,” said Mr. Fuller, “because you really learn who your key players are and how best to work with them.”

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The film’s writers, Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, said that like many people on the film, they were horror-film devotees long before entering the industry. “We think we know why they’re successful and why they stick around,” he said. “We wanted it to feel fun, maybe a little nostalgic.” Strangely, despite his murderous ways, Jason is a sympathetic character, Mr. Shannon said: “He’s a victim of neglect.” Mr. Swift added that “there’s something about an outsider in a mask who is now going to punish others that works.”
Mr. Faraci of Chud.com said he believes that fans are ready for a new “Friday the 13th.” “I think the slasher genre is back in a big way, largely as a reaction to the last few years’ spate of dreary, serious or meanspirited horror films. People like slasher films, because they tend to be lighter, more fun and more akin to the experience of a funhouse. There are scares, but they’re not the heavy kind that give you nightmares. And there’s blood, but it’s not presented in the anatomically excruciating detail of the ‘torture porn’ genre.”
“Torture porn,” as exemplified by the “Saw” and “Hostel” series, is decidedly not what the makers of “Friday the 13th” were trying to emulate.
But change, while good, can be risky. “Anytime you deviate from the expectation of a genre and a specific franchise, you risk alienating your core,” said Toby Emmerich, the president and chief executive of New Line Cinema, the studio behind the new “Friday the 13th.” “You don’t want to go too far.” Still, he added, “you want them at the same time to say, “Hey, that’s cool.’ ”
How cool they find the new movie will determine whether the new strain of “Friday” starts begetting offspring with roman numerals. And more. “We’re going to try to remake ‘Nightmare on Elm Street,’ ” Mr. Emmerich said.


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