13 Things You Didn't Know About Friday 13th: The Final Chapter
It ain't over till it's over... and it ain't over.
By 1984, the slasher bubble was beginning to show signs of bursting. The Friday The 13th series had taken 1983 off, and in that year only two examples of the genre - the forgettable House On Sorority Row and belated sequel Psycho 2 - had made the list of top 100 grossing movies in the US.
Producer Frank Mancuso Jr was also feeling burned out on slasher movies. He'd cut his teeth on Friday The 13th right after college, but was itching to prove he could do more, no doubt spurred by the whispering that he'd only got the job because his father was a top Paramount executive.
Taking this into consideration, it was decided that they'd make one more Friday The 13th movie, and sell it on the basis that this really would be the last one: it would be the movie that saw a final end to Jason Voorhees.
Of course, that had been the original idea with Part 3 as well: that final shot of Jason, axe to the forehead, lying in the barn in daylight had certainly seemed to put the kibosh on him coming back.
But you can never put a good monster down...
13. The Director Scammed Paramount From The Word Go
Joseph Zito, one of the most talented directors ever to work on a Friday The 13th movie, was hired to both write and direct the project based on his 1981 slasher The Prowler - but wasn't keen on actually hammering together the screenplay.
He sneakily used the extra cash for the double workload to hire writer Barney Cohen to write the screenplay for him. He went went so far as to take phone conferences on plot with producer Phil Scuderi and then parrot back the results to Cohen, who would turn them into script pages to be delivered to Scuderi, who would then discuss them in the next phone conference with Zito.
It became a nightmare sorting things out with the Writers Guild Of America, of course: one of their pet peeves is a lack of proper credit for writers that provide work on a project, and Cohen was doing so in secret.
Funnily enough, the script for the very first Friday The 13th movie had a name to refer to the killer for convenience' sake, in order to avoid splashing the true name of the killer all over the place and risk spoiling the twist. That name was... the Prowler.