13 Things You Didn't Know About Friday 13th: The Final Chapter

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.