10 Films Whose Novelisations Took On A Life Of Their Own
7. Friday The 13th
Famously, Rob Zombie tarnished Halloween by over explanation, repurposing a tale of unadulterated evil into a low rent episode of City Confidential. The dangers of explaining away the mythic stance of our boogeyman tends to take their power away, particularly it isn't already in the source material.
Michael Avallone had no such issues when adapting Friday the 13th part 3(D), the first of the films to produce a novel.
Unlike the attempts to ascribe motive to Michael Myers (which had occurred as early as the first film's novelisation), Avallone made little effort to humanise his killer. Jason Voorhees, by that point, had already been turned into an unstoppable killing machine that dealt machete-vengeance on oversexed teens.
The novelisation, however, does use the film's alternate ending in which the heroine dies.
Of the films, six of 12 have been adapted into novels, some more than once, so it's key to know who wrote what. By the Nineties, the slasher genre was faltering in favour of more youth-oriented fare, and even Jason had devolved into a series of YA fiction.
The young adult series, much like the last episode of the anthology series that bore its name, focused on Jason's alleged supernatural mask and different people being possessed by it.
Jason X sparked it's own series of sci-fi, and yet another series features Jason resurrected by a cult.
Interestingly, a lot of these ideas were in the running for Freddy Vs. Jason in it's decades-spanning history.