13 Things You Didn't Know About Friday The 13th

Few of the key players involved made this movie for artistic purposes. Cunningham and Miller, in particular, just wanted to keep the lights on at home.

Cunningham was sure that Manny’s Orphans, his 1978 soccer movie for kids (an attempt to cash in on the success of The Bad News Bears), would be his big breakthrough, and was working on getting it developed for television.

Victor Miller, on the other hand, was only tapped to write the movie because he’d worked with Cunningham on Manny’s Orphans, and was convinced that he’d make his big break on a comedy. He spent most of his subsequent career writing for daytime soap operas like One Life To Live and All My Children, winning several daytime Emmy awards.

Uninterested in horror as a genre, Miller openly admits that he hasn’t seen any of the Friday The 13th sequels because he hates the idea of Jason Voorhees still being alive, let alone being the killer. Despite this, he won a legal challenge against Cunningham this year to be recognised as the owner of the copyright to the original script, making him the gatekeeper for any future Friday The 13th projects.

It’s dispiriting. Neither man is a rousing ambassador for the horror genre, or for Jason Voorhees as a horror icon, yet forty years on they’re still chasing their big moment in the sun, desperate for another cash-in.