7 Friday The 13th Sequels That Almost Happened
5. David Bruckner's Retro Friday The 13th
The Friday the 13th series clearly has a death curse. Every attempt at a new instalment since 2009 has ended up at the bottom of Crystal Lake, and it was the same story when David Bruckner was handed the keys to the camp.
The Southbound co-director had different plans for Jason - a retro sequel that took the slasher action back to the '80s and offset it against a coming-of-age drama.
Retro is very much in these days - just look at how well received the It remake has been - so taking Friday the 13th back to its heyday could well have been a stroke of genius, though sadly the world will never know for sure.
The Forest writer Nick Antosca was working on a screenplay for the nostalgic horror when Paramount Pictures pulled the plug, and he revealed a few details about the project in an interview with Necronomicast last year...
That was the plan, and we had a great time. I went back and watched the Paramount ones, multiple times, because that was the spirit we wanted – starting with the ’80s Paramount logo and all that. [It was] an incredibly fun and rewarding creative experience. A while later I heard they decided not to do it in the ’80s.
An '80s-set Friday the 13th could potentially have recaptured the cheesy slasher magic of the early instalments and marked a welcome change of pace from the endless stream of samey remakes and reboots horror is awash with these days
Antosca and Bruckner sound like he had a firm grasp of the what made the series work, too, and their plans to kick off with the retro Paramount logo would have been a nice tough, but sadly there are no signs of this project resurfacing in any form.