The Friday the 13th franchise has been through a long stretch of bad luck. Legal battles kept Jason Voorhees trapped in development limbo for years.
Now that the rights mess has finally cleared and a new TV series and movie are moving forward, some interesting details have surfaced about the sequel that almost followed the 2009 reboot.
Back in the late 2009, Friday the 13th looked like the fresh start for the franchise. It stripped things back to brutal slasher basics and went on to become the highest-grossing entry in the series. A sequel seemed inevitable. Then everything fell apart. Before cameras could roll, the rights issues began, and Jason was shelved for more than a decade.
While promoting the upcoming Sam Raimi-produced thriller Send Help, writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift sat down with CB and finally opened up about the sequel they had already written.
The film even had a title: Camp Blood: The Death of Jason Voorhees. Longtime fans will recognize that name, and yes, it was meant to be just as provocative as it sounds.
One of the biggest swings the sequel planned to take was reopening Camp Crystal Lake, so it would be an actual functioning summer camp, something the franchise has technically never shown on screen. Even the original film never made it that far before the bodies hit the floor.
The idea most fans had already heard about was the winter setting, a long overdue shake-up for a series that went to space and Manhattan before ever touching snow. What hadn’t been revealed until now is that winter wouldn’t have dominated the entire movie. It was designed as a brutal opening sequence that set the tone before the story shifted gears.
Swift laid out the opening in vivid detail, and it’s easy to picture how gnarly it would’ve been:
“Winter has never been done in the Friday the 13th franchise, and we’ve always dreamed about it. We want to see visible breath coming through the holes in the hockey mask. We want to see red blood drips in pristine white snow.
“We want Jason to jab a long sharp icicle through a camp counselor’s eye. In the opening scene, Crystal Lake is frozen solid. Two naughty teens go out onto the frozen ice to play hockey. The puck slides… and stops right on top of what appears to be a dead girl under the ice. It’s Whitney (Amanda Righetti) from our last chapter.
“Then, on the shoreline, they see an imposing figure who looks like he wants to join them. Only he isn’t holding a hockey stick. It’s a machete.”
So, the opening would’ve confirmed that Whitney and Clay didn’t survive the end of the 2009 film after all. Amanda Righetti’s character showing up beneath the ice makes that pretty clear, even if it’s hard to imagine Jared Padalecki coming back just to be a frozen corpse.
Beyond the icy intro, the heart of the sequel was all about a fully operational Camp Crystal Lake, loaded with counselors, campers, and new ways for Jason to get creative. Shannon teased at least one standout moment that never made it to the screen.
“We had a really awesome zipline kill that I always loved,” Shannon said.
While Camp Blood: The Death of Jason Voorhees will never see the light of day, Jason’s future is finally looking bright again. The upcoming Crystal Lake TV series is bringing the franchise back to life, with Linda Cardellini set to play Pamela Voorhees and IT: Welcome to Derry writer Bradley Caleb Kane running the show.
After all these years, a return to Crystal Lake is finally happening, and if even a fraction of these scrapped ideas make it to the screen, hopefully horror fans are in for something special.