LUCKY 13

LOS ANGELES — It’s safe to say producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form are feeling lucky about launching the big-screen reboot of the horror opus Friday the 13th next week. Even if it does open on a supposedly unlucky day.
 

Hey, that opening date didn't hurt any of the other movies in the inexplicably successful 29-year-old franchise.

And anyway, Form and Fuller already know from previous experience that horror fans love a good reinvention. The partners with the company Platinum Dunes have already revived three other past horror franchises: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror and The Hitcher. Their next project is a redo of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Of all those films, Friday the 13th is arguably the movie that most lends itself to being remade. While the original versions of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hitcher deserve to be held up as classics of modern horror, the 12 previous Friday the 13th movies tended to be formulaic cheesefests in which attractive, raucous and nubile teens were served up as a gory smorgasbord for a hockey-masked psycho named Jason Voorhees.

But the two producers have a somewhat more charitable view of the original movies.

"I think it would be foolish for us to look at the old Friday the 13th movies and say, 'These are cheesily made and we can make them better.' Because there's something magical about those movies that works," Form says.

"I think what we respond to is an iconic concept. In Friday the 13th or Texas Chainsaw (Massacre), you have an iconic killer," he says. "So we're looking for a way to take an iconic killer and put him in situations that today's audiences would respond to.

"All our movies to date have been made for a lower budget, by Hollywood standards," Form explains. "What we try to do is bring very visual directors and people who don't usually make horror movies, and make the best movie that we can."

You can't really hold it against the filmmakers if they favour the familiar. Form and Fuller may have burned themselves when they ventured beyond the strategy of doing remakes of instantly recognizable titles.

The two producers were behind the wholly original shot-in-Winnipeg horror movie The Horsemen, starring Dennis Quaid and Ziyi Zhang. And Form says that film will only get a limited release to a few cities on March 13. Indeed, the thriller, which shot here in the winter of 2007, may bypass Canada altogether, until it is released on DVD.

Fuller suggests that a bleak economic climate will not be conducive to a bleak horror film along the lines of The Horsemen, in which Quaid's police detective is baffled by a series of sadistic murders with apocalyptic overtones.

"The world is a different place than when we made that movie," Fuller says.

"It's a very hard movie," Form adds. "The subject matter of that film is not very commercial and we knew that going in.

"We loved the material, but it's very dark, and it has a very dark ending, and it probably plays to a smaller audience."

Some people would say that the Friday the 13th movies are also dark, given that they're about young people being massacred because they happen to venture too close to Jason's stomping ground: the boarded-up Camp Crystal Lake.

But the truth is that the films are effective at eliciting primal fears of being chased and being attacked.

And the producers say it was their job to bring the Friday the 13th franchise back to basics, given that the latter Jason movies saw the killer battling a telekinetic psychic (Part VII: The New Blood), revived from death by lightning (Part XI: Jason Lives), transformed into a worm creature capable of possessing others (Jason Goes to Hell) and turned into a robot 400 years in the future (Jason X).

"As they make more and more sequels for these franchises, there are a lot of fans who believe it gets farther and farther away from what core idea and how it started," Form says. "So this was an opportunity for us to go back to where it started, when people fell in love with this character."

Friday the 13th opens in Winnipeg next Friday, the 13th.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 8, 2009 D1