Writer Daryl Haney Explains His Experience With 'Friday The 13th Part 7: The New Blood'

The film going public can be a very demanding bunch as we spend our hard-earned money to visit the cinemas and purchase movies to watch at home. This consumer attitude sometimes leads fans to become arm chair film critics, often attacking certain people in a film production without really understanding the circumstances behind the reasons why a film has failed, at least in a fan's eyes. That's not to say that we as film viewers should not have an opinion on what we think is good or bad with respect to the quality of a film, but rather holding off blame to specific people before bringing out the torches and pitchforks. This leads me to one co-writer of Friday The 13th Part 7: The New Blood.

Daryl Haney was originally contracted to write four treatments for the film, which was originally intended to be a Freddy vs Jason vehicle, but rights issues between New Line Cinema and Paramount Pictures killed the chance of the Horror team-up. So, Daryl was tasked with creating something just as fantastical to lure in fans to a sixth sequel of the franchise. As documented in a Crystal Lake Memories interview back in 2005, Daryl was very candid about his negative experiences with the production of The New Blood, often clashing with Producer Barbara Sachs over the direction of the film. Later a second writer was brought in to finish the ongoing script under a pseudonym.

Daryl Haney in 'Crazy' Eye'

This writer has never read anything else outside of this small piece of info pertaining to Daryl's circumstances surrounding the film, until now. A few years ago, Daryl himself wrote an article over at thenervousbreakdown.com (strangely appropriate) about how he came to Hollywood and what he endured after arriving and getting the Friday The 13th writing gig. Below is an excerpt:

My driver’s license had lapsed while I was living in New York, so I walked everywhere; and since I couldn’t yet afford a phone, I would head numerous times daily to a pay phone outside the Beachwood Market. And it was there, on that corner, on that phone, that I learned that someone at Paramount, based on fast-traveling reports of my work at Corman, wanted to hear my ideas for the latest Friday the 13th sequel.

If I was a snob about books—and I was: no guilty pleasures—I was equally snobby about films. In New York I haunted the art houses, where I would sometimes tangle with other snobs, arguing the merits of this auteur over that one. Horror movies, which I had liked to the age of fifteen or thereabouts, were irrelevant as far as I was concerned; so I was only dimly aware of the Friday the 13th phenomenon, which seemed to involve witless fornicators being subjected to unsought surgery by a hulking mute in a hockey mask. No thanks.

Still, never thinking I would get the job, I rented every Friday movie and watched them on a neighbor’s VCR. I had been told that the Friday producers wanted Jason Vorhees, the hulking mute, to square off in the seventh Friday with Freddy Krueger, the razor-fingered pickle of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and though the deal had (for the moment) fallen through, a variation was clearly desired. I had the formula down by the end of Part 2 at least, and I walked to...

To read his entire story, please click on the link below to read his entire experience and hopefully this will give a bit more perspective to his part in Friday The 13th Part 7. Enjoy!

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/drhaney/2010/01/friday-bloody-friday/