Sean Cunningham Talks Friday The 13th Television Show Development

This past weekend, the excellent podcast Shockwaves sat down and chatted with Friday The 13th co-creator Sean Cunningham and discussed his early career making soft porn films and gradually working towards filming one of the most influential horror films in history. Along the way, Sean was asked about the television show that was in development at The CW network and what the show would ultimately be about.

Most of what Sean mentioned about the show on Shockwaves was already revealed a few years ago and has been chronicled on our website in the past, but below is a breakdown (courtesy of Blumhouse.com) of what was discussed about the show and where the potential series could take the character of Jason and the town of Crystal Lake. The interesting point mentioned by Sean in the podcast is that The CW and CBS (The parent company of CW) said to him that the concept was good, however we all know now they ultimately decided to not go forward with the show. Hopefully things change and the network goes forward with the show in the future.

From Shockwaves
Sean Cunningham:
The FRIDAY THE 13TH series is still percolating and we’ve got a very good handle on how we want to do it. CBS and The CW both said “yeah, that’s good!” I don’t quite know what I’ll do there, but I’m really looking forward to it because it’s, again, taking this thing that appears one way, but you can do it this (other) way too, and really keep it interesting.

I think the thing about FRIDAY THE 13TH as a TV franchise, you have that problem – how the hell are you going to deal with Jason? Is he going to come out of the woods every week and smash another teenager against a tree and nobody is going to notice? Nobody knows who did it?

You have to service the fans. You can’t ignore them. FRIDAY THE 13TH, at least in part, is going to be about Jason. So, how do you make sense of all of the contradictory stories that are out there, between Jason going to space, or versus Freddy, and all these other things. The assumption is this. Crystal Lake is a town that really exists, and a long time ago they had a series killer named Jason Voorhees, and then some Hollywood creep comes out and makes this exploitation horror movie called FRIDAY THE 13TH. And then they make another one, and another one, and it just crushes the town. The town becomes the place that “Jason built.” And the stuff that happened, they know what really happened. The rest is Hollywood lore. There are people there that lived through it, and they’ll tell you what really happened. And so, what you can do is set up Crystal Lake as, more or less, like the town in JAWS, Amity Island. You have the town with all its prime movers in the town, but the town is located in an area that would allow Jason to exist in whatever form. But other things as well. I would describe it as a place where if THE X-FILES’ Mulder and Scully wandering into this county, they never would of left! There’s so much weird shit going on!