While Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday isn’t exactly the most treasured entry in the long-running slasher series, it’s clear that director Adam Marcus’ enthusiasm for the 1993 flick hasn’t diminished over the decades, with the filmmaker recently announcing plans to make a spinoff movie focusing on the film’s unhinged bounty hunter Creighton Duke.
What’s more, this slightly loopy idea isn’t the only unusual piece of news that Marcus has shared with us in the past year, with the Texas Chainsaw 3D writer mentioning back in November that he considered the psychotic Jason Voorhees to be a Deadite of the Evil Dead variety.
How seriously you want to take this canon-altering knowledge bomb is up to you, but the director of the ninth Friday the 13th is sticking to his guns, and has now elaborated further on what inspired this creative decision. To start, Marcus notes a strange lapse in continuity between the franchise’s first two installments.
“[Co-writer] Dean Lorey and I thought everything had to come from a place of logic,” Marcus explained to Syfy. “In the first movie Jason is a little boy, thirty years dead and trapped at the bottom of a lake. By Part Two it’s only two weeks later, and this kid has grown two feet. So that’s the logic I have to build off of?”
Not content to let plot holes be plot holes, Curtis came up with the most eccentric of retcons to explain this sudden growth spurt.
“When we were pre-producing the movie, Bob Kurtzman and the guys at KNB said we’re gonna do the effects on the movie. So I got to go on Sam Raimi’s set for Army of Darkness. I asked Bob if Sam would lend me the Necronomicon for Jason Goes to Hell. I let Bob in on my secret plan and knew I couldn’t say Deadite or Evil Dead in the movie because Universal owned the rights. If I just take that prop and put it in the Voorhees house, and use the Kandarian dagger as the thing that kills Jason, what I’m doing is setting up a mythology that Jason’s mom wanted her son back so badly that she made a deal with the darkness. So she reads from the Necronomicon and brings about the resurrection of her son, so now the fact he lived at the bottom of the lake and grows two feet makes sense.”
Seeing how Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday came out a full twelve years and seven sequels after Friday the 13th Part 2, it’s likely that even the nitpickiest of fans would have long moved on from this slight inconsistency between the first two movies by the time Marcus made the fix. Still, there’s something to admire in the guy’s efforts to introduce a wider mythological context to Jason’s various killing sprees.
Speaking of which, it’ll be interesting to see whether the director goes all the way with his Creighton Duke spinoff idea. Lord knows, with Friday the 13th in legal limbo and Ash vs Evil Dead cancelled, someone needs to carry the torch for this unofficial cinematic universe.