October has arrived, and with it come autumn colors, pumpkin spice lattes, and an entire glorious month where entertainment news writers are handed an inexhaustible supply of excuses to ramble about horror movies. The big franchises always get a good look in, with Friday the 13th being no exception, and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives director Tom McLoughlin has now shared details and concept art for his pitch for a follow-up, titled Jason Never Dies.
Regardless of what Stephen King thinks, Jason was only ever properly killed once, in part 4 of the series, the increasingly inaccurately titled The Final Chapter. After the dire reception of the Jason-less A New Beginning, Jason Lives backtracked the studio’s attempt to take the saga in a new direction and resurrected the hockey-masked maniac as the force of supernatural evil he’s now known as. McLoughlin ultimately moved on from the franchise, although in 2018 when it looked like the interminable lawsuit was reaching an end, he came up with an idea for a direct sequel to his own effort that ignored parts 7 through 10, Freddy vs. Jason, and the 2009 remake.
Set in 1999 on the night before Thanksgiving, a group of rebellious Catholic schoolgirls and the stern nun chaperoning them are cut off by snow from the retreat they’re travelling to and instead detour to an alternative site, which just so happens to be beside Crystal Lake, whose bloodied history none of the characters are aware of and where Jason has spent the previous 13 years trapped under the water. The idea was to put the madman, seen above to be this time dual wielding a hammer and an axe instead of his iconic machete, up against characters less passive and more inclined to fight back. Of course, it wouldn’t go well for most of them, but at least would provide a different dynamic.
McLoughlin’s art will be available as an extra on the imminent 16-disc box set celebrating 40 years of the Friday the 13th series, and you can read the director’s thoughts in more detail over on Bloody Disgusting via the link below.