I don’t know what it is PRECISELY that attracts me to the Friday the 13th series so much- is it the charming simplicity of its’ otherworldly main antagonist? Is it the shlocky sequels that are criminally underrated? Is it the wealth of comics, films, and other media that have since been influenced by the franchise for decades? Perhaps it is all of the above. During the pandemic, some friends and I founded a TTRPG Podcast called “Ctrl Group” which slowly became our primary outlet for storytelling and inventing new ideas for writing. So it only seemed natural for Halloween of that year to do something big and bold and inventive, so I set about writing my pitch for a new Friday the 13th film (following the original series, Jason X and Jason Goes to Hell have some fun ideas, but they certainly didn’t help the franchise, did they?) With the arbitrary, but seemingly appropriate deadline of October 31st, we finalized the script and read it aloud with actors like a radio play that you can listen to on the CTRL Group Website.

Part IX is a split story exploring the pain and trauma of those few souls who have actually SURVIVED a Jason Vorhees attack where we see the events of an incident in the 90’s at Crystal Lake and then a return to to Crystal Lake in the early 2000’s. Our main character is a young African-American man named Cameron who begins our story as an awkward teen just trying to fit in with a group of strange friends, but following the tragedy at Crystal Lake, he grows up to become Jason’s Hunter, a killer in his own right.

It would be an absolute dream to write a Friday the 13th Series or even a Pseudo-Jason series, like one of my favorite comics, “Maniac in New York.” This is definitely a story and world I would like to come back to, in fact, soon after we finished the episode, I began work on adapting the script into comic book form with the intention of creating Parts 9 thru 11. I should really get back to work on that…