Posted in: Horror, Movies, Paramount Pictures | Tagged: film, Friday the 13th, horror, jason, Jason X, kane hodder

Jason X Screenwriter Acknowledges an Important Friday the 13th Rule

Thanks to the 1996 game-changing horror film Scream, it became established that the genre is accustomed to playing by rules. Whether it's through general rules of the time or franchise rules that are learned over the span of several chapters, you can't watch a cinematic world rooted in horror without developing some ground rules as to what works and what doesn't.

Over 20 years after the sci-fi slasher coalescence known as Jason X, the Friday the 13th franchise hasn't gone much further than the ambitions of the uncharted movie. However, even that movie needed to adhere to a few specific guidelines. In an interview with AV Club, Jason X scribe Todd Farmer was asked about what unspoken rules were applied to his film, which at one point detailed the need to cement the notion that Jason has nothing but absolute love for his mother. Another rule came from the way Jason handles combat situations and actually makes a lot of sense.

Farmer divulges to the website, "And then[Kane Hodder] let us know that there is one more rule that we didn't even know existed—and that is, you never see Jason get up. You can knock him down three or four times, but you never see him get up. He was like, 'Don't do that. Because it's awkward, and you never want to see Jason be that human.' And I was like, that's fucking brilliant! So I didn't have a problem with that. Kane had been protecting that character for freaking ages. It had been like nine or ten years since there had been a Jason movie, and Kane had kept the franchise alive, going to convention after convention. So he had a right to make that call, I think."

Though sometimes conventional rules need to be broken in filmmaking, these ones feel all too practical. When we get to see another Friday the 13th film in the future, let's follow Hodder's lead, yes?

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