The Big Picture
- Winter weather could provide a fresh and chilling backdrop for a Friday the 13th movie, as the franchise has mostly been set in the summer.
- A fan-made short film, Never Hike in the Snow , showcased the potential of putting Jason Voorhees in a snowy setting, with stylish kills on display.
- There were plans for a Friday the 13th sequel set in winter, but it ultimately never came to fruition due to legal issues and a halted production.
Summer is over, and Winter is here, bringing a frost over a slasher icon's rotten hockey mask. Blood splattering on a blanket of snow would make for stylish kills in Friday the 13th, but the cold weather has never hit the closed grounds of Camp Crystal Lake, which does make sense for a summer camp-themed franchise. Yet bad weather seems to always travel along with Jason’s next arrival, a blizzard shouldn’t be off the table for what could be a winter horror entry.
Camp Crystal Lake has never frozen over, while things have gotten chilly temporarily in a bad sequel and in a more successful fan film, now with a TV series on Peacock happening, maybe the seasons will change from the usual summer setting. This almost happened in a script that was made for the 2009 remake, which would have put Jason Voorhees in the winter, ready to kill again in scenes fans haven't seen onscreen before.
Friday the 13th
A group of camp counselors trying to reopen a summer camp called Crystal Lake, which has a grim past, are stalked by a mysterious killer.
The Weather and Other Elements Play Into the ‘Friday the 13th’ Series
Fierce rainstorms pelt the cabins, as the wind thrashes the water and trees, a harbinger for when Jason gets ready for his kills. In the horror documentary Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue (2009), film historian John Kenneth Muir even brings this weather aspect up as a way to push back on the conservative anger that lashed out at the slasher movies, because in a tongue-in-cheek way, Jason can be defined as an embodiment of the “Old Testament.” Muir says how, with the approaching storms, “Jason is compared with nature” and wonders if the killer could be, “an avenging force of God” due to his violence on teens who are busy committing drug use or pre-marital sex. “Vice precedes slice and dice,” he ends on.
Instead of rain, a blizzard would be a refreshing update to a franchise that is full of small and big attempts to do something different, whether it’s constant snowfall to keep characters indoors, or gentle flurries in contrast to the out-of-control carnage that will soon happen on Camp Crystal Lake. The only other time the Friday the 13th series has ever gotten cold was in Jason X (2001), a late sequel in the original run of movies where sci-fi elements got injected into the formula, but while it wasn’t enough of a new spin, it still gave Jason one of the franchise’s most creative kills.
In the futuristic sequel, Jason is put into a cryogenic sleep and, what should be no surprise to anyone, he’s awakened due to poor judgment. He gets his stiff, zombie joints stretched out when he goes in for a kill that can still send fans into a frenzy to this day. The slasher slams a victim’s face into liquid nitrogen and then delivers a grisly face smash, destroying any facial recognition. As a 90-minute movie, the pacing feels slow as Jason’s upgraded “Über” look doesn’t even happen until way too close to the end. Nevertheless, the coldness of this entry might not have been the last time. It could have changed in the early 2010s.
RelatedEvery Friday the 13th Movie, Ranked by Rewatchability
"I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly."
The Sequel to 2009’s 'Friday the 13th' Remake
Screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift had written the origin story and re-imagining wrapped up in one, Friday the 13th (2009), and they continued with the franchise after the movie released, drafting a direct sequel to the remake, where they dropped the temperatures and had a major reveal over the fate of a potential survivor. In their remake, the story follows Chad Miller (Jared Padalecki), brother to Whitney (Amanda Righetti), who arrives at the camp to find his missing sister, not knowing she has been abducted by Jason (Derek Mears). In the final minutes, the siblings reunite and then learn death comes easy for the victims, but not the killer. Jason pops out for a final scare and attacks Whitney, ending with her scream.
Shannon and Swift then shared the first two pages recently on X, which has an extended openingset in the winter before the rest of the story returns to a thawed summer camp. Viewers are introduced to Val, an explorer at Camp Crystal Lake, who discovers a zip line and tries it out. It’s just too bad for poor Val, that while she’s safely in her harness and shooting down the line, Jason is waiting at the end, delivering a clean swipe of his machete that places Val on the body count list. In the early pages of Shannon and Swift’s follow-up, what happens to Whitney is not kept in the dark for long either.
The screenwriters shared additional pages of their script, where Whitney’s body is discovered under the frozen-over Crystal Lake during a game of ice hockey among friends. Not long after that, Jason appears, with excellent detail about how his breath exhales from behind the hockey mask before Shannon and Swift get to write a moment that has never happened in the series before. The slasher icon walks onto Crystal Lake, rather than drowning or otherwise getting trapped underneath it, approaching to kill the trespassers on his land. In one funny way, this visual goes back to that horror documentary where Jason is given biblical undertones which this act of walking on the frozen lake works into. This colder environment gives the campground a new look, and should a script finally be made with this in mind, Jason will join other horror icons who endured a winter horror movie.
Why Winter at Camp Crystal Lake Can Work for Friday the 13th
It might be believable that unlucky friends head over to the camp during the dead of winter, should they not believe the local stories about Jason Voorhees. After all, the original line of sequels either had the camp closed or an attempt to reopen the camp, until Jason’s fury is unleashed. As there has never been any danger during the chillier season, it could be a reason as to why this friend group doesn’t see any harm in visiting. And with bad weather occurring often, as if Crystal Lake’s atmosphere is as volatile as the Bermuda Triangle, a snowstorm can be a new obstacle that has to be faced by the characters. A fan-made short figured this out.
Never Hike in the Snow places Jason in the snow as one of several fan-made sequels that bring back original actors. In the 30-minute short, a cop and Tommy Jarvis (Thom Matthews) return when a young man goes missing at (you guessed it) Camp Crystal Lake. The young guy is a decent person, in no way deserving of what will happen to him when he runs into Jason. He tries to sprint to escape the killer, but Jason puts an axe into his face, the victim’s yellow coat and his blood flowing are colors that burst from the white snow on the ground. Although it’s never happened in an official movie timeline, Shannon and Swift’s Friday the 13th remake sequel nearly happened.
The ‘Friday the 13th’ Sequel That Wouldn't Get Made
ClosePlatinum Dune producers seemed to be excited about the follow-up to Friday the 13th, as were the screenwriters. There were statements made by all of them about getting the movie made, much to the happiness of returning fans and new ones. The 2009 remake was a box-office success, earning over $90 million on a budget of $19 million, so it seemed like a no-brainer a sequel would get made. One of the producers, Brad Fuller talked to Collider about the Friday the 13th sequel with good news. There were hopes for an August 2010 release date and Fuller went on to say how the team, “want to bring things they haven’t seen before and one of the things that they haven’t seen before is Jason in the snow.” There was also the idea of having it in 3D, perhaps inspired by My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009).
But Collider would then report in April 2010 that the Jason Voorhees sequel wouldn’t get made, with no update as to why, and then, the series got caught up in a frustrating and messy legal battle between the original creators. The prequel TV show for Peacock, Crystal Lake, is in the works, meaning only time will tell if the usual summer camp formula can be updated to have winter strike the location in an episode or two. Maybe there will be a time, in an official film or in that prequel series, when Jason Voorhees will need to warm up by a fire in his dilapidated hut with his dead mother’s head nearby, as a blizzard rages on outside. And for some ill-conceived reason or another, new victims then arrive to bother the summer camp slasher.
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