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Jason Lives Director Wrote a Pamela Voorhees Friday the 13th Prequel
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives director Tom McLoughlin has an idea for a film or limited series exploring the early years of Pamela Voorhees.

Jason Lives Director Wrote a Pamela Voorhees Friday the 13th Prequel

Jason Lives director Tom McLoughlin has an idea for a Friday the 13th Pamela Voorhees prequel. Hockey-masked killer Jason Voorhees may be one of the most famous horror villains of all time. But as all Friday the 13th fans know, the very first movie in the long-running franchise featured not Jason but his mother Pamela as the main protagonist.

Friday the 13th lore of course holds that Pamela was launched on her spree of murdering teenagers at summer camp because her son Jason drowned years before due to the the neglect of counselors who were too busy having sex to watch over him. But in one of the great horror twists, that first movie finally revealed that the drowned Jason was actually alive, having somehow survived being under the waters of Crystal Lake for years. The supernatural Jason would then pick up his mother’s quest for revenge, rampaging through a series of 10 sequels to become an iconic horror monster.

All those Friday the 13th sequels that followed the original movie are of course quite variable in terms of quality. Most fans however agree that Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is one of the better entries for the way it revived a series that at that point had become stagnant. As it turns out, that movie’s director McLoughlin wants to once again revive Friday the 13th, and he has an idea for a prequel centered on Pamela Voorhees and a young Jason. McLoughlin described his prequel idea, called Diary of Pamela Voorhees, to Bloody Disgusting, and also shared a concept poster which can be seen in the space below:

“Pamela’s diary allows us deeper insight into how she feels. It’s particularly even more unsettling as we hear her psychopathic and sociopathic thoughts and plans. I wanted to approach this as if this was a true story. Every event and character are believable. No supernatural aspects. As extreme as her murders are they are passion kills. Serial killers like Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron in ‘Monster’) are more emotionally horrifying being connected a belief or honest rationalization. There’s also a deeply disturbing and creepy aspect seeing the child Jason watching, maybe learning from his mothers’ savage murders. Blood splattered; Mrs. Voorhees embraces her son with a genuine mother’s warmth. Gently explaining to him why these wicked people need to die. ‘If we don’t kill them, Jason, they’ll keep hurting more people like us. There’s no God who will punish them. Only us, Jason.’”

McLoughlin revealed to Bloody Disgusting that he and writing partner James Sweet came up with so many ideas centered on Pamela and young Jason that they actually have enough material for a limited series. Unfortunately, any and all potential Friday the 13th projects are currently locked in limbo as rights issues continue to be worked out between the original movie’s screenwriter Victor Miller and its producer/director Sean Cunningham. Thanks to these ongoing issues, there hasn’t been an official Friday the 13th franchise release since 2009’s reboot.

Prequels to iconic horror franchises are of course nothing new. And perhaps the best entry in the entire genre is actually a TV series, the show Bates Motel, which showed the early life of Psycho character Norman Bates with his mother Norma. Diary of Pamela Voorhees indeed sounds very much in the vein of Bates Motel, with its focus on a young Pamela slowly transforming into a killer while teaching a non-supernatural Jason how to be vengeful murderer himself. All-in-all, it sounds like McLoughlin has a great idea for bringing new life to the Friday the 13th franchise, and it has nothing to do with hockey masks. Hopefully all those tangled rights issues can finally get worked out, allowing for more stories to be told within the Friday the 13th universe.