Amy Steel describes the original pitch for Friday the 13th Part III

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

At the end of the first FRIDAY THE 13TH, Adrienne King's camp counselor character Alice managed to decapitate Mrs. Voorhees, the woman who had just murdered everyone else at Camp Crystal Lake. Months later, at the start of FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2, Mrs. Voorhees' son Jason ventured into town so he could enter the home Alice was living in and avenge his mother's death. So Alice didn't make it very far into that one.

While seeking out the survivors of the previous film isn't something Jason has tended to do as the FRIDAY THE 13TH franchise has gone on, it made sense that he would track Alice down since she was the one who killed his mom. But if things had worked out differently, FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III would have been about Jason going after Amy Steel's character Ginny, the heroine of FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2. 

During a Q&A panel at the Crypticon convention a while back, Steel revealed that her mom had unearthed the script pages she had been sent for a Ginny-centric PART III when she was offered the chance to return. Here's how she described what was on those pages: 

Ginny was kind of a badass, she went to go learn jiujitsu and self-defense, and she was in college, and she was being called weird by all these people because she had PTSD and she was flashing back on this guy named Jason at some lake where people died, and everyone was making fun of me. 

So my roommate one day says, 'Hey, Ginny, can I borrow your car?' The red Volkswagen. And I said, 'Sure,' because Ginny didn't go out at night, she was so weird. So my roommate took my car out. In the meantime, I'm doing my laundry because it's Friday, of course everybody does their laundry Friday night. I go downstairs to the laundry, I open up the dryer, and Paul's head is in the dryer. (Paul was Ginny's love interest in PART 2.) 

So that's how it starts. And then from there, all of the sudden the police come. They find me in the dorm, and they said, basically, that I've been killed. And I go, 'No, I haven't been killed.' Evidently Jason or somebody attacked my roommate, who was driving my car. 

And then Ted and I… remember Ted? (Returning character from PART 2.) Ted and I start on this wild goose chase because we know Jason's out there. And so we start hunting him down."

That's all Steel had of the script, and she couldn't remember how many pages had been written but she estimated that it might have been a third of it. That version of FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III didn't happen because she chose not to return to the role of Ginny, a decision she says was "stupid of me."

The FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III we did get found Jason recovering from the damage Ginny inflicted on him at the end of PART 2 and knocking off a new batch of characters that have gotten together at a lakeside vacation home. That's the film where Jason finally puts on his iconic hockey mask; when Ginny faced off with him, he was just wearing a sack on his head.

It's interesting to ponder what a PART III with Jason going after Ginny at college, and then Ginny going after Jason, would have been like, but I'm very happy with the III we did get, and the idea of Jason fixating on specific people and going after them each movie is a little too much like Michael Myers for me. Survivor Tommy Jarvis did get his own trilogy within the franchise, but Jason wasn't specifically seeking Tommy out. 

Video of the Crypticon panel, where Steel was joined by King, can be seen below.