Tom McLoughlin offers more details on his new Friday the 13th script

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Last month, JASON LIVES: FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VI writer/director Tom McLoughlin revealed that he has written a screenplay for a new FRIDAY THE 13TH sequel that he would love to direct… if only the franchise weren't at a standstill thanks to the copyright dispute between the original film's director/producer Sean S. Cunningham and writer Victor Miller.

McLoughlin later told Bloody-Disgusting that the script is titled JASON NEVER DIES, takes place entirely in the winter, and would have an all-female cast. Now he has sat down for an interview with the Slash 'N Cast YouTube channel, during which he revealed some more details on the script.

The filmmaker didn't want to give too much away about JASON NEVER DIES in hopes that it will be made some day, but he did say that the script has 

a lot of different elements in it, it's not just one thing, there's a number of things that hopefully make it unique and fresh. … I'm such a fan of the horror genre, I was trying to write something that I would love to see myself. Whether it's going to please every fan, of course not. But there's going to be a lot of stuff in there that if you're more old school with it and like 'This is what a Friday is supposed to be', I think you're going to dig it."

While it will be appealing to the old school fans of the franchise, that doesn't mean McLoughlin won't have some surprises in store for viewers. He said, 

I tried to put some new touches on Jason, so there's going to be some things that are going to be fresh and different in just his overall look. … It literally is about Jason coming back and he's going to be filled with more rage than he ever has before and he's going to have an additional agenda that's going to be completely right on the mythology we all know, I'm not going to go off in some other tangent, and we are going to stay in the Crystal Lake area for the whole movie, so it all takes place on familiar ground. … I tried to create a movie that if you know nothing about Jason and you want to go see a scary movie, this will fulfill that. It works on its own terms, there's a lot of mystery about the character because the characters themselves don't quite understand who this is and why they're doing what they doing. Even in the course of the movie, there's stuff that he's doing that you're like, 'Wait a minute, that's not typical Jason M.O., what the f*ck is going on here?' That's more for the fans and the people who know what all the basic rules are, that I'm bending one element just a little bit, hopefully not enough to piss anybody off, but enough that by the time you get to the end of the movie you go, 'Okay, I get it, that's cool.' So I wanted something that would work for both audiences."

As McLoughlin mentioned there, the potential victims in the story don't know who Jason is.

There is an innocence to these characters, that they're not Jason aware as they were in JASON LIVES, so I've tried to make that unique. The truth is, these girls and women span from 15 years of age to 65, so you can try to figure that out on your own, but there is that element that's also part of it, and these are not necessarily victims or empowered women, there's just a lot of different aspects to why I chose an all female cast to make this work."

These aren't 2019 characters, either. 

This is not a present day film, this actually takes place 13 years after my FRIDAY THE 13TH, which was in '86. So if you do the math, that becomes 1999. Now, somewhat unintentional, 1999 was the era of Y2K, there was a great fear – now this has nothing, I emphasize, nothing to do with the story, it's just sort of a weird climate that was going on at that time in the world. We didn't know if all the computers were going to go down, if you were a spiritual person there was a lot of talk about 'is this Armageddon?', 'what's going to happen when the clocks all turn to 000?' So I was going, 'Alright, that kind of works on just having it take place in that time period.' There's a point when one of the girls kind of references the thing about Y2K, but the other one says 'Well, the only thing cool about 1999 is that if you turn it upside down it's 666.' Again, nothing relative to what's really going on with the Jason story, but just little things about that period. Plus '99 and the '90s, there's so much '80s that sort of all poured into the '90s, so I can still maintain that look and that feeling of what the original FRIDAYs were like."

McLoughlin also mentioned during the conversation that Tommy Jarvis isn't in JASON NEVER DIES, nor does the story delve into Jason's childhood. He wouldn't say what exactly the setting is, but he confirmed that the story doesn't take place at summer camp or a ski lodge. One major tease he was willing to provide was this:

The opening, the resurrection of Jason, is going to be – I promise you this – the most spectacular opening of any FRIDAY THE 13TH you've ever seen. It's going to do things that maybe certain fans will go, 'I can't believe you're doing that!' And other people are going to go, 'This is cool, this is f*cking cool!'"

When asked who he would like to cast as Jason if the film is made, McLoughlin admitted that he wrote the character with his JASON LIVES Jason performer CJ Graham in mind, his physicality and way of moving.

There's no telling when the FRIDAY THE 13TH lawsuit will be resolved, but I really hope McLoughlin will be given the chance to make JASON NEVER DIES eventually. It would be really disappointing to know that we had the chance of seeing another McLoughlin F13 and didn't get it.

The quotes in this article are just a sample of what was said during the interview. To hear it all, check out the Slash 'N Cast video.