Sean S. Cunningham, creator of one of horror’s most successful franchises of all time – the Friday the 13th film series – talks about how his slasher character Jason Voorhees and his collaboration with Wes Craven.
Sean says that before his horror genre history, he was actually making children’s films, but when one of his projects was held up due to financing issues, he came up the title Friday the 13th, but as a possible title for a soccer project that ended up becoming Manny’s Orphans.
“In the process of making lists, I came up with the title Friday the 13th, and out of frustration I said to myself, ‘If I had a movie called Friday the 13th, I could sell that.’”
Speaking about working together with Craven on the horror flick The Last House on the Left, Cunningham said the idea came about after he and Craven had watched a Clint Eastwood film that included violent scenes that left a couple hundred people dead by the end.
“His thought was that if you did have a murder on-screen - or some violence on-screen - to do it very personally, and then it became its own sort of statement against it. But using that as a starting point, he then had this idea of taking an (Ingmar Bergman) film, The Virgin Spring, and converting it - that was sort of in the back of his mind - to this modern day story, and that was how we starting piecing it together.”
Watch the full episode to learn more behind-the-scenes details about the making of Friday the 13th.
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