Friday the 13th News / Spoilers

From Scifi Wire:

Producers of the upcoming Friday the 13th--a reboot of the slasher franchise that takes the story back to the beginning--want to make clear that the film isn't a sequel and isn't strictly a remake of the first movie, like their recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot. Rather, the movie will incorporate elements of the first three Friday the 13th movies and will include a couple versions of the machete-wielding serial killer Jason Voorhees, who has come to embody the franchise.

"This one's hard, because on Chainsaw, it kind of was a reboot of the original, and on this one, ... everyone in this room knows that [Jason] didn't put the hockey mask on until the third movie," producer Andrew Form told a group of reporters visiting the film's Austin, Texas, set on June 6. "I would say most of the audience that will come see this movie doesn't know that. ... Most people think that Jason Voorhees was in the first one. ... The younger audience, they think he's in the first one, they think he's wearing a hockey mask, and that's kind of how this franchise started. They don't realize that Pamela [Voorhees, Jason's mother,] was basically the whole first one, [and] he didn't show up until the very end of the movie."

In the original 1980 Friday the 13th, the killer stalking the sexually active teens at Camp Crystal Lake was revealed to be Pamela (Betsy Palmer). Jason appears at the very end of the film, a decomposing corpse miraculously reanimated from the bottom of Crystal Lake.

"He came in late for that one shot," Form said. "And then the second one, of course, he wore the sack. And the third one, finally, you have that great moment when he comes out in the hockey mask. And I think, like you said, we tried to take elements from all three of those movies to create one reboot of Friday the 13th. And I think we take the elements where you will see Jason put the hockey mask on for the first time, how and why. And you'll see him actually do it, not just come out with it on."

Form's producing partner Brad Fuller added: "It's not presented as an origin story in the least. That's not our goal here, to show how he put the mask on. The goal is to put a group of kids in Crystal Lake, bring him back to Crystal Lake, and have them meet Jason Voorhees, and along the way you kind of get a sense of the history, but that's not what the story is." (Spoilers ahead!)

Much of Jason's backstory will be told in flashbacks and will include moments with a young Jason, as well as with Pamela (played by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Nana Visitor). The producers are also taking a Batman Begins approach to the mythology and will explain for the first time why the movie is called Friday the 13th, why Jason is a serial killer, where he's been, why he puts on a sack and then a hockey mask, why a machete, how he gets around Camp Crystal Lake, etc.

During a visit to the set, reporters watched the filmmakers (who included director Marcus Nispel of Pathfinder) shoot scenes in which Jason (Derek Mears) chases the film's protagonists, Clay (Supernatural's Jared Padalecki) and Whitney (Amanda Righetti), through an abandoned school bus at Camp Crystal Lake. The scene includes shots in which Jason smashes Clay's face through a bus window and others in which he grapples with Whitney as she tries to crawl away.

Friday the 13th, which wraps production on Friday the 13th of June, is set to open on Friday the 13th of February in 2009.