To celebrate Friday the 13th, Rewind of the Living Dead looks back at the classic “Friday the 13th IV: The Final Chapter” where Jason faces off with Tommy Jarvis for the first time…
The rise of slasher films in the 1980s has been well documented but months before Freddy Kreuger started haunting the dreams of the Elm Street children, Jason Voorhees was going on his fourth rampage through a group of teenage kids dumb enough to stay near Camp Crystal Lake.
Following the release of “Friday the 13th Part III, which was rumored to be the final film in the series, Paramount decided to do one more movie to finally kill off Jason once and for all. The studio hired Joseph Zito, who was coming off his own slasher film called “The Prowler,” and he was asked to write and direct a fourth “Friday the 13th” movie.
There was only one problem — Joseph Zito wasn’t a writer.
But after the studio doubled his pay to serve as both writer and director, he accepted the job and then hired a ghost writer named Barney Cohen to actually write the script. Once completed, the film featured a major change from previous installments to the franchise because this time around there would be no “final girl” but rather multiple survivors of Jason’s deadly rampage.
The film introduced Tommy Jarvis for the first time — a character who would later be considered Jason’s greatest foe — and Tom Savini returned to handle the effects after previously working on the first “Friday the 13th” film.
The story is continuous from the conclusion of Part III to the beginning of Part IV as Jason once again wakes up and starts his killing spree all over again, except this time he runs into more formidable foes including the brother of one of his previous victims. On April 13, 1984, “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter” opened in theaters and it was intended to be the last of the series…
In the latest episode of Rewind of the Living Dead, we’re going to shave our heads and grab a machete as we look back at the 1984 sequel “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter”…
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