Cody shares more of the videos he has written for the JoBlo Horror Videos YouTube channel.
I have been working as a news editor and film reviewer on the horror site ArrowintheHead.com for a while, and earlier this year I started writing scripts for videos that are released through ArrowintheHead's recently launched YouTube channel, JoBlo Horror Videos. I shared a few of the videos I have written - ones covering Frailty, Dead Calm, and Shocker - a few months ago, and now another batch of videos I wrote can be seen below.
For an episode of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I wrote about writer/director Eric Red's 2008 ghost story 100 Feet:
100 Feet script:
In this edition of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw video series we’re taking a look back at the 2008 film 100 Feet, a clever addition to the haunted house sub-genre from the mind of The Hitcher and Near Dark screenwriter Eric Red.
CREATORS/CAST: Red wrote and directed 100 Feet, which stars Famke Janssen as Marnie, a woman who killed her abusive husband Mike in self defense, but has still spent the last two years in prison. Now she’s going to finish up her sentence with a year of house arrest, time she’ll be serving in the very same house where she killed the guy. His blood is even still on the wall when she is brought back home and fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet by a tech officer played by Arrow in the Head founder John “The Arrow” Fallon, who delivers the exposition we need to understand how that bracelet works and makes his character seem like a really nice person while doing so.
The title 100 Feet comes from the fact that this bracelet will only allow Marnie to move around within a one hundred foot radius of the base unit that The Arrow places in the center of the house. If she goes beyond one hundred feet, an alarm will start going off, and if that alarm beeps for more than three minutes the police will be coming by to check on her. If she’s found to be doing something she’s not supposed to, she’ll be going back to prison for ten years.
Making matters worse for Marnie is the fact that her husband was a police officer, and Mike’s former partner Shanks, played by Bobby Cannavale, has a much more positive opinion of him than Marnie does. Shanks believes Mike was a good guy, and that Marnie is a cold-blooded killer, so he’s determined to find a reason to get Marnie sent to prison. To make sure that doesn’t happen, she has to be cautious and mindful of that one hundred foot rule… which proves to be very complicated, given that Mike’s spirit, played by Michael Paré, is lurking around the house, and in death he has gotten meaner than ever.
If Marnie tries to escape from her husband’s ghost, she’ll be going to prison. If she stays in the house with him, the man she killed might return the favor.
BACKGROUND: Eric Red broke into the entertainment industry in a major way with the screenplay for the 1986 film The Hitcher, a script he started writing when he was just 21-years-old and which was brought to the screen in a masterful way by director Robert Harmon. The following year, Red collaborated with Kathryn Bigelow on the cult classic Near Dark, proving that his career was going to be one to keep an eye on. He has continued delivering thrills and giving us the creeps throughout the decades, and has directed films like Cohen and Tate, Body Parts, and Bad Moon. He worked on movies that involved bloodthirsty maniacs, vampires, werewolves, and even cowboys, but he never had the right hook for the ghost story he wanted to tell – until he heard about a couple high profile cases of house arrest in the early 2000s. That gave him the idea of sticking the Marnie character in a haunted house with an electronic bracelet on her ankle.
With such a fascinating set-up, and with Famke Janssen in the lead at a time when she was fresh off of playing Jean Grey in the initial trilogy of X-Men films, it’s surprising that 100 Feet didn’t land bigger distribution deals. It barely played in theatres at all, earning just $1.4 million from screenings in a handful of territories around the world. In the United States, it was a television premiere on the Syfy Channel and was then given a barebones DVD release courtesy of The Asylum. Yes, Syfy and The Asylum, the companies that would later team up for the nonsensical Sharknado franchise, were the ones who helped Red get his haunted house movie out into the world.
With that sort of release, it’s easy to see why it didn’t catch on with a wider audience. Anyone who didn’t tune in to see it on Syfy could only blind buy it on DVD. Those who did tune in would have found that this was not the network’s usual type of movie. 100 Feet deserved better than it got – it should have gotten more theatrical play, rather than going straight to Syfy, and there should have been some bonus features on that DVD release. The movie has developed a very well deserved cult following, but it still hasn’t been seen by nearly enough horror fans.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Inspired by the likes of The Innocents, Rosemary’s Baby, and Wait Until Dark, Red was aiming to give his contemporary ghost story an elegant, old school cinema feel, and he was able to accomplish that with the aid of cinematographer Ken Kelsch. This is a great looking movie, filled with impressive camerawork. Although it’s set in a Brooklyn brownstone, the interiors were filmed on sets constructed in Hungary, which allowed Red and Kelsch to place the camera anywhere they wanted to in the rooms, since they were able to move walls and take away ceilings. Red said,
“What interested me in writing the script and directing the film was doing an exercise in tension and suspense without relying on blood and gore, just manipulating audience expectations – just when you think something terrible is about to happen, it doesn’t, and just when you least expect it, it does.”
Famke Janssen received some strong support from Cannavale as Shanks and Ed Westwick as the delivery boy who brings Marnie her groceries and also connects with her on a personal level, but she carries the majority of the film on her shoulders and gives one of the best performances of her career. The Shanks character may doubt her, but it’s clear to us that Marnie really was acting in self defense when she stabbed her husband to death, and that Mike had put her through a living hell before things reached that point. We side with her, we care about her, and Janssen perfectly conveys her character’s emotional turmoil.
Red gave her a role with depth to explore, too. When Marnie isn’t dealing with the haunting situation, the film takes some time to show us how lonely and isolated she is, shunned by family and old friends. There’s a heartbreaking scene where she gets all dressed up to pass out candy on Halloween, but the trick-or-treaters won’t even come up to her door. As far as they’re concerned, she’s the crazy criminal lady.
For Marnie, the threat of going back to prison is even greater than the threat of being stuck in a house with Mike’s vengeful spirit, and we see she’s a strong heroine when she dives right into figuring out how to rid her home of her husband’s ghost. The way to do that may be to dispose of all of Mike’s possessions, but when she finds that the corrupt cop was hiding a huge amount of cash beneath their bedroom floorboards some viewers might start thinking that they wouldn’t mind cohabitating with an angry ghost for however long it would take them to spend all of that money.
The closer Marnie gets to removing him, the more it becomes clear that Mike is not going to leave without a fight. If you’re the type of horror fan who has trouble getting into haunted house movies because you’re not scared by the sounds of creaky floorboards or the sight of doors swinging open on their own, 100 Feet is a haunted house movie that might win you over. Mike doesn’t waste the viewer’s time by just trying to unnerve Marnie. This evil bastard makes his presence known with acts of physical violence, hitting people, tossing them across rooms, throwing glass plates at them. This is a ghost to fear because he might just kill you outright instead of moving some furniture to scare you. Paré wasn’t given many lines to speak, Mike is not a chatty spirit, but he didn’t need words to get across the fact that Mike is very pissed off.
BEST SCENE(S): There were moments of extreme violence in Red’s previous works, and while he didn’t want to rely on blood and gore when making this one, he also didn’t leave it out completely. One of the best scenes in the movie is the one that does get bloody. At the center of this scene is Westwick’s character Joey, who Marnie has just slept with. She sleeps with him because he’s one of the few people to show her any kindness, but in the middle of it she also seems to start taking extra enjoyment from the fact that she’s bothering Mike by sleeping with Joey, since the ghost has to lurk there and watch it happen. It turns out that making Mike even angrier was not a good move. Mike is so jealous, he decides to show Marnie and Joey that he is still capable of physically destroying somebody. He makes a mess of that delivery boy. As Red said,
“When that single extremely gruesome kill does come it’s a doozy, because there’s nothing in the movie up to that point that leads you to expect it.”
The scene is really horrific, disturbing and disgusting. Then Red manages to make the situation even more tense after Joey’s dead, as he reveals that Shanks is right outside Marnie’s door, and we know he would be eager to blame her for the murder if he happens to see the body. Watching Marnie try to keep Joey hidden until she can get rid of Shanks is very engaging and captivating, truly the stuff that great thrillers are made of.
PARTING SHOT: There has been a huge boom of supernatural horror movies in recent years, and in that time we have gotten some new haunted house classics. 100 Feet isn’t as well known as many of its contemporaries, but it ranks right up there with the best of them. Just like Near Dark is a great vampire movie and Bad Moon is a great werewolf movie, 100 Feet is a great ghost story – and we would be saying that even if it didn’t have the Arrow in the Head connection. Red has a knack for taking established sub-genres and putting his own unique, fascinating twist on them. Using an electronic house arrest bracelet to trap a woman with the angry spirit of the man she killed in self defense was a really clever idea, and Red turned that idea into a well-crafted film that really draws the viewer in.
If you haven’t seen 100 Feet yet, it’s highly recommended that you seek out the barebones DVD or Blu-ray. If we can build the cult following for this film a bit more, maybe it will finally get the special edition release it deserves, like Red’s Bad Moon and Body Parts recently did.
Then I took on the task of writing an episode of WTF Happened to This Horror Movie that digs into the decade Freddy vs. Jason spent in development hell and discusses the many rejected scripts that were written for the film during that time. There was a lot of ground to cover in this one, and I wrote a lot of words for narrator Chris Bumbray to read:
Freddy vs. Jason script:
The ’80s were an incredible time for horror, and during that decade we were introduced to two of the genre’s greatest icons, Freddy Krueger of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th films. Those two gained a popularity that could rival that of the monsters and madmen Universal brought to the screen back in the Golden Age – and since Universal had their monsters cross paths on several occasions, it wasn’t long before fans started wondering what would happen if Freddy and Jason were to come face-to-face as well. Freddy vs. Jason (watch it HERE) was inevitable, but the ’80s were long gone by the time the film reached the big screen, and it took nearly ten years of struggle to get it there, with screenwriters turning in draft after draft of scripts that were rejected and tossed aside. Getting two slashers to fight shouldn’t have been so complicated, so we have to ask: What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie?
When the idea of Freddy vs. Jason first came up, the characters were still at two different companies, Freddy at New Line Cinema and Jason at Paramount. Paramount executive Frank Mancuso Jr. tried to make it happen, though. He asked Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI writer/director Tom McLoughlin if he would be interested in taking the helm of the crossover and approached New Line about the idea. The studios weren’t able to make a deal, so instead of pursuing McLoughlin’s back-up plan of Cheech and Chong Meet Jason – a crossover that, unfortunately, has never been made – Paramount moved forward with Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, which pit Jason against a telekinetic teenager who was basically a stand-in for Stephen King’s Carrie.
After the 1989 release of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, Paramount felt that they had run the series into the ground, so they allowed the original Friday the 13th‘s director-slash-producer Sean S. Cunningham to take Jason to a different studio. Cunningham, who had produced Elm Street creator Wes Craven’s film The Last House on the Left and even directed a bit of second unit on the original Elm Street, took Jason straight over to New Line. The first Jason movie to be distributed by New Line was 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which Cunningham wanted to be different from the preceding sequels. Director Adam Marcus and the writers certainly delivered that, starting the movie with Jason getting blown to pieces. He then uses supernatural abilities that had never been hinted at before to start possessing people, not regaining his own form until the climax, just in time to get dragged to Hell by giant hands. The only thing left behind is his hockey mask. Even though Cunningham and the New Line executives were already thinking of Freddy vs. Jason from the moment they made their deal, Marcus thought he was just dropping in a fun sight gag when he had Freddy’s gloved hand come out of the ground to drag Jason’s mask down to Hell at the end of that film. Marcus didn’t know he was setting up the crossover, or how appropriate it was that he had Freddy welcome Jason to Hell, since the two were about to spend several years in development hell together.
For Freddy vs. Jason to receive a greenlight, Cunningham and New Line executive Michael De Luca would both have to approve a script, and finding one they could both agree upon was a grueling process. They listened to countless pitches, approached filmmakers like Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro, and hired more than fifteen different screenwriters to work on different iterations of the script. Some of those scripts are readily available on the internet, and others that aren’t available are well covered in Dustin McNeill’s book Slash of the Titans, which is highly recommended to anyone interested in the making of Freddy vs. Jason.
The first writer to take a shot at the concept was future Titanic cast member Lewis Abernathy, who had previously worked with Cunningham on a few other projects. Abernathy crafted a story in which a cult of Freddy-worshiping teenagers abduct a young girl with the intention of impregnating her with a soulless child. By inhabiting the body of the child, Freddy will be able to rule the world. The girl’s older sister figures out that her best chance to thwart Freddy and the cult is to resurrect Jason Voorhees and sic him on them. Abernathy had done some uncredited revisions on Jason Goes to Hell, and even wrote the film’s opening sequence, so he knew that the body Jason was taken to Hell in was a different one from the body that exploded at the beginning of the movie. The characters in his take on Freddy vs. Jason put that blown up body back together with fishing line and barbed wire, using steel braces to reinforce the arms and legs. There’s no doubt Jason would have looked pretty cool in this movie. Problem is, Jason’s missing a heart, since the Coroner ate it in Jason Goes to Hell – yeah, that movie’s a weird one. So the new heart that’s inserted into Jason’s chest comes from the heroine’s boyfriend, who was killed by Freddy.
Abernathy’s script was unusable primarily due to the tone. This script not only brought back the cartoonish humor of Freddy’s Dead, it went further with it. Freddy is constantly cracking jokes and even steals the “Smokin’!” line from The Mask, there’s a scene where a character interacts with a talking booger inside Freddy’s nose, and the big fight takes place in a boxing ring in Hell, with cameos by the likes of Ted Bundy and Hitler. But while this was very clearly not the script they should move forward with, it did establish several elements that other screenwriters would work into their drafts. Versions of the Freddy-worshipers – sometimes multiple people in a cult, sometimes just one fanatic – would be featured in drafts written by David J. Schow, Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, David S. Goyer and James Dale Robinson, and Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger. Most of the scripts also had Jason being resurrected with the heart of the heroine’s boyfriend, with Jason’s heartless body usually being found at the bottom of Crystal Lake. Starting with Abernathy’s script, every rejected screenplay somehow made Freddy responsible for Jason drowning as a child. Abernathy wrote that Freddy was a camper at Camp Crystal Lake with Jason and drowned him because it was his idea of fun, in scripts by other writers Freddy was a camp counselor who had molested Jason and drowned him to cover up that crime. In a script written by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, Freddy drowns Jason just because the kid walked in on him having sex with Mrs. Voorhees.
Braga and Moore were hired for Freddy vs. Jason when they were fresh off of having Captains Kirk and Picard meet in Star Trek: Generations, so it seemed like they were the right scribes to turn to when you wanted iconic characters to collide. Rather than attempt to make a follow-up to the previous Elm Street and Friday movies, the duo took a meta approach along the lines of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare – in their story, the Friday the 13th films were based on the crimes of a real serial killer that we’d meet for the first time in this movie. The Jason envisioned by Braga/Moore is so grounded and human, he even gets captured by the authorities, locked up in jail, and put on trial. The heroine is his defense attorney, who realizes that Jason has a neurological disorder that keeps him from getting sleepy. When he’s sedated, he dreams of the man who drowned him – Freddy, who did not have movies made about him in this world – and his body serves as a doorway, through which Freddy can enter waking reality with his dream world powers intact. Freddy takes advantage of this and ends up causing mayhem at a shopping mall, which is also where the climactic battle takes place.
The Braga/Moore script was interesting and unique, but the way they re-imagined Jason begs the question – if the Freddy or Jason in Freddy vs. Jason weren’t the same characters fans had already come to know and love, why should the fans care about the crossover at all? The entire appeal of having the two clash is lost. This same issue came up again with other drafts, as the writers repeatedly attempted to go meta with the concept instead of scripting a match-up between the Freddy and Jason we had seen in previous movies.
In 1991, Peter Briggs wrote an Alien vs. Predator spec script that was purchased by 20th Century Fox, and since he had experience writing a crossover he was the next writer to get hired for Freddy vs. Jason. Briggs’ draft is the only full screenplay written for the project that actually brought back heroes and heroines from previous Freddy and Jason movies; specifically, he had the survivors of Jason Goes to Hell meet up with Alice Johnson, Freddy’s nemesis from Elm Streets 4 and 5, and her young son Jacob, the Dream Child himself. As fun as it would be to see characters from a Jason movie get menaced by Freddy and to see Alice face off with Jason, Briggs dropped these characters into an overblown, apocalyptic story that begins in 17th century Italy and is ultimately about a demon called Thanos (no, not the Marvel character) planning to take over the world in the year 2000, with Freddy and Jason basically just serving as his henchmen. Freddy isn’t featured enough in the script, while Jason is the one who is resurrected by cultists this time, emerging from Hell with a chrome mask reminiscent of the poster for Jason Goes to Hell. Journeys through the netherworld and even some time travel come into play by the time it’s all over, and Briggs reveals that Jason lived on Elm Street when he was a kid – which is why he became Freddy’s first victim after the child killer gained his dream powers. The Briggs draft became one of the most popular rejected scripts when Fangoria ran an interview with the writer in July of 1995. Briggs told them that New Line was hoping to get the film released in ’96, but fans actually had seven more years to wait beyond that.
The Crow screenwriter David J. Schow, who also worked with New Line on some Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Critters movies, did a direct rewrite of the Abernathy script, taking a more serious approach to the material than Abernathy had. Schow’s largest contribution to the development process was to make a character named Dominic the leader of the Freddy-worshiping cult, which Schow called the Fred-Heads. The executives really latched on to this Dominic guy and had him brought back as a human antagonist in several other scripts, including one by Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight’s Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris.
Coming along just six months after the Schow draft, the script by Reiff and Voris was titled Freddy vs. Jason: Millennium Massacre, and it merged the basic ideas of the Abernathy script with the year 2000 apocalypse idea at the core of the Briggs script. A cult called the Fred-Heads, led by Dominic Necros, is trying to release Freddy from limbo so he can destroy the world. To protect her sister from the cult, a young woman resurrects Jason and sends him after Freddy, who raped and drowned him when he was a child. Reiff and Voris apparently pulled off the ‘Jason vs. Freddy and his cult’ idea better than other writers had, because their take on the material very nearly got a greenlight. With their script in place, New Line began searching for a director. The person they chose was special effects legend Rob Bottin, who is best known for the work he did on John Carpenter’s The Thing. Bottin would be making his directorial debut on this film, and planned to re-design the looks of both Freddy and Jason. He also came to the project with his own story ideas, convincing New Line to scrap the Reiff/Voris script.
Bottin wrote his a treatment that centered on a girl and her friends going to Camp Crystal Lake and tripping on a drug called Somnambulene that allows them to share each other’s dreams. While being stalked by Freddy fanatic Dominic Necros, they also hallucinate encounters with Freddy and Jason, who are just film characters in their reality. But somehow these film characters are also alive and capable of killing them, and of fighting each other. David S. Goyer, who worked with New Line on Dark City and the Blade trilogy, and would eventually write the icon mash-up Batman v. Superman, teamed with comic book writer James Dale Robinson on an unsuccessful attempt to turn the Bottin treatment into a sensible screenplay, and future Kung Fu Panda writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger also weren’t able to make it work. Bottin soon drifted away from the project, and The Mask and Timecop writer Mark Verheiden – who went on to be showrunner for the third season of Ash vs. Evil Dead – was hired to make one last attempt at turning Bottin’s treatment into a usable script. Verheiden tried to improve the idea by taking Dominic Necros out of the mix and removing the meta approach, setting the story in the continuity of the existing Elm Street and Friday movies. But his draft didn’t get the go-ahead, either.
Now Cunningham was getting restless, and he started to develop a Jason movie that he could make while waiting for Freddy vs. Jason to get off the ground. He gave New Line a deadline – if they didn’t have a script they could greenlight by a certain date, he was going into production on Jason X. Michael De Luca didn’t want that to happen, and tried to stop Jason X by asking The Cell writer Mark Protosevich to get a draft of Freddy vs. Jason ready in six weeks. Protosevich made the deadline, but there was no way his version of the crossover was ever going to be made. Entrenched in academia, the Protosevich draft centers on a grad student who inadvertently summons the title characters back into existence simply by putting together a presentation on them. The legendary killers then start terrorizing people around the student. It’s all surprisingly intellectual, and would have made for an extremely dull movie. The fact that Jason X exists shows that it didn’t go over well.
By the time Jason X was ready for release, there had been a major shake-up at New Line. The studio got new owners, many employees were let go, and lost in the shuffle was Michael De Luca. He was replaced by Toby Emmerich, who was open about not being a fan of horror, and Emmerich put I Know What You Did Last Summer producer Stokely Chaffin in charge of Freddy vs. Jason. Before De Luca left the company, he hired the writing duo of Damian Shannon and Mark J. Swift, who had no produced films to their credit, to write a new draft of Freddy vs. Jason. When Shannon and Swift turned in their script, Chaffin thought it was good enough to get the movie into production, and even though Cunningham had issues with the script, he signed off on it because he just wanted Freddy vs. Jason to get made already. Although the box office failure of Jason X made New Line a little hesitant about making another Jason movie at this point, they decided to move forward with it anyway. The search for a director ended with Ronny Yu, who had recently revitalized another popular slasher franchise with 1998’s Bride of Chucky. With Yu at the helm, Freddy vs. Jason finally went into production in September of 2002.
It would be easy to be cynical and speculate that the Shannon and Swift script wouldn’t have gotten the greenlight earlier in the development process, that the new executives at New Line just gave the okay to the first script that landed on their desks and Cunningham shrugged his shoulders about it. But even though things had changed by the time Shannon and Swift were done with their draft, they had also truly cracked the code on how to write a successful Freddy vs. Jason script. They didn’t overthink the concept, didn’t distract from the title characters by adding in other villains, didn’t try to re-imagine Freddy or Jason, and didn’t cheapen Jason’s mythology by saying that Freddy was responsible for drowning him. Their script isn’t set in a world where A Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th are movies that the characters have watched. Shannon and Swift’s Freddy vs. Jason is a follow-up to the existing films, picking up after the events of Freddy’s Dead and Jason Goes to Hell. Weakened not only by his defeat at the end of Freddy’s Dead but also by the measures taken by the authorities in Springwood, Ohio to ensure that he can’t infiltrate the dreams of any more Elm Street kids, Freddy has to search the bowels of Hell for someone he can send to Elm Street to kill some people and stir up fear. Jason proves to be the perfect candidate, and Freddy is able to manipulate him into going to Elm Street by appearing to him in the image of his beloved mother, similar to how Jason was fooled into thinking the heroine was his mother at the end of Friday the 13th Part 2. Jason’s dedication to his mother is so strong that he rises from Hell to follow her orders and go to Elm Street, where he kills someone in bed at an iconic location from the Nightmare movies, 1428 Elm. The police immediately jump to the conclusion that if someone died in bed in that house, Freddy has to be responsible. The fear generated among the locals by the murders Jason commits is enough that Freddy is able to start appearing in nightmares again; problem is, Jason sticks around in Springwood to go on a killing spree. He continues whittling down the population, stealing potential victims from Freddy. Now Freddy has to figure out how to stop Jason, and the teens realize they need Jason to fight back against the dream stalker. It’s simple, straightforward, and by far the best and most fitting story that had been written for Freddy vs. Jason in all those years of development.
Which isn’t to say that the finished film is perfect. Chaffin was concerned that Shannon and Swift’s script would result in a film that was too long, so she brought David S. Goyer back to the project to perform a rewrite. Goyer was able to streamline the script, but while doing so also made sure that the characters reiterate the plot to the audience over and over again through some very clunky dialogue. Apparently the producers were concerned that viewers wouldn’t be able to keep track of what was going on, despite how simple it is. While Yu brought a terrific visual style to the film and turned the fight between Freddy and Jason into a glorious bloodbath that lived up to all the anticipation, it has been claimed that he was more focused on the visuals and action than he was on the cast’s performances. Combined with the rewritten dialogue, that resulted in some awkward, laughable moments.
And then there’s the fact that Jason was recast. Kane Hodder had taken over the role in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, and when Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was heading into production, no one thought to contact him. The movie was going to be shot in Vancouver, so Canadian stuntman Ken Kirzinger was hired to play Jason – until Hodder reached out to the producers and fought to be brought back. When he was re-hired, Hodder became the first person to ever play Jason twice. Then he reprised the role for Jason Goes to Hell, and again for Jason X. The entire time Freddy vs. Jason was in development, fans and Hodder himself assumed it was a given that he would be playing Jason in it, just as it was a given that Robert Englund would be playing Freddy again. Fans wanted to see Englund and Hodder fight each other. But they didn’t get to. There has never been a direct answer given for why Hodder wasn’t hired to play Jason. New Line execs said Yu had his own vision for Jason that required an actor with a different build, Yu has said the recasting was the studio’s decision. Whatever the case, Freddy vs. Jason was filmed in Vancouver, and Ken Kirzinger – who did a few stunts as Jason in Jason Takes Manhattan and also got tossed across a diner by Hodder in the movie – was again hired to play Jason. This time the casting stuck, and Kirzinger replaced Hodder more than a decade after he was originally supposed to. It wasn’t the Jason anyone expected to see in the movie, but there are some great things about Kirzinger’s Jason. He’s intimidating, he’s brutal, an unstoppable force… but Yu’s choice to make Jason move slower than ever before, with Kirzinger calling some his movements “painfully slow”, did result in a divisive representation of the character.
The Goyer rewrite and Yu’s direction also gave some viewers the mistaken impression that this movie says Jason is afraid of water, which every Friday fan knows isn’t the case. Shannon and Swift’s idea was that Freddy would be able to tap into the fear Jason felt as he was drowning when he was a child; Jason isn’t afraid of water, but he was scared when he was drowning. Freddy is able to use that against him – but in the movie, when Jason won’t strike at Freddy simply because there’s some water flowing between them, it does look like Jason is afraid of water, even though that wasn’t the intention.
Freddy vs. Jason definitely has its issues, and some of those have caused it to age poorly, but it’s still a lot of fun. Going ahead with the Shannon and Swift script, and hiring Yu to bring that script to life, paid off for New Line. The audience had been wanting to see Freddy fight Jason since the ‘80s, and when New Line gave them that fight they came out to watch it. All those years of development hell became worth it when Freddy vs. Jason was released in August of 2003 – ten years to the month after the release of Jason Goes to Hell – and earned over 116 million dollars at the global box office. Fans have debates over which of the characters won the fight, but this movie was a victory for everyone involved.
Then it was time for another Best Horror Movie You Never Saw episode, and for this one we took a look back at Sandor Stern's creepy 1988 flick Pin:
Pin script:
If you’re looking for a movie that will give you the creeps in all sorts of ways, we’ve got one to tell you about in the latest edition of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw video series. In this episode, we’re going to dig into the 1988 psychological horror thriller Pin (pick up a copy HERE), which is both deeply inappropriate and creepy as hell.
CREATORS / CAST: Pin started off as a novel written by Andrew Neiderman and published in 1981. The most popular novel with Neiderman’s name on it is probably The Devil’s Advocate, which was turned into a movie starring Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino in 1997, but his greatest success has come under a different name – in 1986, Neiderman was hired to be the ghost writer for late author V.C. Andrews. Since then, he has churned out over eighty novels writing as V.C. Andrews. The story Neiderman told in the pages of Pin was brought to the screen by writer/director Sandor Stern, who has over forty writing credits and more than thirty directing credits, but there are two films other than Pin that really stand out from the pack – Stern wrote the 1979 version of The Amityville Horror, based on a novel by Jay Anson, and ten years later returned to the Amityville franchise to write and direct the sequel subtitled The Evil Escapes.
Pin stars David Hewlett, Cynthia Preston, John Pyper-Ferguson, Terry O’Quinn, and Helene Udy as prominent human characters, and then we have the title character. Pin is a medical dummy that sits in the office of O’Quinn’s Doctor Linden, but don’t let the fact that this movie is named after a dummy lead you to believe that Pin is going to walk around slashing people like Chucky or that he has a demon hanging out with him like Annabelle. Pin really is just a dummy. Trouble arises when someone comes to believe that this inanimate object is actually a living, thinking creature.
You see, in addition to his medical knowledge Doctor Linden also fancies himself a ventriloquist, a skill he displays when he uses Pin to teach his children Leon and Ursula life lessons. And he doesn’t let the anthropomorphism of this dummy stop with those teaching moments, he messes with the minds of his kids even more by pretending that Pin is truly alive at all times, a trusted family friend who buys the kids gifts for birthdays and holidays. All the best gifts come from Pin. While Ursula is able to figure out at a young age that Pin is a dummy with a voice provided by her father, Leon fully buys into the concept, and this isn’t something he leaves behind in childhood. We see Leon and Ursula at a few different ages over the course of the film, but they’re primarily played by Hewlett and Preston, who take over the roles when the characters are teenagers and carry them into adulthood, and it’s once Hewlett is playing Leon that he starts going too far with his belief that Pin is alive. Even if he has to do Pin’s voice himself, Pin is alive. Although we never see Leon receive an official diagnosis, his sister is able to deduce that he has paranoid schizophrenia, and the upbringing that his overbearing father and uncaring mother provided certainly didn’t do him any favors. That’s part of why he gets so strongly attached to the dummy, because he only ever saw warmth and kindness from Pin, and is able to imagine that he’s the caring parental figure he didn’t really have.
Life gets even worse for Leon and Ursula when their parents die in a car accident – while Pin happens to be sitting in the backseat – and Leon retrieves the dummy from the wreckage so he can move it into the family home and treat it like a houseguest. He even gives Pin skin and hair so he can appear more human. Add in the fact that Leon is obsessed with his sister and gets seriously upset whenever she shows another man attention, and you have the recipes for both disaster and an effectively unnerving horror film.
BACKGROUND: Stern wanted to turn Pin into a movie from the moment he read the novel, which was passed to him by Neiderman’s agent. One reason why he was so drawn to the material stems from the fact that he had been a family doctor himself, until he was able to leave the profession behind in favor of a career in the entertainment industry, and was fascinated by the schizophrenic patients he had dealt with. He thought the story of Leon and the medical dummy would make an interesting movie, but it took a few years before he could make it happen. He was able to get two separate producers to read the script, Pierre David and René Malo, but the project didn’t move forward with either of them. David had a deal with Universal, but when he brought Pin to them the studio passed on it. A few years down the line, Stern got lucky when David and Malo became producing partners, and once they realized they were both fans of the Pin script they decided to make the movie together as a Canadian production. A budget of 3 million Canadian dollars was secured, with 70,000 of that going toward the making of the Pin dummy.
Pin was set up at New World Pictures, with the stipulation that the cast needed to include at least one recognizable American actor so the film would get shown in the states. Stern had seen O’Quinn in The Stepfather and chose him to be the sole American in the cast. Hewlett, Preston, and Ferguson were basically starting out in their careers at that time, while Udy was already familiar to genre fans from movies like The Incubus, The Dead Zone, Nightflyers, and My Bloody Valentine, where she famously got a showerhead stuck through her skull. The fact that all five of those actors are still incredibly prolific to this day, each of them with credits nearing or in the triple digits, is an indication of just how well cast this was.
Although Pierre David had been backing Stern’s intention to make Pin for years by the time the film went into production, the producer was not happy when he decided to visit the set and check out the first week of dailies. That’s when David and Stern realized they had different views of what the film should be; David had been expecting it to be more of a straightforward horror film, while Stern felt that the “psychological thriller” he had in mind was outside of the horror genre. This difference was most evident in the way that Stern and cinematographer Guy Dufaux had been shooting the film, which wasn’t dark enough for David’s liking. Some scenes ended up being reshot to appease the producer. But that seems to be the biggest issue that arose during production, so Pin appears to have been a smooth ride overall.
The real problem came when it was time to screen the finished film for a test audience. The screening started over an hour behind schedule, and the audience that had been waiting in the theatre all that time decided to make a mockery of it. Stern asked New World to hold a second test screening, but the company was dealing with financial problems at the time and wouldn’t pay to show the movie again. While Pin was still given a theatrical release in Canada, it was sent straight to video in the United States – despite the presence of O’Quinn in the cast! Once on home video, it seemed to fall into obscurity rather quickly. It has managed to develop a cult following over the years, with DVD releases giving it another chance to earn fans.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Pin should have gotten a better release than it did in the ‘80s, and it definitely didn’t deserve to have the test audience turn against it, but it’s not a film that would have gone over well with movie-goers who were expecting gore or a body count. While it’s undoubtedly a horror movie, you can see why Stern disagreed with that label and preferred to call it a thriller. This isn’t a movie that’s focused on bloodshed or even jump scares. This is a movie that aims to get into your head, to unsettle you. At its core it’s basically a twist on Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bloch’s Psycho; Leon being the Norman Bates of the story and Pin standing in for Norman’s mother, just like Leon sees him as a substitute for his own parents.
The film captures your attention by showing the stages of Leon’s gradual mental breakdown. We see him as a child, having negative interactions with his parents. We see the event that gives him sexual hang-ups for the rest of his life. We watch as his obsession with Pin grows. Seeing how he was raised, it’s easy to understand why he would have a lot of issues, but his mental disorder causes him to take things even further than we can understand. We begin to wonder just how far he’ll slip into madness, and what lengths he’ll go to in order to make sure that his sister will remain in the family home with him and Pin.
Pin is an intriguing character study of a seriously troubled individual, and Stern had an equal interest in exploring both the thriller aspect and the idea that two people who are raised in the same household can turn out to be quite different from each other. He said he had always been "fascinated by the fact that you can have siblings, who have the same circumstances in their growth, yet go off on different paths. One of them will become a criminal and the other will become a lawyer, you know? … I was trying to establish the influence of the parents on the kids and the fact that each child receives it differently.”
Because of Stern’s interest in showing Leon and Ursula’s upbringing, Doctor Linden and his wife make it much further into the film than you might expect. By the time they have their accident, we have gained a sympathy for Leon that will never fully go away, since we know that his parents are largely responsible for how damaged he is.
Hewlett is great as Leon, and Preston helps him carry the film by turning in a terrific performance of her own. Ursula is a bit odd as well, but she’s also the character we’re meant to side with during all of this. She knows that her brother is disturbed, she’s hurt and frustrated to see how Leon acts toward Pin, but she loves her brother and wants him to be happy and content. It’s a struggle for her to try to lead a normal life while also trying to pacify Leon.
The acting, the cinematography by Dufaux, the music by Peter Manning Robinson, and the subject matter all work together to make sure that nearly every scene of this film is enveloped in an unnerving, haunting atmosphere. Pin himself is also unpleasant to look at, even though we never really join Leon in the belief that he’s alive. He’s just naturally creepy, it doesn’t matter that he’s inanimate. His creepiness is enhanced by the voice that Doctor Linden and Leon both use to speak for him. That vocal performance was actually done by Jonathan Banks, another prolific character actor, but you’re not likely to think, “Hey, that’s Mike from Breaking Bad!” when you hear the Pin voice.
BEST SCENE(S): This isn’t the sort of movie that’s going to leave the average viewer with a smile on their face, having been entertained by all the fun scenes they witnessed. The best scenes in Pin are the ones that cause psychological scars, the ones that will linger in your mind for a long time. Scenes of a father using a creepy voice to speak to his children through a dummy. A scene where the father performs an abortion on his own daughter and asks his son to watch the procedure. One where Leon decides to read some of his poetry out loud to Ursula and her boyfriend, and the poem he chooses is about a man who’s thinking of raping his sister. The list goes on. The scene that may be most traumatizing to viewers comes when a young Leon hides in his father’s office and watches as a nurse uses Pin as a sex doll. Yes, the dummy is anatomically correct.
There are some great, traditional thriller scenes in there as well. A moment in which Ursula and her boyfriend think they’re having a private conversation about Leon’s mental health, unaware that her brother is listening from the next room, not even noticing that his reflection is in the mirror right beside them, is the sort of classic scene that increases the sense of dread. The dangerous person now knows that others are working against him.
The Pin dummy also manages to be at the center of some chilling moments, with one standout being the accident scene, where Doctor Linden and his wife are freaked out to see the dummy moving around in the backseat while the doctor is driving at an unsafe speed. They’re in a hurry, and the doctor has just found out that Leon has been talking to the dummy as if it’s alive, so they’re in a heightened emotional state. Even though Pin is only moving because the motion of the car is knocking him around, it still gets to them, and the way they react to his movements makes the scene unsettling.
As if Helene Udy didn’t face enough troubles in her previous genre movies, she also gets scared by Pin when Leon sticks the dummy in a motorized wheelchair and uses it to chase her around a dark house. Pierre David was probably happy Stern put that scene in there; it’s as “horror movie” as it gets.
PARTING SHOT: Pin is jaw-droppingly strange, and Stern filled his film with scenes that were meant to make the viewer uncomfortable. All of that shock value is packed into a captivating thriller that deserves to be a lot more popular than it is. Any genre fan who hasn’t seen Pin yet, especially fans who are fond of horror films from the 1980s, are strongly encouraged to seek it out. This should get mentioned regularly as being among the better horror offerings of the ‘80s, but not enough people have seen it. Yet.
Pin didn’t make any money, but the disappointment of the release didn’t tarnish the film for Stern. He has said that working on it was the best filmmaking experience he ever had, and he wouldn’t change anything about it. Hewlett is proud of it as well, calling it a “creepy little movie that I starred in back when I was cool and thin and had so much hair I didn’t know what color to dye it. It’s a great psychological horror flick and really helped put me on the map in my film and television career. It also paid for freedom, in the form of my first apartment. There should be a sequel. I look so much scarier now!”
I have written more videos for the channel, so another batch will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Videos!
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