Video Scripts: Halloween 6, Jason Goes to Hell, The Thing 2011
Cody shares three more of the videos he has written for the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and now I also write scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
Below, you can see three more videos that I have written the scripts for.
Since I had already written about the "Thorn timeline" in the Halloween franchise, a timeline which includes Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, I was asked to write a "WTF Happened to This Horror Movie?" video about that particular Halloween sequel as well. Here's the result:
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers script:
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the sixth film in the Halloween franchise, isn’t just one of the most divisive entries in the series, it also had a more troubled production than any of the others. There was studio interference, a controversial recasting, and extensive reshoots, which resulted in two substantially different cuts of the film – one of which wasn’t officially available for decades. It’s a messy story, and we’re diving right into it with this episode of What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie?
Halloween 6 was truly behind the eight ball from the beginning, as in order to be a satisfying sequel it was going to have to address the mysteries 1989’s Halloween 5 had set up and not provided any answers to. In that film, we had seen that slasher Michael Myers had a symbol tattooed on his wrist, something we had never seen before and shouldn’t be there because Myers isn’t exactly the sort of person who will just stop by the local tattoo parlor to get some ink. This tattoo was actually something that was left over from an alternate opening sequence in which Myers was nursed to health by an occultist called Doctor Death. It was this occultist who put the tattoo on his wrist, and the symbol was supposed to mean “eternal life”. Doctor Death was cut out of the movie, but that tattoo was kept in – and the filmmakers doubled down on it by showing a Man in Black lurking around the town of Haddonfield, Illinois, sporting the exact same tattoo on his wrist. Nobody involved with Halloween 5 even knew who this Man in Black was, they just dropped him into the movie to add some more intrigue. One potential and ridiculous explanation put forth was that the Man in Black could be Michael Myers’ twin brother no one had ever mentioned before. But whoever this guy was, at the end of the film he busted into the Haddonfield Police Department and massacred the cops so he could rescue Myers from a jail cell – leaving Myers’ young niece Jamie Lloyd, the focus of his Halloween 4 and 5 killing sprees, to find the bodies.
Halloween 5 had reached theatres a week shy of a year after the release of part 4, and producer Moustapha Akkad initially planned to get the sixth film out quickly as well. One writer who was contacted in those early days was Quentin Tarantino, whose screenplays for True Romance and Natural Born Killers were going around Hollywood at the time. Tarantino wasn’t formally hired, but he did ponder a 20 minute sequence that would find Michael Myers and the Man in Black leaving a trail of bodies at coffee shops and other pit stops while on a road trip down Route 66.
When Halloween 5’s box office haul didn’t quite match up to what Halloween 4 had made, Akkad decided to take some extra time on this one… and the development of part 6 was slowed down further when the original Halloween’s creative team of John Carpenter and Debra Hill filed a lawsuit in an attempt to win back the rights to the franchise, which Akkad had taken control of when putting together the fourth movie. Carpenter’s hope was to take Halloween to New Line Cinema, the studio he was making In the Mouth of Madness for – the studio known as The House That Freddy Built due to the success of their Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and which had just made Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 and was also acquiring Jason Voorhees at the time. While fans would have been hyped to see Carpenter take control of Halloween again, they might not have been so enthusiastic about the idea he had in mind. Carpenter laid out his concept in an issue of Fangoria: “If you can’t kill Michael Myers, what do you do? You send him up into space, except he gets out up there and ends up on a space station.” Yep, there was a possibility that Myers could have gone to space even before Pinhead, Leprechaun, and Jason Voorhees got there.
But the lawsuit was decided in the favor of Akkad, and Dimension Films, the genre label of Miramax, bested New Line in a bidding war over the rights to distribute Halloween 6. Once Myers settled into his new home at Dimension, development on the sixth film hit warp speed. In April of 1994, screenwriter Phil Rosenberg turned in a draft of the script that Akkad was reportedly so displeased with that he threw it across the room after reading it. Miramax was about to release Pulp Fiction, so they asked Quentin Tarantino and his producer Lawrence Bender who they thought should direct the film. They recommended their friend Scott Spiegel, who had co-written Evil Dead II and directed the 1989 slasher Intruder, which Bender had produced. There was some talk of Spiegel rewriting the Halloween 6 script and possibly directing the film with Tarantino on board as producer, but he only got as far as writing a loose treatment before the project slipped away from him. Just one month after Rosenberg finished his draft, the writing duo of Irving Belateche and Lawrence Guterman had already turned in a rewrite. What’s interesting about the versions of the story writers were crafting at this point is how much they disregarded the Man in Black and Jamie Lloyd. Questions raised by Halloween 5 were not being answered. Instead, the scripts were introducing a new heroine named Dana, and featured Tommy Doyle – a character from the original Halloween – as a loner and virtual reality enthusiast who discovers that the way to defeat Michael Myers is to find a portal that can only be opened on Halloween night and have him get dragged into the underworld. Not too far off from what happened at the end of Jason Goes to Hell.
So in June of 1994, Akkad contacted Daniel Farrands, a Halloween super fan he had met four years earlier, and Farrands was given the job he had been dreaming of taking on ever since he saw Halloween 5: he was hired to write the sequel. It’s a good thing Farrands already had ideas for where he wanted to take Halloween 6, because by the time he was hired the scheduled start of production was only four months away – Dimension and Akkad wanted to have cameras rolling on this thing by the end of October 1994. Farrands kept a couple elements from the rejected drafts; the idea that Halloween has been banned in Haddonfield since the events of the fifth movie, the presence of a loner Tommy Doyle who has figured out the supernatural secrets of Michael Myers. He ditched the virtual reality aspect, though, and Dana was also gone. Instead, Farrands set out to solve the mysteries of Halloween 5. To do so, he drew some inspiration from the Curtis Richards novelization of the first Halloween, which started with a prologue that went back to the holiday’s Druid roots and presented the idea that the Myers bloodline is cursed. Another inspiration was the scene in Halloween II where we see that Myers had uncharacteristically written the word “Samhain” on a wall in blood.
Farrands’ story finds that a Druid cult has been built up around Michael Myers, who hears voices telling him to kill his family because he’s afflicted with an ancient curse. The symbol tattooed on his wrist is the Thorn rune, and his Halloween killing sprees coincide with nights in which a constellation in the shape of the rune is visible in the sky. The leader of the cult, the Man in Black, is Doctor Wynn of Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, a character who was seen in the first Halloween, arguing with Myers’ doctor Sam Loomis about the lax response to Myers’ escape and whether or not Myers knows how to drive a car. As it turns out, the cult captured Jamie Lloyd on Halloween night in 1989 and has kept her captive in the bowels of Smith’s Grove for six years. During that time, they even had Myers impregnate his teenage niece. Farrands has said that he didn’t really intend for the silent slasher to be the baby daddy, but by the time the movie was filming someone else had done revisions to the script that made it pretty clear that he was. In the initial cut of the movie, anyway.
Jamie gives birth to a boy who’ll end up being named Steven, then she manages to escape from Smith’s Grove with her newborn just in time for Halloween 1995… and Myers and the Man in Black follow close behind. In Haddonfield, Tommy Doyle has unearthed all the information on the Thorn curse and is living across the street from Myers’ childhood home, which is now inhabited by relatives of the Strodes, the family that had adopted Myers’ sister, Jamie’s late mother Laurie, back in the day. One of the Strodes is a kid named Danny, who is hearing voices just like Michael Myers does. The cult’s plan is to have Myers kill Steven, therefore passing the Thorn curse over to little Danny, and somehow that will also magically make Doctor Loomis replace Wynn in the caretaker position. It’s quite convoluted and far off from the franchise’s simplistic roots, but this is the story that made it to the screen, more or less.
The writer had been found, but the director search continued. Hider in the House’s Matthew Patrick was hired to direct the film and asked cinematographer Billy Dickson to shoot it for him. Then Dickson was notified that Patrick had lost the gig. When Farrands was hired, he was told that When a Stranger Calls director Fred Walton was taking the helm. But that didn’t happen, either. Producer Paul Freeman was one of the few people who have ever seen a low budget 1993 crime film called Thieves Quartet, which was the feature directorial debut of Joe Chappelle, and he was so impressed with that movie that he offered the Halloween 6 job to Chappelle. Chappelle accepted the offer, and he’s the one who ended up directing the movie with Billy Dickson handling the cinematography.
Farrands had some high hopes for the cast that didn’t pan out. Since Christopher Lee had been John Carpenter’s first choice to play Doctor Loomis in the original Halloween, Farrands had written Doctor Wynn with Lee mind, despite the fact that the character had not been a regal British man when he appeared in the first movie. Instead of Lee, the role ended up going to American actor Mitchell Ryan, best known for being the villain in Lethal Weapon. For the role of radio shock jock Barry Simms, Farrands imagined the stunt casting of either Howard Stern or Mike Myers. The person cast was Leo Geter, the guy who got frisky with Linnea Quigley on a pool table in Silent Night, Deadly Night. But when it came to casting expectations and casting reality, the true heartbreaker was the role of Jamie Lloyd.
Jamie had been played by Danielle Harris in Halloweens 4 and 5, and when Harris heard they were looking to cast an actress as Jamie in part 6, she set out to claim the role that had always been hers. The production was looking for an 18 year old to play the character so they wouldn’t have to deal with child labor laws, and Harris was just 17 at the time – so she spent around four thousand dollars of her own money going to court to get emancipated so she could be considered an adult during the making of Halloween 6. After she had done that, the number crunchers working behind the scenes told her what they were willing to pay her to be in the film, and that offer was less than what she had spent to get emancipated. All she wanted was to get paid enough to cover the court costs she had racked up so she could do the movie, but she couldn’t get a higher offer, even with Moustapha Akkad backing her up. The people in charge of paying the actors wouldn’t budge and were insultingly dismissive of Harris, so she walked away from Halloween 6 and J.C. Brandy was cast as Jamie.
The presentation of Jamie in the film was disappointing anyway, as the role got whittled down more and more as the movie progressed. Jamie had a heroic battle with Myers at the end of the film in Farrands’ script, but in the shooting draft she was killed about halfway into the movie and in the cut that was released to theatres she dies very early on.
Thankfully, Donald Pleasence was brought back to play Doctor Loomis one more time, and ended up sharing scenes with an actor who was just getting started in 1994 but is one of the most popular actors in Hollywood these days: Paul Rudd, who was cast as off-kilter Michael Myers expert Tommy Doyle. Although Halloween 6 ended up being released after audiences had already seen Rudd in Clueless, this movie was Rudd’s first.
Shot with the working title Halloween 666: The Origin of Michael Myers, the film made its October 1994 production start date and proceeded to shoot through a bitterly cold fall, complete with snow. A Fangoria reporter was on set one night to witness a shot of Michael Myers pursuing heroine Kara Strode, played by Marianne Hagan, getting messed up because Myers actor George P. Wilbur slipped on a patch of ice. This was Wilbur’s second time playing Myers, as he had played the character for the majority of Halloween 4, making him the first person to ever play the role in two movies.
The cast and crew didn’t just have to deal with the ice and cold, but also with the fact that the script was constantly being rewritten during filming, with Paul Freeman, Joe Chappelle, and script doctor Rand Ravich all making their own tweaks to the story. But the movie was completed on schedule, and a cut was ready to be screened for a test audience in early 1995. And this is when things got really messy. As far as the producers were concerned, Halloween 6 was done and ready for its theatrical release. They were satisfied with the cut of the movie they had. Unfortunately, the test screening audience wasn’t so pleased with the film – and when Dimension saw the reactions that came out of that screening, they demanded that the film not only be recut, but also undergo major reshoots. Dimension would earn a reputation for tinkering with their movies too much, and the film that would end up being called Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is a prime example of that, another being when they made Wes Craven shoot two different versions of the werewolf movie Cursed. It’s quite fitting that both of those movies happened to have the word Curse in their titles.
Reshoots on Halloween 6 happened in July of 1995, just two months before the film’s September release date. Dimension wanted an almost entirely new third act for the movie, but they were stuck with using the Doctor Loomis scenes they already had because, sadly, Pleasence had passed away in February of ’95, very soon after principal photography had wrapped, at the age of 75. The first cut of the movie, which would come to be known as the Producer’s Cut since the producers had signed off on it, had leaned heavily into the Thorn cult aspect of the story, so much that it featured Tommy managing to stop Myers in his tracks by putting him in a circle of magical stones – something that even Farrands, the person who came up with the curse concept, felt was going too far. The mandate for the reshoots was to ditch the cult aspect of the story as much as possible. The robes worn by cultists were written out, a scene was added where Myers massacres the cult members, and new strangeness was added in that nobody could explain. The new ending has hints of genetic experiments, shots of fetuses in aquariums, and Tommy injects Myers with a weird green liquid that then comes leaking out of his face when Tommy beats him with a pipe. What does it all mean? No one knows, just like no one knew who the Man in Black was when they made Halloween 5. Farrands can’t explain it, because he wasn’t asked to write the new ending.
Wilbur also wasn’t asked back to play Michael Myers in the reshoots, with A. Michael Lerner wearing the mask for the new scenes. Oddly, Wilbur was still on set to play one of the cultists killed by Lerner’s Myers. Cinematographer Billy Dickson wasn’t available to shoot the new footage, so he was replaced by Thomas Callaway.
Dimension also felt that Halloween 6 would be improved with the addition of gore, so the special effects crew was tasked with adding more bloodshed to the kills. Some of the gore went way over-the-top: in one scene where Myers had simply snapped a man’s neck in the Producer’s Cut, the theatrical cut shows that he twists the man’s head so hard that his spine tears out of his flesh. The most famous moment of gore comes when a character is electrocuted until their head explodes. This gore was added into a movie that was now edited with flashy, music video style, and composer Alan Howarth re-recorded his score to accommodate the film’s new over-the-top tone, taking the music over-the-top as well with drums and electric guitar. That still wasn’t far enough for Chappelle, who brought in a friend of his to add more electric guitar to the soundtrack. The new music was paired with sound design that added strange sound effects throughout the movie.
The theatrical cut ended up being 8 minutes shorter than the Producer’s Cut, but was so poorly received by critics, the general audience, and fans, that it makes you wonder if Dimension might have been better off just skipping the reshoots and releasing the film as it was at the test screening. While the 15 million Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers made at the box office was better than part 5’s 11 million, it was still short of Halloween 4’s 17 million.
As soon as Halloween 6 was released, fans noticed it was lacking scenes that had been featured in the trailer and pictured in the pages of magazines like Fangoria. It wasn’t long before they learned about the existence of the Producer’s Cut – and soon bootleg VHS copies of the Producer’s Cut started spreading around, giving fans the chance to see the film in its original form, even though the picture was murky. The Producer’s Cut was so widely available and the demand for a better quality version of it was so great, this scrapped version of the movie ended up getting an official Blu-ray release from Scream Factory in 2014.
Both cuts of the film have their issues. No one involved could ever figure out the best ending for the story, and the fact that the franchise had gotten to a point where we’re talking about secret origins, curses, and cults was never going to sit well with every fan. But it’s good that the Producer’s Cut is out there so we can see what the movie was like before it lost the plot and went off the rails during the reshoots done for the theatrical cut. Now fans can choose which cut they like better – and both are equally valid, because no sequel ever continued the story of either version.
The movie’s box office total was low enough that Dimension was planning to send future sequels straight to video, much like they did with the Hellraiser and Children of the Corn franchises, among others. Michael Myers was saved from that fate when Jamie Lee Curtis decided to return as Laurie Strode, the heroine from the first two Halloweens, in the next movie… but her return also meant that the events of 4, 5, and 6 were tossed aside so that part 7 could be a direct sequel to part 2. Jamie Lloyd, the Druid cult, the curse of Thorn, the fetus aquariums, none of it mattered anymore. It was like it never happened at all.
I also wrote a WTF video on the Friday the 13th sequel Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, and it received some great feedback from the film's director Adam Marcus: "Hey guys! This is Adam Marcus, yeah, THAT ADAM MARCUS. I just wanted to say thank you. I’ve been a huge fan of JoBlo and all of your content (even when I don’t agree with all of it). But when I first heard that you had done an episode of WTF about my first film, my heart sank. Well, imagine my surprise when I saw this thoughtful, well-researched piece about what really happened (a couple facts are slightly off, but it’s insanely close to word perfect). I am completely surprised and honored. It played a little more like a Black Sheep episode than a WTF but I’m glad for it. Also, thank you for shouting out most of my remarkable cast, they all did incredible work and I’ve always been so proud of them. Anyway, you folks are terrific and this is one director who’s actually quite happy to have you dissect my work. Bless y’all. Adam"
Jason Goes to Hell script:
The first several films in the Friday the 13th franchise stuck to a very simple formula: a group of young people get together in a remote location and get knocked off one-by-one, either by iconic slasher Jason Voorhees, his mother Pamela Voorhees, or a copycat. While a couple of the films included crazy elements like Jason being resurrected by a lightning bolt or the heroine having telekinetic powers, they still retained that same basic set-up. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was the first to stray from the woods in a major way, but the shake-up that saw Jason getting dropped into Times Square was nothing compared to the insanity the ninth film had in store for us. Today, we’re taking a look at 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell to try to figure out What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
Paramount Pictures had released the first eight Friday movies, but when their effort to revitalize the franchise with a trip to Manhattan turned out to be a box office disappointment, they decided to get out of the Jason business. So Sean S. Cunningham, the producer and director of the original Friday the 13th, re-emerged to take control of the franchise he had started a decade earlier. He found Jason a new home at New Line Cinema, the studio that was known as the House That Freddy Built due to the game-changing success they had with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Given that Paramount and New Line had previously discussed, and then abandoned, the idea of a Freddy vs. Jason movie in the ‘80s, getting Jason set up at New Line paved the way for that crossover to finally happen… But first, Cunningham and New Line wanted to make a solo Jason film.
The filmmaker who was chosen to bring Jason to the screen this time around was Adam Marcus – quite an unexpected choice, since Marcus was a 23-year-old who had never directed a feature before. Marcus and Cunningham had a long history together, though. Marcus had been friends with Cunningham’s son Noel since they were children, and Marcus had even worked on the set of the first FRIDAY when he was just 11. By the early ‘90s, he had graduated from film school and was hoping to direct his friend Dean Lorey’s zombie comedy screenplay Johnny Zombie as his debut feature. But when the project – which would eventually be renamed My Boyfriend’s Back – was sold to Disney, it was out of Marcus’s hands and he was left without a movie to make. So Cunningham gave him the chance to make a Jason movie. There were only two conditions in place: one, Marcus was to ignore the fact that Jason Takes Manhattan ever happened. And two, Cunningham wanted him to “Get that damn hockey mask out of the movie.” Apparently he wasn’t too fond of what Jason had become since he made his cameo appearance at the end of the first Friday the 13th. Cunningham has since denied that he ever told Marcus to ditch the hockey mask, but Marcus insists that he was given this order.
When Marcus sat down with writer and former Magnum P.I. producer Jay Huguely to figure out how to separate Jason from his hockey mask, they deduced that the way to do it was to dig deep into the supernatural elements that had never been explored beyond the fact that Jason could return from the dead very easily. This time around, they were going to give him the ability to possess people as well. So the concept that Jason’s spirit would be passing from body to body throughout the film was in place from the beginning, and Cunningham and the executives from New Line gave this idea their stamp of approval early on. Details did change along the way, though. For example, the first draft of the script started by introducing Jason’s hideous, boil-covered brother Elias, a character who had never even been hinted at in any of the previous movies. Ignoring Jason Takes Manhattan as he was told, Marcus intended to pick up from the ending of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood and have Jason’s corpse lying at the bottom of Crystal Lake. Elias would be shown pulling his brother out of the water, removing his heart – after a bit of a struggle, as Jason would regain consciousness mid-surgery – and then consuming the heart, thus gaining his brother’s evil powers. Body hopping shenanigans would ensue from there.
When everyone involved decided that Jason should have a larger presence in the overall story, Marcus’s friend Dean Lorey was brought in to perfect a quick rewrite. A very quick one; Lorey was hired on Thursday and told the rewrite needed to be finished on Monday. He was to do the writing in Cunningham’s office, with Cunningham sitting nearby to make sure the work got done. Lorey would have rather written a Jason Takes L.A. script about Jason getting caught between two warring gangs, but he was stuck with just trying to improve the body hopping idea. He took the Elias character out of the story, but did include a reference to the name – at one point, it’s said that Jason’s father was named Elias. He also added the fan favorite character Creighton Duke, a bounty hunter who has extensive knowledge of the supernatural abilities we never knew he had. It was supposed to be revealed in the film that Duke became obsessed with Jason after the slasher killed his girlfriend years earlier, but that explanation didn’t make it to the final cut. Lorey got the script closer to what the movie turned out to be, but he wasn’t the last writer on the project: Leslie Bohem, who had written the fifth Nightmare on Elm Street movie The Dream Child, also did revisions. And the film’s opening sequence was given a boost by the film’s armourer, Cunningham’s DeepStar Six writer Lewis Abernathy – who would later write a draft of Freddy vs. Jason. It was Abernathy who suggested Jason Goes to Hell should start with Jason getting blown to pieces.
So it does. Marcus pulls a bait and switch on the audience, starting the film in a way that makes it look like we’re in for another “cabin in the woods” sequel. A woman arrives at a cabin, presumably there on vacation, and just when she’s about to take a bath her peaceful time is disrupted by the arrival of Jason, who’s still stalking around the Crystal Lake area with no explanation given as to how he returned after the events of any previous film – because, remember, Jason Takes Manhattan apparently never happened. It’s all a set-up, though. The woman is an FBI agent who leads Jason into an ambush that ends with him getting blown up. We’re just 7 minutes into the movie and our beloved slasher has been destroyed. Lucky for him, Marcus has given him that whole possession insurance policy thing.
So Jason’s still-beating heart hypnotizes a coroner, enticing him to eat the muscular organ and become possessed by Jason’s spirit. Now Jason, in his new body that still casts a reflection of Jason in all his hockey masked glory, sets out on a mission: he has to go to Crystal Lake and locate his sister Diana – again, a sibling that had never been hinted at previously. Because, as Creighton Duke will inform us, the bodies Jason possesses break down quite quickly, and the only way he can be reborn in his own, mostly indestructible body is through a fellow Voorhees. The down side: Jason is also putting himself in danger by going after Diana – not to mention her daughter Jessica and Jessica’s baby Stephanie – because other Voorhees have the power to send him directly to Hell.
While Jason Goes to Hell comes off as being completely nuts because none of this is in line with anything we’ve heard in this franchise before, Marcus was able to assemble a good cast for this crazy movie. Kane Hodder, who had played Jason in The New Blood and Jason Takes Manhattan, was brought back to play the role for a third time. While Jason is only in his own body for the opening sequence and the climax, with some reflection appearances here and there, Hodder still had plenty to do on the movie because he was the stunt coordinator, and makes a cameo as a victim of the Jason-possessed coroner. Broadway star John Rubinstein was initially cast in the role of Creighton Duke, but when he had to leave the project he was replaced by Steven Williams, who turned in an awesome performance. Tippi Hedren auditioned to play Jason’s sister Diana, but the role ended up going to Erin Gray. Kari Keegan plays her daughter Jessica, and it isn’t until Jason kills Diana and Jessica returns to Crystal Lake for the funeral that her ex Steven Freeman, played by John D. LeMay, discovers they have a baby daughter together. Steven is the lead character in the story, he is, aside from Duke, the first to realize that Jason is rampaging through Crystal Lake in other people’s bodies – and Marcus had originally intended for this character to be Tommy Jarvis, the hero from the fourth, fifth, and sixth movies. But Marcus was told that he couldn’t use Tommy because the character was owned by Paramount, so he was changed to Steven Freeman. Paramount also held on to the title Friday the 13th, which is why the movie was called Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. Final? Yeah, sure. We’ve heard that before.
Other notable characters in the film are played by Allison Smith, Richard Gant, Billy Green Bush, Rusty Schwimmer, Leslie Jordan, Steven Culp, Adam Marcus’s brother Kipp Marcus, Julie Michaels, Adam Cranner, and Andrew Bloch. Several of those characters are possessed by Jason at some point in the film – and the strangest possession scenes comes when Richard Gant’s coroner passes Jason’s evil spirit, in the form of a worm-like creature that exits one person’s mouth and enters the other person’s mouth, to Andrew Bloch’s character Deputy Josh. Before the coroner baby-birds the evil worm into Josh, he strips the man down, straps him to a table, and shaves off his mustache. Now, we see the coroner doing this stuff, but it’s supposed to be Jason doing it, and we’ve never seen Jason do anything like this before. Why does Jason strip Josh and shave him before possessing him? There’s absolutely no reason for it within the film, Marcus just knew that seeing this would make audience members uncomfortable.
While he was working to make people uncomfortable, Marcus also imagined that he was building a cinematic universe – long before Marvel, but well after the Universal Monsters collided with each other and Abbott and Costello. He includes references to several other films in Jason Goes to Hell, including a line about “the Myers place”, putting a jungle gym that was seen in The Birds in front of the Voorhees house, placing the crate from Creepshow in the basement of the house, having script supervisor Harri James reprise the role of a police officer she had played in Die Hard, and sticking the Necronomicon from The Evil Dead inside the Voorhees house. The Necronomicon was the most important Easter egg of the bunch, and Marcus acquired the book from Sam Raimi while visiting the KNB effects crew on the set of Army of Darkness. As far as Marcus was concerned, putting the Necronomicon in Jason Goes to Hell explained exactly why Jason has supernatural abilities. While he couldn’t directly state this in the movie due to rights issues, he believed that Pamela Voorhees had used the Necronomicon to resurrect Jason after he drowned as a child. That’s why he could always return from the dead, and why he’s able to possess people now: he is a variation of the Evil Dead franchise’s Deadites.
Of course, the most famous reference to another franchise in the movie is the appearance of Freddy Krueger’s gloved hand, which shows up at the end of the movie to drag Jason’s hockey mask down to Hell after demon hands have burst out of the ground and done the job of getting the rest of him down there. Jessica makes that happen by sinking a magic dagger into Jason’s heart – a dagger that happens to be another Evil Dead prop.
After production wrapped, Marcus got a cut of Jason Goes to Hell ready to be shown at a test screening – and when that screening was over, it was clear that the movie was lacking something. Not only were there no horny youths taking mind-altering substances in Jason Goes to Hell, as Marcus wanted to center his film on adult characters dealing with more serious issues, but the first cut also didn’t feature a single camper, unless you count the woman at the cabin who turns out to be an FBI agent. Audience members and New Line Cinema had a request: Marcus had to fit in a scene where Jason kills campers.
So Marcus and his crew went back to work to do reshoots and put together a new cut of the movie. Scenes were reworked; extra moments with Creighton Duke were filmed in an effort to make the new rules of Jason’s abilities easier to understand; at least one jump scare was a late addition; a character played by future multiple-season Survivor contestant Jonathan Penner was cut out. A shot that shows a little demon called the Hellbaby, which emerges from a decapitated possessed character, going up the skirt of Diana’s corpse, thus allowing for Jason to be reborn, was another studio demand, but a moment in which the characters are faced with a much larger version of the Hellbaby, played by a performer in a full-body costume, was removed. And yes, campers were added in. Marcus gave New Line and Friday fans three campers to see get slaughtered, and these campers – played by Michelle Clunie, Michael B. Silver, and Kathryn Atwood – happily admit that they’re going to Crystal Lake to smoke some dope and have some premarital sex now that Jason has been blown up by the FBI. But Jason is there to ruin the celebration, and Clunie’s character is the recipient of one of the most spectacular deaths in the entire Friday the 13th franchise. These reshoots were totally worth it.
To see Clunie’s death scene in full, you have to watch the unrated cut of Jason Goes to Hell. The existence of that cut was a great marketing move on the part of New Line, because it was well known that the ratings board had done their best to make filmmakers whittle much of the bloodshed out of previous sequels. They struck again on Jason Goes to Hell, making Marcus cut his movie down substantially to achieve an R rating for the theatrical cut. But when it came time to put the film out on home video, New Line released both the R-rated theatrical cut and the unrated cut, which features a lot of incredible gore courtesy of KNB.
Unfortunately, one effect we don’t see in either cut of the film is Jason’s unmasked face. An unmasking moment was something fans had come to expect from these films, Jason’s mask was removed at some point during each one of his previous killing sprees, but it remains firmly attached to his face in Jason Goes to Hell. In fact, the mask is sinking into his face and his flesh has started to grow around the edges of it. Cunningham may not have wanted the hockey mask to be in the movie very much, but when it was in the movie he did not want it coming off of Jason’s face. As he told Marcus, “The minute you see the face of fear, it’s no longer scary.”
With a thirty-seven day shooting schedule, counting the reshoot days, Jason Goes to Hell was made on a budget of two-point-five million dollars. Released to theatres on August 13th, 1993, it had a seven-point-six million dollar opening weekend and ended up with a final domestic haul of fifteen-point-nine million dollars. Not terrible for the budget, but it certainly wasn’t a hit. It did only slightly better than Jason Takes Manhattan, which had underperformed so badly that it made Paramount give up on the franchise. Maybe audiences needed a break from Jason after seeing so much of him in the ‘80s, but you have to wonder if Jason Goes to Hell might have done better if Marcus hadn’t attempted to do something so different from the films that had come before. If someone did want to see more Jason, they’d be much more likely to go to the theatre to see him kill more campers than they were to see him go to Manhattan or possess people.
Cunningham and New Line tried to do something different with the franchise again nine years later, sending Jason to space in Jason X. That didn’t go over well, either. Jason didn’t deliver a hit for New Line until 2003, when he finally fought Freddy, a battle fans had been waiting to see since the ‘80s. Six years after that, there was more success when Jason was finally taken back to the woods to kill more campers in 2009’s Friday the 13th.
But while Jason Goes to Hell is certainly a black sheep in the Friday the 13th franchise and a lot of fans hate it for how different it is and for the changes that were made to the Jason character, there are also a lot of fans who appreciate its uniqueness and can go along with the idea that Jason possess people – and that he can turn into a demon worm if his body sustains too much damage. Love it or hate it, it definitely brought something new to the table, you can’t say it’s nothing but the same old thing. And we have to admit, Adam Marcus solved the problem of needing to remove the hockey mask from most of the movie in a way that probably no one else would have thought to.
And the third in this WTF streak was a video on the 2011 prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 classic The Thing:
The Thing (2011) script:
When given the opportunity to revive The Thing for Universal Pictures, producers Marc Abraham and Eric Newman chose to craft a prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter movie. Unfortunately, this new version of The Thing turned out to be a box office disappointment, just like Carpenter’s had been. It also managed to disappoint fans of the Carpenter film and the members of its own special effects team when the impressive practical effects that had been put to use on the set were completely covered over by unconvincing CGI effects in post-production. There were some interesting decisions made behind the scenes of The Thing 2011, but also some very poor ones, so let’s look back ten years and find out What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
The Thing 2011 exists because of Dawn of the Dead 2004. That remake of George A. Romero’s 1978 classic was produced by Marc Abraham and Eric Newman, and when Universal Pictures released the film it earned more than 100 million dollars at the global box office. So it’s no surprise that Universal wanted to stay in the Abraham – Newman remake business after that. There’s conflicting information on how exactly the producers got involved with the new version of The Thing – in some interviews, it was said that they chose the project after looking through Universal’s library of titles, but on the audio commentary Newman says Universal brought the project to them and asked them to revive The Thing in some way. Whatever the case, the duo knew very early on that they did not want their take on The Thing to be a remake. They knew there was no way they could make something better than what Carpenter had done. Instead, they decided to make something that could be seen as a complimentary companion to the Carpenter movie. They decided to make a prequel.
It’s quite interesting that they felt The Thing was an untouchable film, when they had just produced a remake of Dawn of the Dead, which many horror fans would argue is also an untouchable film. There could have been some extra hesitancy to produce a remake in this case because Carpenter’s The Thing had already been a remake itself, of 1951’s The Thing from Another World, and who wants to say they made a remake of a remake? Then again, since the source material for all of these Thing projects is a 1938 novella written by John W. Campbell, there are some who wouldn’t use the term “remake” for Carpenter’s film at all. They would prefer to say that it’s another adaptation of the Campbell story, not a remake of The Thing from Another World.
You don’t have to worry about arguing semantics for the 2011 movie. It is a prequel that leads directly into the events of the Carpenter Thing. In the 1982 film, the titular alien creature arrives – in the form of a dog – at an American outpost in Antarctica after it has already decimated a Norwegian outpost not far away. The American characters, with Kurt Russell in the lead as helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady, are able to deduce that the Norwegians discovered the alien and the spacecraft it came to Earth in thousands of years ago buried in the icy ground. The block of ice containing the alien was taken back to the Norwegian outpost, the alien escaped from the ice, and by the time MacReady and his associates reach the place it has been burned out and it appears that everyone is dead. There’s a fire axe stuck in the wall, the frozen corpse of a man who slit his own wrist and throat, and nobody else around. Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster had already set up the prequel very well, Abraham and Newman just had to figure out how to fill in the blanks.
Ronald D. Moore, best known for his work in the worlds of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, was the first writer hired for The Thing 2011. Moore was the one involved when they had to feel their way through some really bad early ideas, like the possibility of having the lead character in the film be MacReady’s brother. Never mind that MacReady had never mentioned having a brother at all, let alone one that was also in Antarctica and had been at the Norwegian outpost. Or the Swedish outpost, as MacReady would call it. A draft was written with this MacReady sibling, who had some booze he was going to share with his brother and even had a flashback to a climbing accident he and his brother were both present for, a scene that would have required the casting of a young R.J. MacReady. This idea was wisely abandoned. Still, figuring out who the lead character would be was a challenge, because Russell’s performance as MacReady had been so iconic that they had to be careful not to focus on someone who could be unfavorably compared to him. So his brother was out. A male scientist who would have been presented in what they described as a “wimpy” manner was also out. The decision was made to set the lead apart from MacReady by making the character a female. Since there had not been any female characters in Carpenter’s film, this eliminated the problem of direct comparisons.
As the development of The Thing went on, Moore fulfilled his contract and then Eric Heisserer was brought in to work on the script, making this the third high profile horror franchise he had worked on in a row; around this time, Heisserer also wrote Final Destination 5 and the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. The rewrite he performed on this project was substantial enough that he is the sole credited writer on the finished film, although Scott Frank was brought on to do an uncredited polish, just as he had done on Dawn of the Dead 2004.
And like Zack Snyder made his feature directorial debut on Dawn of the Dead, The Thing also marked the feature debut of a director who had been working in commercials and music videos up to that point, Matthijs van Heijningen. Interestingly, Heijningen was only available to make The Thing because the film he had signed on to direct the previous year had fallen apart due to the Great Recession, and that project had been Army of the Dead, a zombie movie that was being produced and co-written by Zack Snyder. Army of the Dead wouldn’t end up being made until a decade later, with Snyder at the helm for Netflix, but in 2008 it got very close to happening with Heijningen at Warner Brothers. After Warner decided Army of the Dead was too expensive, Heijningen went looking for another job. Snyder introduced him to Eric Newman, and he got hired for The Thing.
The most admirable element of the prequel is the dedication Heijningen, Heisserer, and the crew showed to making sure their film would match up to what Carpenter had shown of the Norwegian camp in his film. Heisserer made sure to show the alien escaping from the block of ice, he shows who put that fire axe into the wall and why, he introduces us to the man who will end up slashing his wrist and throat. Still frames from the movie, along with maps that were already available online, were used to recreate the layout of the Norwegian camp as shown in 1982, with the height of Kurt Russell and how he looked in the rooms he passed through being used as a guide for the construction of rooms in the 2011 movie.
The effort to match up with the earlier film extended to a shooting location, as some of the snowy exteriors were filmed in Cumberland, British Columbia, not far from where the cast and crew of the ’82 film had been set up in Stewart, B.C. But while Carpenter was blessed with the opportunity of having his outpost set built in true isolation, in an area of Alaska that was about a 30 mile drive from Stewart, the prequel had to stay closer to civilization. The outpost for this one was built in mine pits near Toronto, Ontario.
Only half of the characters who populate the outpost in the film are Norwegian, because of course Universal wasn’t going to release a film that was entirely populated by Norwegians speaking their first language. The eight Norwegians are joined by Danish, English, and French characters, plus five Americans, including the lead. Since the characters are from all over the place, they default into speaking English with each other; only one person at the outpost doesn’t speak English. The lead, the one they made sure we couldn’t compare to MacReady, is Kate Lloyd, a vertebrate paleontologist who is brought to the outpost by antagonistic scientist Doctor Sander Halvorson after the discovery of the spacecraft and the frozen alien. Played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, she’s not only the audience surrogate character that we follow through this crazy situation, she’s also the most observant and sensible person of the bunch, and turns out to be a capable heroine.
The casting of Halvorson was one of the bigger issues to arise during production, as Norwegian actor Dennis Storhoi, who was initially hired to play the role, was replaced by Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen after a week of filming. Some sources say Storhoi was fired due to personal issues, while Storhoi himself said that he chose to leave the production. This switch-up required some digital effects work in post, as Thomsen’s face was put on Storhoi’s body for scenes that had already been shot with the other actor.
Although The Thing 2011 turned out to be a decent film and the material was certainly handled with respect, the film does come up short in comparison to the Carpenter THING in the way the producers always seemed to know it would. That’s why they made a prequel instead of a remake in the first place. The writing isn’t as good as the script Bill Lancaster wrote for Carpenter’s movie. It can’t achieve the level of suspense and paranoia the ’82 film had, and instead of building a feeling of dread it increases the amount of action, showing off alien attack sequences that aren’t as impressive as what Carpenter showed us nearly thirty years earlier. But the prequel’s greatest downfall is its presentation of the alien. This film was following – or technically, leading into – a movie that is filled with some of the most awe-inspiring practical special effects ever put on film. The work Rob Bottin did on The Thing was incredible. During the production of the prequel, the correct decision was made to have the effects artists from Amalgamated Dynamics on set to bring the monstrous alien shape-shifter to life through practical effects. There was always the thought in mind that the creatures would receive slight CG enhancements in post, but as the movie was being filmed the actors had the opportunity to interact with animatronic monsters. Sadly, the studio ended up deciding that the practical effects needed to be completely covered over with a layer of CGI, and they apparently made this decision after some misguided audience members at test screenings made negative comments about the effects. The designs created by Amalgamated Dynamics remained, the animatronics and puppets were just replaced by CGI versions of the exact same creature – so it was like the effects artists never needed to be on the set at all. Effects supervisor Alec Gillis was so depressed to see all of their practical work get tossed aside, he wrote and directed his own creature feature called Harbinger Down a few years later as a way to try to get over the disappointment of The Thing.
For his part, Heijningen seemed quite willing to have the practical effects replaced by CGI effects. On the commentary, he and Newman said that the replacement was necessary because the effects team didn’t have enough prep time; Bottin had a year to work on the effects for the previous Thing, they said, while Amalgamated Dynamics only had a few months to get ready for this one. Heijningen said the creatures required more articulation than the puppets had, that they couldn’t do much with the practical stuff. In one interview, he even said that the practical effects had made The Thing 2011 look “like an ‘80s movie” – and he said this as a negative, even though the film is set in the ‘80s and its entire purpose was to emulate an ‘80s classic. He felt the CGI effects made the film more accessible to the modern audience.
Universal also demanded that the end of the film be reshot. The original cut involved Kate entering the spacecraft to find the corpses of multiple aliens that had died from their contact with the Thing. She was then attacked by the Thing in the form of an alien that had no human element to it at all, meant to be a copy of the spacecraft’s pilot. The studio didn’t like that, and viewers in the test screenings were reportedly confused; they didn’t know what this creature was supposed to be. Since Kate and Halvorson had been butting heads throughout the movie, Universal wanted the final creature she encounters to have Halvorson’s face on it. So in the version of the film that was released, Kate’s climactic confrontation is with a Halvorson monster, which Heijningen admits looks like it was created at the last minute, since it was. CG enhancements were also added to the interior of the spacecraft to cover up the alien corpses, which were taken out of the movie entirely.
All of this tinkering was done in the attempt to turn The Thing 2011 into more of a crowd-pleaser, but it didn’t do much good in the long run. The general audience didn’t seem to be very interested in this project – made on a budget of 38 million dollars, it earned just 31.5 million at the global box office. The failure of The Thing 2011 shouldn’t be put on the shoulders of Heijningen, his work here is effective enough and shows enough promise that it should have led to more feature work – but nine years would pass before he directed another film. This may have been his own choice. Unsourced online trivia claims that he found working on The Thing to be a negative experience due to studio interference, so he has purposely avoided working with Hollywood studios since then. His 2020 film The Forgotten Battle was a Dutch and Belgian production. If Heijningen was disenchanted by his experience working on The Thing, he is a great “grin and bear it” team player, because there is no hint of disappointment in the press he did for the film at the time of its release or on the audio commentary.
However Heijningen truly felt about his film at the end of the day, it has gained some fans over the years. Still, a lot of the viewers who enjoy it in its current state would like to see the movie the way it was before all of the CG additions, and before the ending was reshot. There have been “Release the Amalgamated Dynamics Cut” and “Release the Pilot Version” movements, but Universal doesn’t seem to be paying attention. Yet. Ten years have gone by, but there’s still hope that someday we’ll get a special edition release that will remove the CGI from those monsters the effects team brought to set.
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals!
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