Books of 2024: Week 13 - Two Friday the 13th Part III novelizations

Cody reads two different novelizations of Friday the 13th Part III.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 3-D by Michael Avallone

When Paramount Pictures and the film’s producers moved forward on a second sequel to the surprise hit Friday the 13th, they intended for the third film to be a big deal. It was going to be shot in 3-D and would wrap the franchise up as a trilogy, with slasher Jason Voorhees being put down for good in the final moments. It was such an event, they hired author Michael Avallone to write a novelization of the screenplay, which was written by Martin Kitrosser and Carol Watson, with an uncredited rewrite by Petru Popescu (who does receive credit on the cover of the novelization).

Avallone didn’t have access to the final draft of the script and wasn’t even aware of what the actors playing the characters would look like, so his book Friday the 13th Part 3 3-D does feature some interesting differences from the film. Some character descriptions are slightly off from how we know the characters from the movie, although the Shelly character was always intended to be overweight, and Avallone took every opportunity to remind readers of this fact. The events of the story play out in pretty much the same way, although there’s a missing moment or an extra scene every once in a while. Then things go completely off the rails toward the end of the book. Fans are aware that director Steve Miner and the writers and producers had trouble figuring out exactly how to end the movie. A scene was filmed for the ending where Jason would be shown decapitating heroine Chris, but it was dropped and replaced. There’s a decapitation at the end of the book as well, but it’s not Chris getting her head chopped off. It’s Jason, with Chris lopping his head off with a scythe. So that’s how they were going to kill the character off when they were intending Part III to be the last movie. They ended up just having Chris sink an axe into Jason’s hockey mask-protected forehead, giving an injury that was much easier for him to walk off when they did make a fourth movie. Once Jason has lost his head, we get a very weird sequence that involves Chris being kept under observation, with the authorities not believing that her friends were murdered even though their body parts should be scattered around the cabin they were vacationing in. The things kind of just sputter out. It would have been an awful ending for a movie.

Since the hockey mask was something they stumbled across in the middle of production, it’s not discussed in Avallone’s writing. He simply has Jason getting his hands on a feature-less white mask that sounds reminiscent of what Michael Myers wears. The hockey mask they used is so cool and iconic, it’s no surprise movie-goers were anxious to see more of Jason after he put that thing on.

Avallone didn’t make much of an attempt to dig into the characters, but he does prove to be good at writing the suspenseful stalking scenes. And when the stalking leads to chasing or slashing, the writer proves to have a different view of Jason than anyone else has ever had, because he has the silent slasher laughing at certain moments.

This will also be of interest to obsessive F13 fans, but the book also reveals that Kitrosser and Watson were apparently very fond of the name Pinehurst for a location. Their script must have mentioned that the town of Crystal Lake is in Pinehurst County, and Avallone latched on to the Pinehurst name, dropping it into the book on multiple occasions. Pinehurst didn’t make it into Friday the 13th Part III, but when Kitrosser and Watson returned to write the fifth movie, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, they called a different prominent location Pinehurst.

Avallone’s book features an off-brand Jason and a lousy ending, but it’s worth a read if you’re a fan of the Friday the 13th franchise.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 by Simon Hawke

Simon Hawke was hired to write a novelization of Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI – and that went over so well, he was then hired to write novelizations of the first Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th Part 2, and – in a strange move – a second novelization of Friday the 13th Part III. While Michael Avallone’s Part III novelization was published in 1982, the same year the film was released, Hawke’s novelization didn’t come along until six years later. So if you want to read a novelization that matches what we see on the screen, this is the one to turn to. Hawke had the final draft of the script to work from, and his novelizations of the first three movies sometimes read as if he was also going through the movies scene-by-scene on VHS as he was writing them, he stuck so closely to what can be seen on the screen.

Reading a faithful novelization of a movie you’re very familiar with can be an oddly comforting experience, and I have definitely found that to be the case while reading Hawke’s novelizations. Sometimes I just want to spend more time in the world of a movie than simply watching it can allow, and these novelizations are a fun way to dig deeper into the world presented in these classic films.

Hawke doesn’t usually go in-depth with suspenseful descriptive passages, but something I really appreciate about his prose versions of these stories is how we put work into trying to give the reader a deeper understanding of the characters than we might get from watching the movie. He does a good job of taking us into each characters’ perspective at different points in the book, letting us know what they’re thinking and feeling in certain moments. Then Jason removes most of them from the story.

Friday the 13th Part III happens to be my favorite Friday the 13th movie to watch, so I really enjoyed having two different novelizations of the movie to read back-to-back. I preferred Hawke’s version for its accuracy to what’s on screen, but Avallone’s has its merits as well.