X Marks the Spot

By: SCOTT COLLURA
Date: Thursday, March 07, 2002

It's been almost ten years since we last saw the "king of the kills" known as Jason Voorhees in action. The madman serial killer, best known for his love of hockey masks and machetes, has plagued many a horny teenager since his debut in 1980 in Sean S. Cunningham's HALLOWEEN knock-off FRIDAY THE 13^TH. And while Jason only had a small "cameo" in that early film (his mom was actually the villain of the movie), the picture proved popular enough to spawn many sequels over the next ten years or so, culminating in 1993 with JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY.

So while it's been nine years since we last saw Jason, the famed slasher will be making his return to the big screen in style this April in his tenth installment, titled simply JASON X. CINESCAPE recently spoke to the film's director, Jim Isaac, about the resurrection of one of the truly classic characters of modern horror.

"I had

worked with Sean Cunningham years and years ago as a visual effects [adviser] and kind of a producer for him on a couple of films," recalls Isaac. "So we had this longstanding relationship and we were involved with developing Freddy and Jason with New Line. He'd have me come in and help him with the story and visual effects and a couple of ideas and things. We were working on that for months and months and months and things weren't really clicking between us and New Line and [the studio] wasn't really sure what they wanted to do. So I asked [Sean], 'What's going on with Jason?' 'Well, it's sitting here on my shelf. I own Jason and it's just sitting here.' And I suggested [that] I'd love to come up with some ideas and direct the next Jason and do something really interesting."

But Cunningham was biding his time then, focused as he was on getting the long-developing FREDDY AND JASON project off the ground. Eventually Isaac went off to work on other projects, but he always had Jason on his mind and he returned to Cunningham about a year and a half later with the same request.

"[I] said, 'Where are we with FREDDY JASON?' 'Oh, we're the same as we were two years ago,'" laughs Isaac. "I said, 'That's it. I'm coming down to your office in a couple of weeks and I'm going to pitch you just a whole bunch of ideas and a concept and we're going to do Jason.' And I think I just wore him down; he was tired of the development process of FREDDY JASON. And so he said, 'Come on down, let's talk.'"

Of course, Cunningham eventually did agree to let his friend direct a new JASON film, and the result is JASON X, a very different take on the titular character that takes place some 500 years in the future. A group of young explorers from a human space colony return to the long-abandoned planet Earth and inadvertently awaken Jason, who's been cryogenically frozen for five centuries. Sure enough, the killing soon begins anewalbeit with a futuristic twist, eventually resulting in Jason's transformation into a cyborg-ized "Uber-Jason."

"[Screenwriter] Todd

Farmer [and I] threw out a bunch of ideas, and he said, 'What about space?' I had had a space idea earlier, [but I didn't] want people to think of Jason in space and [say], 'Oh hokey,'" recalls the director. "But then I thought, well if we do it way in the future and we take it away from Crystal Lake... Then it started to click and Todd and I began to banter back and forth and come up with some ideas about how that would really help us in that one of the things that I wanted to do was I wanted to make sure that the kids in the movie were smart and were proactive. And putting it in the future and putting it in space enabled us to do that. So that's basically how it started. We left that meeting with, 'O.K., Jason in space.'"

With the "Jason in Space" concept firmly set in the filmmakers' minds, there was still the matter of New Line and the festering FREDDY JASON project to contend with. While everyone wanted to see a teaming of the two notorious movie monsters, no one at New Line could quite figure out how to make such a premise work.

"It was a little bit dodgy at New Line only in that we went in and pitched it to Mike DeLuca, who was there at the time, but they still had this FREDDY JASON thing in the back of their mind," says Isaac. "He was excited when we pitched it, he loved the script, he loved the concept, but it just was, 'We still want to do FREDDY JASON, now who comes out first? Do we do this Jason movie that turns Jason into a completely different creature and has a whole new take on it? Then can we go back and do FREDDY JASON which is an older Jason and maybe an older kind of horror style?'"

Funny enough, it was that project's lack of direction that ultimately led to JASON X getting underway first.

"I think

for us it was beneficial that there was no voice for FREDDY JASON," offers Isaac. "Nobody had a real passion for it to take the helm and give it a direction, and so it was floundering and while it floundered we just went forward. We never really got the greenlight. Mike DeLuca kept saying he loved it and we kept going in with a lot of drawings I had and a lot of concept stuff. He kept saying, 'O.K., cool.' But no one actually officially gave us the greenlight. Sean just kept paying for pre-production until finally we got to the point where we're casting, we're making Uber-Jason, and I'm like, 'Sean, we really need a greenlight, otherwise you could lose a lot of money.' And finally he put the screws to them a little bit... Sean did his magic, and did whatever he had to do to give us the official greenlight."

As for the film itself, Isaac is as aware as anyone of the shortcomings of the slasher genre. Be it a HALLOWEEN film, a FREDDY adventure, or a SCREAM homage/rehash, the slashers have definitely had more than their share of lame sequels. With JASON X, however, Isaac thinks that he's found a fresh spin on both the character and the premise that will revive audience interest in the franchise.

"[Jason is] in a place that's foreign to him and he has to react to it," he says. "It's still the same old killing machine, but now he's in this really weird environmentyou know, like VR scenes and things. Things that really mix it up a bit. And I think it works really well because you've got this person that doesn't have all these magical tricks, and all these kind of strange magical tricks [are] happening around him. But he's the same old Jason[he] just kind of cuts through all that junk. And you can throw all the tricks you want [at him], but he just cuts right through it and it's fun!"