Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

Conception

After the previous installment, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, which reintroduced the Jason Voorhees character, Part VII was originally intended to be a crossover film between Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger.^[2] With each Friday the 13th sequel, the box office profits were diminishing, with the films in the Nightmare on Elm Street series grossing nearly twice the amount of the Friday films.^[3][4] Paramount Pictures proposed the crossover idea to New Line Cinema, the rival company who held the rights to the Elm Street films, with Paramount controlling domestic distribution and New Line controlling international distribution.^[4] The idea was abandoned after the two companies failed to come to an agreement, but the concept eventually came to fruition with Freddy vs. Jason in 2003, after New Line had purchased the rights to the Friday the 13th franchise.^[3]

One of the concepts for Part VII was conceived by associate producer Barbara Sachs, and was noted as being similar to the plot of Jaws, wherein a corporate land developer covers up the previous Jason Voorhees massacres in order to profitably build condos on Crystal Lake.^[3] Executive producer Frank Mancuso Jr. resisted the idea, and screenwriter Daryl Haney stated "There’s always a teenage girl who’s left to battle Jason by herself. What if the girl had telekinetic powers?"^[3] Sachs, who considered the "Jason vs. Carrie" concept to be "an interesting idea", wanted the installment to be more respectable than the previous entries in the series. Haney stated that "She wanted it to be unlike any other Friday the 13th movie. She wanted it to win an Academy Award".^[3] Several high-profile directors were considered for the job, including Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini.^[3]

Production

The film's original working title was Birthday Bash, chosen to conceal its identity as a Friday the 13th film.^[2] The entire production of this film was scheduled, completed, and released within seven months. Shooting took place from October to November 1987 in Baldwin County, Alabama, at Byrnes Lake off Highway 225,^[5] and in nearby Mobile.^[6]

This film marks the first of four appearances by Kane Hodder as Jason, the only actor to ever reprise the role. Although C. J. Graham, who had portrayed Jason in Part VI, was initially considered, Hodder was ultimately chosen based on his work in the film Prison, for which The New Blood's director, Carl Buechler, had worked on as the special effects make-up artist.^[2] In that movie, Hodder filmed a scene in which his character, a prisoner executed in the electric chair, rises from the grave; Hodder himself had suggested to Buechler that he have maggots coming out of his mouth during the scene to heighten the effect of decomposition, and went on to film the sequence with live maggots spilling out of his mouth. Buechler remembered Hodder's commitment to the part when casting The New Blood, and chose Hodder over Graham. Graham expressed disappointment, as he had hoped to reprise the role of Jason and make himself synonymous with the character, as Boris Karloff had with Frankenstein's monster, but ultimately expressed satisfaction with Hodder's portrayal and said that he bore no ill will about not being asked to return. Hodder would go on to make cinematic history for the longest uninterrupted onscreen controlled burn in Hollywood history. For the scene in which Tina causes the furnace to shoot flames at Jason, Hodder was actually set on fire by an apparatus rigged so that the ignition could be captured on film (as opposed to being edited in later with trick photography). Hodder was on fire for a full forty seconds, a record at the time.

Post-production

Though one contemporary critic noted that the film is "nearly devoid of blood and gore by '80s slasher standards," several explicit scenes of gore were cut in order to avoid an X rating.^[7] Among these were the murder sequences of Maddy, who originally had a sickle jammed through her neck; Ben's death, which showed Jason crushing his head into a bloody pulp; Kate's death revealed the gory aftermath of a party horn to her eyeball; we see Eddie's head hit the floor; a shot of Russell's face splitting open with a large blood spurt; Dan's original death had Jason ripping out his guts; Amanda Shepard's death originally showed Jason stabbing her from behind, with the resulting blade going through her chest and subsequent blood hitting Dr. Crews; Dr. Crews's death showed Jason's tree-trimming saw violently cutting into his stomach, sending a fountain of blood and guts in the air; Melissa's original death had Jason cleaving her head in half with an axe with a close-up of her eyes still wriggling in their sockets. The boxed set DVD release of all of the films and the single deluxe edition have all these scenes available as deleted scenes in rough workprint footage; however, the deluxe edition features more additional footage than the boxed set.

Box office

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood opened on Friday, May 13, 1988 in 1,796 theaters, debuting at number 1 and earning $8.2 million its opening weekend.^[9] Ultimately, the film would go on to gross a total of $19.2 million at the U.S. box office, placing it at number 53 on the list of the year's top earners.^[10]

Critical response

Susy Flory of the Santa Clarita Signal wrote: "It's Hollywood's idea of every teenager's dream—a bunch of lovely, nubile young girls, a rustic cabin in the woods, a stash of marijuana, and, gore galore courtesy of a zombie superhuman psycho killer."^[11] The Star-Gazette's Amnon Kabatchnik wrote that the film is "geared to appeal to the viewers' baser instincts, horrific moments of graphic mutilation are interwoven with nude-and-sex sequences," adding: "The offbeat Tina is reminiscent of Stephen King's Carrie, but unlike Sissy Spacek, Lar Park Lincoln is unable to flesh out a human dimension. Cult devotees of the series probably won't care."^[12]

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 30% of 20 critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 4.4 out of ten.^[13]

John Carl Buechler, the director, who also created the special make-up effects for the film, is credited with creating "the definitive Jason" in the audio commentary of the film from the series' DVD box set. The film is later mentioned in the novels American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.