Last month, rumors of a television series entitled Crystal Lake Chronicles surfaced -- just like when Tina used her psychic powers to raise Jason from the bottom of Camp Crystal Lake way back in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. Producer and series creator Sean Cunningham told sources that writers were already hard at work planning how to create a Smallville-styled series centered on the vicious mass murderer and his reign of terror.

 

At the time, we thought that was pretty awesome -- but there was no way it was going to be the only new Jason product on the horizon. For almost inexplicable reasons, Platinum Dunes has never made a sequel to its highly successful 2009 reboot of the series, despite a lot of rumblings. Ideas have floated around for years (my personal favorite involved Jason in a winter setting -- something we've never seen before), and one of the oldies has reemerged.

 

According to various sources, the idea of making a found-footage Friday the 13th is once again in play. My initial reaction to this is that it's a bad idea.

 

Found footage is a compelling medium when done right and when used to tell a certain kind of story. A typical Friday film is not that sort of story. Found footage requires the willing suspension of disbelief -- meaning the audience has to accept that the characters would keep filming even while horrible things are happening. Hard to see that being the case while Jason takes a machete to the face a poor, unsuspecting teenager.

 

Because of that, Crystal Lake Chronicles sounds like a more interesting idea from where I'm standing. A web series set in the Friday universe with a recurring cast of characters and an ongoing storyline could be just the ticket to make Jason king of the horror hill in a new decade. I'm sure we'll be seeing more films in the series, too -- but my own hope is that we'll get more traditional Friday narratives and leave the gimmicky and inexpensive found-footage approach to films more suited to take advantage of its benefits.

 

What do you guys think? If you had to pick, would you take a Friday TV series (I'd bring back Friday the 13th: The Series if it were up to me) or would you take a gamble on the found-footage approach in the hopes it would present Jason in a new and more terrifying way?

 

[via Cinemablend]