Nothing can kill Jason Voorhees. That's not to say he hasn't died, of course—he's been sliced to death by Corey Feldman's machete in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, drowned in Jason Takes Manhattan, yanked back into the underworld in Jason Goes to Hell, and burned up in an alien planet's atmosphere in the final moments of Jason X. But mortality isn't a hurdle for the hockey mask-wearing serial killer. Wherever there are bubbly co-eds and loud jocks douchebagging their way to horror-movie death sentences, Jason will be there, knife in hand. Hollywood, it turns out, is much more threatening.

Audiences last indulged in Jason's blood-splattering art in 2009's Friday the 13th, when Warner Bros. Pictures and Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes ripped through the franchise's history, sprinkling bits of backstory and fan service across another murderous escapade. The movie delivered on series-set expectations: Weed-smoking dorks got impaled, young couples ran in fear, and just to prove they weren't pussyfooting, Jason bagged up a victim and set her on fire. Mainstream critics didn't care for it, horror connoisseurs found plenty to gush over, and the resurrected Jason lured enough people to theaters to score $65 million. Platinum Dunes had a modest hit, and with an iconic brand in the mix, the makings of a new franchise. Sequels were inevitable.

But just when fans thought it was safe to anticipate another visit to Camp Crystal Lake… Friday the 13th: Part 2 stalled. In Fall 2009, plans were casually announced for a sequel. A year later, fate intervened. Platinum Dunes was well into its next big horror remake, 2010's A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Hollywood was well into a genre sea change. Paranormal Activity, earning blockbuster box office with found-footage aesthetic, prompted studios to scale back investments on horror movies. A studio didn't need to spend $20 million on slasher flicks when mainstream audiences would pay the same ticket price for $100,000 jump-scare-athon. Jason, aching from a nasty chest wound, was left rotting at the bottom of a murky lake.

***

On this Friday the 13th, there is hope. Over the phone, Brad Fuller, Bay's partner at Platinum Dunes and producer of the 2009 film, tells me that he is anxious to bring Jason back to life. There are plans. There is development. There's a release date set, and more importantly, an open window to shoot this fall. As a Friday the 13th movie might put it: Jason Lives.

There was never really a moment Fuller wasn't planning to produce a sequel, even when the rules changed and the industry pushed back. The stagnation was both legal and philosophical. Fuller tells me that, after Nightmare on Elm Street amounted to similar business in 2010, Platinum Dunes' "phone kind of stopped ringing." If the company would continue making genre movies, it had to pull the reins and adapt to post–Paranormal Activity life. His first move: take a meeting with Jason Blum, Paranormal Activity's producer.

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"Out of nowhere," says Fuller, "I just wrote Blum an email that said, 'We don't know each other, but you stole our business, so the least you can do is buy me a cup of coffee.' Literally." He says that Blum fired back: "Any time, any place." They met the next day at the 20th Century Fox studio commissary, where Blum introduced Fuller to Vigilandia, the script that would become The Purge. "My partner Andrew Form and I, we both read it and we loved it and we looked at each other and said, 'How are we going to make a movie for under $3 million?'" Fuller says. "Up to that point our movies were $20M and even Elm Street was a little bit north of $20M. We both agreed that this was going to be our opportunity to learn how to do it." Platinum Dunes and Blum's Blumhouse Productions—now a titan of low-budget film with the Paranormal franchise and movies like Insidious, Sinister, and Whiplash—shepherded The Purge to sleeper hit status. As a quid pro quo for bringing him on board The Purge, Fuller offered Blum a producer stake in his Ouija adaptation, which soared at the box office last October.

Grappling with Hollywood's ideological woes wasn't Fuller's only obstruction for Friday the 13th. As Fuller and Platinum Dunes shifted gears, the franchise rights lingered in limbo at Warner Bros. and its subsidiary, New Line Cinema. After A Nightmare on Elm Street, New Line, whose bread and butter was genre pictures, turned its attention to broader, WB-appropriate titles. After Nightmare, the company distanced themselves from R-rated horror, a brand they wouldn't return to until The Conjuring. Unless Jason was game for stalking hobbits in a new Lord of the Rings sequel, the rights were on the backburner.

Whenever the new Friday the 13th movie does arrive, we'll have Christopher Nolan to thank. In 2013, the rights became a bargaining chip when WB wanted a piece of Interstellar, the next film from its star Dark Knight director. Originally, writer-brother Jonathan Nolan developed Interstellar at Paramount Pictures, when Steven Spielberg was planning to direct. When Christopher Nolan stepped into the director's chair, WB went into wheel and deal mode to keep their prized blockbuster-er under the roof. What followed was one of the largest lunch table swaps in recent memory. In order to co-produce Interstellar, WB traded Paramount full ownership of the Friday the 13th brand (the company previously owned international rights) as well as a portion of a future South Park movie—another crazy dream project.

Stars aligned. By that point, Platinum Dunes had a production deal with Paramount (where they recently produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Project Almanac) and the studio was in full control of Jason's destiny. The Pamela Voorhees–like fans could stop screaming for Jason. The door was open for more Friday the 13th.

***

Jason haunts Fuller. As I speak to him about rough development waters, he tells me that he is transfixed on a Jason mask, a prop from the 2009 film, that sits on an affixed perch on his wall. It stares at him, day after day: Bring me back. The producer believes that, with Paramount being in sole possession of Friday the 13th, reviving the franchise is a priority. And as commercial as it sounds, the new installment is Fuller's passion project.

"There have been titles in my past that I've done, movies that I've made, that I was not as passionate about the source material and I've learned my lesson from doing that," he says. So he's taking his time. While the writers behind Fuller's Friday the 13th penned a draft for a potential sequel, the new film will depart from those ideas (although it's uncertain, even to Fuller, if the next film will tie back into the 2009 version — the details haven't crystalized). Paramount preemptively dated a Friday the 13th a number of times, first for March 2015, then to November 2015. It's now slated for May 13, 2016. Several writers have worked on scripts for the film over the years, but Fuller says, at this stage, they're finalizing a direction and settling on "two or three different" writers, who they hope to hire in the next two weeks. That May 2016 date is in sight.

Jason Voorhees - Friday the 13th Warner Bros. Pictures

When I ask Fuller what to expect from a new Friday the 13th, what one does producing a new slasher after 35 years of Jason antics, he stresses his desire to keep the core values intact. It will involve Jason Voorhees. It will involve kids having sex and smoking weed. They will be at camp. Which is a big one for Fuller, a former kid camper. "Some movies you do for some reasons and some you do 'cause you just love the source material. And truly this is something that we all love here." Fuller plans to shoot Friday the 13th at the end of the summer because the weather is still nice and it's easy to take over a camp for cinematic slaughtering purposes.

What fans shouldn't expect is anything resembling Paranormal Activity. Fuller insists Friday the 13th will not follow the found-footage trend, nor will it mimic the cost-shaving tactics of Platinum Dunes' recent output. Somewhere between 2009's $20 million shine and The Purge's three-to-four million sweet spot lies this envisioned Friday the 13th venture. Constricting Jason's mayhem within these new templates strikes Fuller as fundamentally wrong, a disaster in the making. Stabbing someone through the eye socket takes finesse. "You can't do a great kill quickly. It takes time and the blood levels. You know, every time there's a drop of blood you have to change their wardrobe and shower people off. You can't rush that to get it right."

Same with a story. The head on Friday the 13th's shoulders may be bloodlust, but the backbone is a coherent, character-driven plot. Each Jason movie needs a twist. Fuller knows you can go too far. His bulky killer is fragile. That's what keeps the development process running long, cracking details and exploiting openings. The new movie could play with established mythology or a different time frame in Jason's life, he says. Or answer a question that's always confounded him.

"There's always been this supernatural aspect to these movies. It defies logic that, you see Jason get killed in every movie, including ours, the 2009 one. And then he comes back and no one's ever really investigated what that is. So that's something that I think about a little bit. Like it is supernatural, but what is he? Those are the things that we're toying with. Nothing has been decided. But those type of things: How does he always come back?

The Signal and V/H/S director David Bruckner, who Platinum Dunes hired in April 2014 and remains on the project, planted the seed in Fuller's head. Bruckner is a driving force on the movie, someone Fuller describes as having the whole movie running in his head at all times. "You can talk to them about a scene that's happening on page 18 and they can tell you what the ramifications are on page 82," he says. "The way he spoke about the movie was brilliant. His segment of V/H/S was so scary and unsettling and felt very real. So often, you see characters do things and you just roll your eyes and say, 'How could they be so stupid?' And in that movie I didn't feel that one bit. That dread is a very hard thing, a very hard emotion to convey on film and he did it so well. That spoke volumes to us."

Bruckner got Fuller thinking about Jason's unquestioned ability to die and reanimate in each Friday the 13th film, what he sees now as the franchise's unique attribute in film history. "People traditionally want to understand exactly how and why things happen, and yet something so odd happens at the end of these movies and no one seems to question it. So people come to the movie with the expectation that the real villain will be killed and come back. And yet we never toyed with that notion." If someone noticed, could Friday the 13th earn its own Dr. Loomis, the Halloween series' in-the-know psychologist? Fuller approves of the comparison. "Those are the things that we're asking ourselves. And we'll see what comes of it."

More than the Friday the 13th hockey mask that looms over his workspace, it's fans that haunt Fuller. The producer is active on social ("for better or worse," he says with a laugh), and hears it all. "There is nothing more consistent that I get asked about than Friday the 13th. Nothing comes even close. Nightmare doesn't come close. The Turtles don't come close. I get direct message tweeted every day, multiple times a day about Friday the 13th." Nothing can kill Jason Voorhees or the fervor for another movie.

Matt Patches Senior Writer Patches is a Senior Writer at Esquire.com.

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