There’s nothing hotter right now than turning popular horror movies into TV shows, and up next on the chopping block is The CW’s small screen adaptation of the Friday the 13th film franchise. We learned about the project earlier this week, and now details have been revealed.

The network has hired Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle to pen the Friday the 13th TV series, and Legion of Leia‘s Jenna Busch caught up with Mitchell yesterday and pressed him for details. He revealed a whole lot, describing the series as “True Detective meets Twin Peaks… on acid.”

“What we really wanted to do when they came to us and said, hey let’s do Friday the 13th – I don’t think we really wanted to do a show about a guy with a machete chasing girls in tube tops,” said Mitchell. “We couldn’t do that on a weekly basis. So then we started thinking, so why don’t we do something – because everybody will think, how can you do something with that? – we thought, let’s surprise them.”

“Reimagined as a sophisticated, horror/crime thriller, Friday The 13th is about the ongoing quest of a detective’s search for his missing brother that is somehow tied to Jason Voorhees, a long thought dead serial killer who has now returned to wreak havoc in the new Crystal Lake,” the writer continued. “The masked Jason is being reimagined with a stronger feel of grounded reality.”

Mitchell dug even deeper into the specifics of the plot…

“Crystal Lake is not just Crystal Lake anymore. Just this place out in the woods. It’s this thriving town, sort of like Silicon Valley. There are these rich people, a lot of young rich people with a lot of money and a lot of time, neither one well spent, and there’s the old people who grew up in this town. It’s like the town from Jaws. It’s like Amityville 20 years later, and someone says, ‘I I think the shark is back.’ Everyone is like, ‘Oh, shit. We can’t have the shark back!’we finally grown up as a town and we have all this mythology, but it ruined our city.’”

“So what ends up happening is, a cop comes into town, looking for his brother. He realizes his brother was there searching into the past murders, and realizes that his personal story is tied into Jason’s personal story. Part of the fun of the show is exploring, is this Jason or is this a copycat? Is it possible that Jason has been around all these years? Is Jason a monster? Is he real? Is he a serial killer? And really exploring who and what Jason is, is part of the whole thrill of the show.”

So, will the Friday the 13th TV series acknowledge the movies we all know and love? Indeed it will, taking place in a world wherein they exist – just as they do in ours.

“What we’re going to do is basically acknowledge that the people came to this town after these killings happened, and they made all these movies,” Mitchell noted. “And now the town has a stigma. Our show is, here’s the true story. Here’s the real story of Jason. It’s been taken and exploited. So we have the young crowd who doesn’t know who he is except for what they’ve seen in the movies. The older crowd is afraid of him. We have a lot of people who have scars from him. The underlying thematic of the whole thing is that Jason is a monster in this town. He openly wears a mask. But everybody in this town wears a mask. Underneath those is the monster.”