FridayThe13th

It's hard to believe that 30 years have gone by since the grisly events at Camp Crystal Lake made slasher film history in a franchise that has become synonymous with a mute, lumbering, hockey-masked hulk who really sounds like a guy I used to date. The good folks at Creepy Tees decided to celebrate the past "30 years of fear" by designing this lovely Friday the 13th t-shirt. Since they think you're really swell, they even made it limited edition and threw in other goodies for good measure.

"This 30th Anniversary Edition is strictly limited to 500 pieces and contains the following: a 5-color commemorative t-shirt featuring the amazing artwork of Jeff Zornow, a poster of the artwork signed by the stars of Friday the 13th: Adrienne King, Ari Lehman and Ron Millkie and a raffle ticket for a piece of screen-used memorabilia from a Friday the 13th movie.

And if that wasn't enough, random packages will have vintage studio-issued ephemera included, some featuring the autographs of Kevin Bacon, Betsy Palmer, Robbi Morgan and Mark Nelson!

This 30th Anniversary Edition package goes on sale March 5th and is only $49.99. However, it is only available to Creepy Tees newsletter subscribers for a very limited time at that price. Once they are gone, they will never be reprinted or resold."

Head over to Creepy Tees before you miss out on this great anniversary t-shirt! Thanks to Dread Central for the tip on this one.

Camelot's DarKnight Pictures will be releasing two horror documentaries, the subject of which is oh so sweet. Unearthed: The Hellraiser Saga and Zombie Culture: Documentary of the Living Dead will be produced by Anthony Masi (Halloween 4, Halloween: 25 Years Later, His Name Was Jason).

With a Hellraiser reboot (heretics!!!) on the way, it seems like the perfect time to release a behind the scenes feature. Unearthed will explore every facet and theme of Clive Barker's two decades of Cenobites in his beloved Hellraiser series. Meanwhile, Zombie Culture is investigating the zombie craze--delivering a retrospective on an eight-decade international obsession with the popular movie monster.

I'm ashamed to say I haven't seen His Name Was Jason but from what I've heard it was a decent overview of the Friday the 13th franchise, with a lot of great behind the scenes stories. According to one friend, the most amusing thing about the doc was listening to everyone try to take credit for revolutionizing the use of a hockey mask. Hellraiser creator, Clive Barker, has said the cenobite fashions and creature designs were heavily influenced by religious garb and alternative lifestyle fashions. This is just one of many compelling factoids behind the franchise so my bets are that Unearthed can't be half bad. As far as Zombie Culture goes--you can never have enough zombie anything. I do hope the documentary touches upon some of the social and/or political influences on zombie cinema. For me, that's a huge part of the undead appeal. What about you?

Even though I got my start writing about horror by creating a blog called Horror's Not Dead, I don't jive with the idea that good horror is becoming an endangered species. Sure, who is actually making and delivering good horror is always in a state of flux, but considering the sheer crop of films to choose from is constantly on the rise, there will always be gems to found. Now before getting to the list proper, let's explain my own personal criteria for what qualifies as a 2009 film.

Basically, what matters is if the film was given its widest release during the course of the year. For example, despite being first shown publicly years ago, I consider Trick 'r Treat an eligible title, as 2009 finally found it going wide (albeit straight-to-video). Daybreakers, on the other hand, played a few festivals in 2009 but will not have its wide release until 2010. Conversely, most people in America won't see [REC] 2 until 2010 or beyond, but it went wide in its native Spain in 2009, thus it is eligible. Make sense? On to the show!

10. Paranormal Activity
I went back and forth on excluding Paranormal Activity from my Top 10 list because, really, it didn't do much for me in the scare department. I found it pulse pounding to watch for the first time, but it has scarcely popped into my brain since then. However, I do remain in awe of what Oren Peli accomplished with a mere $15,000. I have a lot of respect for the process that goes into engineering any thrill ride, so to speak, so even if it didn't severely impact me, it still commands a placement.

9. Thirst (my review)
Chan-wook Park's Thirst is, hands down, not only the best vampire film of the year, but I'd put it in league with another similarly atypical fang-set film, Let the Right One In. It's not particularly scary, but it is a deft, engrossing blend of lust and violence that gets back to the eroticism of the vampire that no film (or TV show) has properly explored in years. If you're feeling burned out on vampires these days, and that would be perfectly understandable, at least put this in your Must Watch queue simply because it's another brilliant film from the mind of the man who gave the world Oldboy.

By: Todd Gilchrist

Members of the cast and crew of Friday the 13th Parts VII and VIII sat down with a small crowd of genre press to discuss their experiences on the films and delve into the extras on both films' forthcoming DVDs. Vincent Craig "VC" Dupree, who played Julius in Jason Takes Manhattan, said he was amazed people still had so much affection for his death in the film, in which Jason literally knocks his block off. "People just have a lot of love for that particular kill," Dupree said at a press event Wednesday on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles. "As Kane and I were just talking about, the fact that I'm one of the only black guys who's like made it towards the end of the movie [is significant], so the response from it is really cool. More recently I started doing these conventions, and I didn't realize how much love people had out there for that kill."

Kane Hodder, who played Jason in the film, corroborated the fans' love for that particular scene. "It's one of the kills that I'd done that fans talked about the most," he revealed. "In fact, I was just in Atlanta at DragonCon and a guy came up and was talking about that kill. He says, 'do you know how many times he punched you before you knocked his head off?' I said no. 'Sixty-six!' The guy knew that. Then I was looking at them and it was hard to count because he was throwing body punches really fast. I'm not kidding – he was hitting me. I had a catcher's pad on."

By Jessica Barnes

Can a horror movie have a political agenda? Well, that was the question I asked myself after reading '15 Horror Movies Socialists Could Love''. So as I started to think back to all the hacking and slashing I'd seen over the years, I looked for some some pattern or connection between what I choose at the box-office and what I do at the polling station -- and what did I come up with? Well, I'll get to that, but first I wanted to take a moment to look back at some of the films that have gained a reputation with critics and fans alike as movies with a so-called conservative or liberal state of mind:

'Red State Horror':

Friday the 13th (1980)
Conservatives supposedly love this movie because it's all about no-good kids getting what they deserve. Sexy teens don't stand a chance in this franchise from the moment they take a drink, get high, or get naked. Plus, it's one of the few horror films with a moral about the importance of a good work ethic.

Frankenstein
It's science vs. religion in the story of a man who presumes to know more than God...and I think we all remember how that turns out.

Lost Boys
Family values are all over this one, and when a divorced mom pays more attention to a her love life than her two sons, look what happens. So even with a pot-smoking grandpa, plenty of critics agree that this film is all about Regan's America and the triumph of family over no-good, rock n' roll loving, motorcycle-driving youth gangs.

Tremors
2nd Amendment fans praise this tale of a band of locals fending off giant worms and the gun-toting survivalists that help save the day -- Take that Brady Bill!

Cape Fear (1962)
Maybe more of a thriller than a pure horror movie, but conservatives like to champion the story of a morally compromised lawyer and his family being terrorized by a paroled rapist. This one isn't an easy sell, but maybe it rings a bell with hard-line fans of justice when the police seem to be more interested in protecting the criminals, and it's up to Gregory Peck to take the law into his own hands.

By Peter Martin

Did the More sisters have to draw straws to see who went to bed with Crispin Glover? Today may be Tuesday the 17th in the real world, but for horror fans it's Friday the 13th, as not one, not two, but four new DVDs in the long-running series arrive. The showpiece is, of course, this year's rebooted Friday the 13th, directed by Marcus Nispel. The "Extended Killer Cut" features nine additional minutes of footage. I wasn't sufficiently jazzed to buy this one, but Dread Central has broken it down: More sex / nudity, plus "some additional blood spillage and longer looks at some of the film's kills ... Yet, in the end, these additions do nothing more than put a band-aid on a gushing wound." So make your own call on that one.

As for me, I opted for the three new "Deluxe Edition" DVDs. Scott Weinberg has already given a good rundown on the special features for Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. All I can add is that the transfer looks better than the bare bones DVD issued in 2000. If you're only buying one today, this is the one to get.

Against my better instincts, I threw Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning into my order; my previous viewing convinced me that it's quite awful, but the audio commentary makes it worth a rental. Director / co-writer Danny Steinmann is extremely profane, very funny, and quite forthright ("Cheap played an integral part in this movie"); he knows the flick isn't good but cheerfully claims mock credit for doing everything. He also details some of the numerous cuts required to please the MPAA, most extensively in the kill scenes but also in the sex scenes (a three-minute softcore sequence was cut to "10 seconds").

On a recent visit to the Chicago-based set of the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake, producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form gave us online types a good hour with which to poke and prod about that film and countless other projects in the works. The Elm St. stuff will have to wait until the time is right, but at the moment, you're just a hop, skip and jump away from finding out where Platinum Dunes currently stands with a Friday the 13th sequel, their present involvement in reported remakes of The Birds and Rosemary's Baby, and how exactly the little-seen Horsemen ended up slipping through the cracks last spring...

I just got done picking through the special features on the brand-new Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter DVD, and then *boom* a section of a very cool featurette popped up online! The "Jason's Death" segment is embedded after the jump, but I really must say ... after Friday 4 got the shaft on that 2004 box set, this DVD is an absolute revelation! It's got A) an audio commentary with the director, editor, and writer, B) a "fan" commentary with horror directors Joe Lynch and Adam Green that's really terrific, C) a lot of "b-roll" footage and alternate takes (including extra gore!), d) a really amusing mockumentary about Jason's "real life" rampage, and E) assorted bells and whistles that the horror freaks will love.

The Deluxe Editions of Fridays 4, 5, and 6 arrive on DVD next week, but for now you can dig this entertaining clip about Jason's untimely "death" in 1984. Ha.

If you feign surprise when you hear that a Friday the 13th Part 2 is in the works, you're officially insane. This year's F13 remake is based on a series that spans no less than 12 chapters, so it's pretty much assumed that the remake will earn its own sequel relatively soon. (But the Platinum Dunes guys are knee-deep in their Freddy remake, and remakes take priority over ... sequels. I guess.)

Anyway, the ridiculously large man who now plays Jason Voorhees is also a ridiculously nice guy, and he recently chatted with FEARnet about the inevitable sequel: "I don't know what they are planning on doing for the sequel, honestly, but in my opinion, I think less is more. If you just touch on aspects of his past, it's like the monster outside of the box theory; it's scarier when you don't know. I myself wouldn't want to see what he was like when he was younger. I would like to touch on it, but then move on." I think that's Mears (subtly) smacking the Halloween remake, and if that's the case, then Yay Derek says I.

Click here for the full interview, and don't forget that Marcus Nispel's version of Friday the 13th hits DVD next week.

By Peter Martin

Just when you thought it was safe to go wandering in the woods with your portable DVD player, Jason Voorhees appears to remind you: check your calendar before leaving the house. I wish that the Friday the 13th reboot, directed by Marcus Nispel and produced by Michael Bay, had lived up to the promise of its first 20-25 minutes. As I wrote upon its release in February, "the set-up in the present day was classically simple, the action flared up in mean and bloody outbursts, and Jason's appearance was note-perfect."

It's too bad the movie never regained its footing after it paused to take a breath, but I know that won't keep horror fans from checking it out when it hits DVD on June 16, especially since the unrated version will include additional scenes (reportedly nine minutes of unseen footage). The theatrical version did appear short of some of the expected bloody carnage -- a few scenes felt incomplete, while others stopped just before more explicit mayhem might have been unleashed. DVD Active has the early artwork; the unrated edition on DVD includes a "Rebirth of Jason" featurette, while the Blu-ray will have both the theatrical and unrated editions, plus two additional featurettes and a "terror trivia track."

Meanwhile, Shock Til You Drop has details on the extras and artwork for the new special editions of Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter, Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. All three feature audio commentaries and featurettes; Part IV even gets a "fan commentary" by the talented directors Adam Green (Hatchet, Spiral) and Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2: Dead End). Personally, I'll be buying at least two out of those three. They'll all be released on Tuesday, June 16.