Back in the late 1980s, the television adaptation of Friday The 13th was something of a guilty pleasure for me. During that time in my adolescence I had strict and unyielding standards: I would watch anything that was on television. I’d watch doubly hard if there was a chance there might be a woman in some state of undress in the proceedings. Besides, I was a fan of the horror genre, and because Friday The 13th filmed up in Canada, regional filmmakers like Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg directed some of the episodes.

True, Friday The 13th didn’t seem to have much to do with the movie franchise that inspired it. Jason Voorhees and his signature hockey mask were nowhere to be seen, and the show instead focused on a junk shop filled with haunted items, one of which would inspire each tale of spookery. The show’s extremely slippery relationship to the Friday The 13th movies didn’t bother me since I wasn’t much of a fan; I always considered Friday The 13th to occupy the low end of the slasher-movie totem pole and A Nightmare On Elm Street the top. So it didn’t bug me too much that the show essentially just used Friday The 13th as a lucrative brand name. 

Now, the Friday The 13th fan site Fridaythe13franchise.com is reporting that another TV adaptation of Friday The 13th is in the works, and that this incarnation will be far more faithful to its source than the earlier version. The article quotes an attendee at a New Jersey convention called Monster Mania, who said that Friday The 13th producer Sean Cunningham used the event to confirm that The CW was interested in picking up a Friday The 13th TV show that would take place in what it referred to as “the REAL city of Crystal Lake,” depicting it as a real town and the setting of a series of horrific murders that were chronicled in the Friday The 13th film series. Apparently, the show would acknowledge the film series and how it affects Crystal Lake, not unlike the way the second Blair Witch Project acknowledged Blair Witch mania or the way Wes Craven’s New Nightmares acknowledged and riffed on the Nightmare On Elm Street series.

That sounds like a semi-clever way to add a new wrinkle to the second TV adaptation of an ancient film series that has already been both rebooted and crossed-over with the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise. It is unknown whether Cronenberg and Egoyan will work on this version of Friday The 13th as well—according to IGN, the pilot script will be written by Bill Basso (Terminator) and Jordu Schell (Avatar), with Cunningham executive-producing—but we’re using this space to start the rumor that they’re taking turns playing Jason. So if you see some hockey-mask-wearing monster slash the shit out of some kids on the show, the man doing the killing is probably one of Canada’s most revered artists.