Sean S. Cunningham

And so the Friday the 13th combination didn't happen until like the late 1800s.

So it's relatively a new phenomenon, but it must've been a thing because Sean Cunningham started this whole thing with just that date.

got his start on Broadway in stage management.

Yeah.

It's not the kind of horror that I enjoy at all.

It's very disturbing.

According to Sean Cunningham, it was sensational.

so

um i'm hoping that uh uh and and and I have heard because I spoke to Sean Cunningham.

We were together at several conventions last year.

And he mentioned that the storyline for this TV series has some elements that he described as being clever.

So Manny's Orphans, the movie about soccer-playing orphans who win their orphanage back from the mafia in a soccer tournament.

But you see Paramount Pictures passed on Manny's Orphans, and that's what gave rise to Friday the 13th.

They said, hey, you did Last House on the Left, and we love that, so why don't you do something like Last House on the Left And so Sean Cunningham had seen the success of Halloween.

And so he said, I don't know, Friday the 13th.

They could never quite get it lined up.

And finally, Sean S. Cunningham, who's one of the major players in the Friday franchise, got annoyed and said, I want a movie so that people still remember that my IP exists, please.

And of all the things that they workshopped, Jason in Space just became the one that wouldn't mess with the timeline.

If you're like, OK, there's this one that's 400 years in the future.

that's true.

I have a feeling that his influence on this film was perhaps deeper than it first appears.

So the director is James Isaac, who I think had co-directed one movie before, The Horror Show, which here in the UK is called House 3, and it's included in The House, obviously.

right even though apparently has nothing to do with house it's just labeled that in some territories does

No.

Sean Cunningham, you answer that

question.

It's left to the theater of the mind.

So I think we talked a little bit in the first film.

You have Victor Miller, who's a screenwriter, who is a friend of the producer-director Sean Cunningham in Connecticut.

They had done – or at least Sean had done some films including Last House on the Left, which is a really dark, nefarious, rape, revenge fantasy film.

And the story goes that Sean Cunningham had noticed the success of Halloween and said we should do a low-budget horror movie.

I mean, it actually is kind of a horror movie.

But the first thing he does, this is I think this tells you everything you need to know about Sam Cunningham are other than what you already know about him from these few bullet points.

He does not begin by writing a screenplay or developing a story.

The first thing he does is hire an advertising agency to create a logo and And then he takes out a full page ad in Variety magazine on July 4th, 1979, advertising a movie that has not been written, is not necessarily in production.

First

person view.

I think Sean Cunningham really studied Halloween and was trying his best.

Just like he studied the bad news bears.

I had Harry Manfredini sign this.

I think the last signature I got in my book was when I met Sean Cunningham.

And seriously, I shit you not, everyone.

I love this shit so much.

When I was talking to Sean Cunningham, the director of the original film, and I almost had tears in my eyes.

I had to hold him back.

because, I mean, I was telling him how much I loved that film.

That's 1978.

And that was released by Compass International to really big business and chased up by Sean S. Cunningham's indie game changer friday the 13th which was uh snatched up by paramount and then all the major studios sort of found themselves with their shelves bare in terms of films that could compete with the the might of these were very cheap to make and made a fortune and didn't require stars crucially um so there's this feeding frenzy bidding wars and anything that ticked all the the trophy boxes or any finished negatives going with dead teenagers or a masked antagonist in them were getting snapped up.

And all of these slashes came along.

And a lot of them were set in summer camps due to, you know, just being copycats of the original 1980 Friday the 13th, which was a smash made for 500,000, I think, And to this day, the series is grossed under a billion, just under a billion.

Yeah, so I'm not sure which one it was.

And then he published the location of Betsy Palmer as well and encouraged people to mail mean things to her.

And he labeled Friday the 13th creator, Sean S. Cunningham, one of the most despicable creatures ever to infest the movie business.

Fuck