An Underrated Slasher Horror Remake is Climbing Streaming Charts — Here’s How to Watch
Fans get prickly about remakes, and the more iconic the original film, the more prickly the fanbase might be. This is especially true of horror films, but despite a distrust of remakes and reboots in a big chunk of the fandom, there are still bright spots. The early 21st century was a hotbed of these bright spots, from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake to the surprisingly fun “perfect horror remake” Sorority Row.
But some of these films still haven’t gotten their due, and those who love them are doing their best to change that. For proof, look to the latest HBO Max streaming charts, where an unfairly maligned remake of a slasher classic has cracked the Top 10 over the last week.
Like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake before it, 2009’s Friday the 13th reboot was produced by Platinum Dunes and directed by Marcus Nispel. That lends a specific tonal relationship, but while Chainsaw stuck reasonably close to the original story, the Friday remake made some radical departures. Instead of redoing Jason’s origin story entirely, or even just remaking the entire first film, complete with a Pamela Voorhees killing spree, writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift took a different approach.
Rather than simply reworking the original story, the 2009 Friday film tackles elements of the first four movies in the franchise, working in everything from Pamela’s death to Jason’s favorite weapons to, yes, a moment when a would-be victim distracts him by pretending to be his Mom. It’s so crammed with nods to what came before, in fact, that the film’s most significant flaws end up being how hard it tries to pack everything into just 97 minutes of runtime. It’s a film that tries to take on virtually every beat of Jason lore while also introducing a bunch of new Crystal Lake characters, and it always feels rushed as a result.
Aside from that, though, and the complaints of purists, Friday the 13th ’09 is, how do I put this delicately…a banger? It’s funny, it’s fast, it’s got good kills, Jason is appropriately scary, and it’s genuinely trying to do something new without trading away everything about those original movies. It’s really a shame that the franchise went dormant again after this one, because follow-up films with this level of intensity would’ve been a blast to see. And just as Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 has gotten more love in recent years, so too will Friday the 13th 2009. Mark my words.
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