Welcome to Horror Secret Handshakes, a monthly column spotlighting horror stories off the beaten path that serve as an instant vibe check with new friends, acquaintances, and fellow fans. If you both know the story, you feel the bond.
Well, it's Friday the 13th again, and this time it falls just ahead of Valentine's Day, which means when it came to this month's column, I had a decision to make. Did I lean into the Jason Voorhees Holiday, or did I push some horror romance on you? You can already guess from the headline which one I picked, but if you stick around you might also find that I kinda did both.
Every Friday the 13th fan has their own preferred favorite film, their own least favorite film, and their own suspected Deep Cut that not enough people have seen. I've had a lot of these conversations with fellow fans over the last 25 years or so, and trust me when I tell you that they vary wildly from person to person. That means several films in the franchise qualify as a "Secret Handshake" of sorts, including Jason Goes to Hell and of course the underrated 2009 reboot, but the most satisfying conversations I've ever had with fellow fans, it turns out, have centered on Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.
Contrary to popular belief, the Friday films didn't take a full-blown supernatural approach until Part VI: Jason Lives. The fourth film, The Final Chapter, really was meant to be the end of Jason ... for a while, anyway. And after Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning frustrated fans with an imposter Jason, the sixth installment went full zombie Jason with things, paving the way for more supernatural happenings in the series.
Which brings us to The New Blood, which basically functions as Jason vs. Carrie. Years after Jason sank to the bottom of Crystal Lake at the end of Jason Lives, he finds new life when a telekinetic girl named Tina (Lar Park Lincoln) returns to the Lake with her mom and her therapist in an effort to deal with her lingering psychological issues. See, apart from her telekinetic gifts, Tina's also wracked with guilt because she believes she caused the death of her father on the lake years earlier. Now she has to confront all of that head-on, all while trying to make friends with one of the hot boys in the party house next door — and oh yeah, surviving the return of Jason Voorhees.
Yes, that's a lot to fit into one movie, particularly when you consider that the movie in question is 88 minutes long, but despite its somewhat defanged kills and jam-packed narrative, there is so much to love about this film. Friday the 13th begins as the story of a mother trying to reclaim the narrative of her son's death through bloody vengeance, and The New Blood brilliantly builds on that idea by giving us the story of a daughter trying to reckon with the death of her father in the same lake, which also happens to be the home of the local machete-wielding madman who's out to stop her. Jason and Tina share some of the same emotional baggage tied to Crystal Lake, and it makes them a fascinating pairing when it comes to Slasher and Final Girl. They can, in their own strange way, understand each other, which makes their battle that much more interesting.
The New Blood also arrives at a time when the Friday franchise was Just Trying Stuff in the wake of the disappointment that was A New Beginning just a couple of years earlier. It starts with Zombie Jason in Part VI, then moves into telekinesis battles, then you get stuff like Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes to Hell and, finally, Jason X years later. It's a time of experimentation, and while everyone has their own views on how each experiment worked out, I think The New Blood was promising in a way that its sequels just aren't. Well before Freddy Krueger showed up to face Jason (though there were already discussions about that), he fought Tina, a girl with supernatural gifts and a real emotional tie to Crystal Lake. It's easy to see that saga continuing, either for Tina or for another supernatural being, and while we never got that, this film still stands out as an experiment that mostly worked.
Plus, of course, it's the debut of the great Kane Hodder, arguably the best Jason actor of the bunch, behind the hockey mask.
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