Adam Marcus talks to Macabre Daily about "Hearts of Darkness: The Making of The Final Friday!"
Adam Marcus directing “Secret Santa,” his Christmas horror film: (Photo: IMDB)
At this past April’s New Jersey Horror Con, we got the chance to sit down with Adam Marcus, director of “Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday” at his table. Fans of the “Friday the 13th” film series have a LOT of opinions about Marcus’s controversial ninth entry in the series, and he’s heard them all (for the record, it has the Macabre Daily stamp of approval).
Marcus and his production company, Skeleton Crew have been putting the finishing touches on a documentary about the film, “Hearts of Darkness: The Making of The Final Friday,” which blew past its funding goal on Indiegogo, and he even showed a sizzle reel at the con. We had a good conversation about the lasting legacy of “Jason Goes to Hell” and how he and his writing partner (and wife) Debra Sullivan, survived the detrimental changes to their “Texas Chainsaw 3D” script.
Lowell Greenblatt: How did the idea for the documentary come about?
Adam Marcus: A lot of people have been asking me to make a doc about “Jason Goes to Hell.” I love the film, but I had sort of moved on. I've made so many movies since then in different genres. Horror is my home, but I was kinda like “yeah guys, I'm good.” It's also my middle name now. Like I'm Adam “Jason Goes to Hell” Marcus. I didn’t think I needed to make a documentary about this. There were a lot of fan films getting made around that time.
LG: Not to mention an extensive documentary on the franchise.
AM: By the way, that was sort of the reason the people were really voracious about it. “Crystal Lake Memories” is an insanely long documentary with about 20 minutes given to “Jason Goes to Hell. A lot of that has to do with [original “Friday the 13th” director] Sean S. Cunningham and the way he pushes things.
What happened was that two great fans of mine, T.J. Bowser and Cory Coffman, created a Facebook page for my birthday in 2019. It was called “Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Fanpage.” I was like “wow that's really cool! What a lovely thing.” But they had ulterior motives. Within two weeks, the page had thousands of members. I was like “what is happening?” [Coffman and Bowser] started promoting it and asking if everybody would like to see a doc based on the movie. Of course everybody ran to say yes, so I said “OK if everybody really wants this, I'll make it if the fans put up the money.” I knew I wasn’t gonna make any money from it. That’s not what I’m doing it for.
So we put up an Indiegogo campaign that got funded immediately, then got so overfunded that Indiegogo kept it up as an “in-demand” campaign. It was so successful, they kept going and people are still contributing to it! So I said “let’s go do it.” I’d also seen other horror docs where they didn't get a lot of people to talk. I thought if we're gonna do this, let's try to get as many people as possible. We got over 30 people who worked on the movie, and then a ton of other people came in to talk about their affection for it.
The Indiegogo banner for the upcoming documentary.
But the other thing was, I did not want to make a movie that kisses my ass. I have no interest in that. We also have to have the haters and people who reacted badly to it. You know your fame from your haters, rather than the people who love you. Sadly, it’s just the truth. I even said on the latest edition of the film for Scream Factory that everybody who hates my movie owns five copies of it. So thanks for my pool. I'm sorry, I love when someone really comes at me about the movie and I go “so you bought the VHS, right?”
“Well, yeah…”
“And I guess you have the box set with the blu-ray? And I bet you got the first edition blu-ray, which wasn’t even a good blu-ray?”
“Yeah…”
And they’ve got the laserdisc, because they all have the freaking laserdisc, too. So continue to hate me. I’m good with that. One of the common things said about “Jason Goes to Hell” is that it’s a shit “Friday the 13th” movie, but it's a really cool horror movie. Okay, I'll take that! Whatever it is that you need to connect to the movie and have a good time with it. I made it for the fans. Boy, did I make it for the fans. I'm a super fan of these movies. If you need to put it in a different category to connect to it, that's great, but I will say this: it's canon. It's not a fan movie. It is part of the franchise. By the way, I love when people say “I love the Paramount movies [entries 1-8].” I do, too. But Paramount didn't love the Paramount movies. They couldn't wait to get rid of Jason. New Line Cinema was the best home I could’ve had for the movie. It's “the house Freddy built” for a reason. They were incredibly respectful, not just of the franchise and the genre, but of the filmmakers. So much so that Mark Ordesky, one of my two executives on the film, is in the documentary. The guy who made “the Lord of the Rings” movies was like “yeah. I’ll come and talk to you for an hour. I love “Jason Goes to Hell!”
LG: Even before the documentary, you had to have known this film has a second life in the years after its release.
AM: Oh yes.
LG: Can you recall when you realized it had a following?
AM: It was when people stopped wishing me ass cancer and started writing tributes to it. There was this amazing moment when it was being shown as part of “Terror Tuesday” at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin about 10 years ago. I didn't know they were doing it, but a friend of mine told me that Tuesday that they added a night, which they never do for “Terror Tuesday.” They sold out so quickly that they added a Thursday screening. I went to their website and saw that they had written a review of the movie to sell the movie, but it was written by the guy who ran Alamo at that time. To this day, it’s one of the best reviews ever written for my movie. It knocked me out.
So I called the Drafthouse and asked to speak to the guy. He was like “this isn’t a friend pranking me, right?” I talked to him about the film and what he wrote, and I asked if it was okay to write a letter to be read for the Thursday audience. He said “you’d really do that?” Of course I would. He said Thursday was sold out, too. That was the moment I realized the tide was kind of turning. By the way, people have this idea that when the film came out, it was hated immediately. It wasn’t. It was second to “The Fugitive.” Variety’s cover the next morning said “#1 goes to ‘The Fugitive,’ the rest of the box office goes to hell.”
LG: You have that framed, right?
AM: In my office, yes. But it wasn’t until YouTube hit, and someone made a video about how New Line “destroyed” the “Friday the 13th” franchise. That’s when the wave of hate really hit. Then more articles started coming out praising the film, and the wave of love kept building. A lot of people who say “Jason Goes to Hell” was their gateway “Friday the 13th” film, or saw it before a lot of the others tend to love it. It’s different for people who watched 8 entries before this one.
Kane Hodder as Jason, waiting for his close-up.
LG: This is such a nerdy question, but your film posits Jason’s soul moves between bodies. Were you trying to say he possessed Roy from “A New Beginning?”
AM: Here’s the thing. I see “Jason Goes to Hell” as the “Rogue One” of the “Friday the 13th” franchise. We were there to fill a three-meter hole in the Death Star and make that plot make sense. Look, “Part 2” doesn't make sense. There’s a little boy in a lake, then 2 weeks later, he’s a full-grown man breaking into an apartment. If you buy that and you don’t buy “Jason Goes to Hell…”
LG: I want to move on to “Texas Chainsaw.” You share a screenwriting credit with your wife and writing partner Debra Sullivan, but very rarely have I ever seen a film and immediately felt it was tampered with by the studio.
AM: Yup.
LG: There’s no way the man who made the lore-heavy “Jason Goes to Hell” didn’t write a scene where someone who’s never been to Texas says “Welcome to Texas” to Leatherface, or have 2 death scenes that were accidents in a slasher movie.
AM: Literally none of what you’ve just listed was written by Debra or me.
LG: Is it edifying to set the record straight or is it painful to bring up?
AM: I'm honestly thrilled to talk about it. Screenwriters get blamed more than almost anyone, really. Directors blame us, the fans blame us, and the number of people who blame me for “do your thing cuz?” I didn’t write it! I did not write that line, and if you read anything [Debra and I] write, you'll see that that's not our writing.
That said, it’s time someone says “here’s what happens: a bunch of producers or executives who don’t love horror are here to make money. They love money and say, in meetings, that the audience is a bunch of morons.” Writers like myself love the genre, and we sit there rolling our eyes and biting our tongues, because we just want to say “look, just let us write what we're gonna write. We'll make a good movie for you, so just leave it alone.” Those people are the ones who make the final choices. People who think Sean Cunningham loves the horror genre have never met Sean Cunningham. He loves money.
When you meet executives who love horror, hold onto them. Brian Sexton is my producing partner with Skeleton Crew. His love of the genre is why we’re connected. He would never dream of forcing any of those kinds of choices on me. I actually find it incredibly liberating to be able to say “hey we didn't do that. This is who did it, and why, and it's on them.” When you're talking about [things going wrong on] a tiny, in-house indie movie, I can understand. You go “that's our movie. Nobody talked us out of anything, and it’s ours.” But the minute you hit studio movies with budgets over $1 million…there are so many producers on “Texas Chainsaw,” go ahead and take a look at the credits. When we wrote a script for the remake of “I Walked with a Zombie,” we had 19 executives and producers.
LG: All 19 were credited?
AM: Oh yeah. You wonder, how can any voice get through all of that? Everybody wants to justify their job, and sit in the audience next to their girlfriend or boyfriend and go “ha, that [part] was me! I did that!” I understand wanting that experience, but you know what’s amazing? When you meet a producer who goes “I just want you to make a great film I'm gonna take credit for the whole thing.” There are plenty of those, and I'm fine with them taking credit for the whole thing. They made the movie with me! But they didn't get in the way of me telling the story. I think it's incredibly liberating when I get to actually tell people what went down on these films.
LG: So that scene with the smartphone…
AM: The whole movie [was supposed to] take place in 1993 and Alexandra [Daddario’s character] was supposed to be 19. No smartphones.
LG: Did you at least talk to Tobe Hooper about your experience?
AM: Tobe Hooper read our version of the script before the movie was a “go.” He called me and said “bless you for writing the only true sequel to what I did the first time.” And I said “But Tobe, you made “part 2!” He said “Again. Thank you for making the only true sequel.” I was like…I turned to Debra and said “you can put me in a box. I've achieved everything I need to achieve. I'm good!”
By the way, Debra and I booked two movies and a television series off of that screenplay. The script was loved in Hollywood. Again, nobody was expecting it because it's this weird sequel in the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchise.
LG: It's arguably the first real legacy sequel.
AM: Yup. I’ll say this. There's a lot of people who love the movie, and that's awesome. I only want people to enjoy what they pay to see. Who cares if I hate it? You need to love it. It brought a lot of joy to people, and I had the number one movie at the box office. Okay, I'll take it. We walked into our agency that week and we got a standing ovation.
LG: That’s awesome. I hope you got paid for your trouble.
AM: Oh yeah, that was no problem. [Laughs] I was not upset about the money.
LG: Can you tell me where you are with “Hearts of Darkness?”
Adam with an old friend (photo: Facebook)
AM: I can tell you we are just finishing post-production now. The last thing we gotta do is our color timing, which begins next week. So that's amazing, and we’ve had several offers for distribution, which we are now dealing with. Once it has found its home, it will hit a couple of festivals, which have already requested the movie. I can't say who they are yet, but they're huge and then it will go directly to Blu-ray and DVD first, so it will have a physical media presence first.
LG: We love to hear it.
AM: We are going to try to do a bunch of conventions and screen the movie for fans in a theater setting, and then it will go to streaming. We are doing a traditional release strategy, letting the movie really be a movie. I will also say the film is 110-112 minutes, but for anyone who gets the physical media, there's 2.5 hours of extra footage, so it's a package of over 4 hours of film.
LG: I always thought there was more to the story of making “Jason Goes to Hell” beyond the chapters in “Crystal Lake Memories.”
AM: To that end, Peter Bracke, who wrote “Crystal Lake Memories” is one of the producers on our film, and he's the historian for the movie, so he wrote all the questions for the cast and crew interviews. He's a big part of his journey, and he’s why [horror producer] Michael Felsher and I hooked up.
LG: Anything else coming up you can tell us about?
AM: Well, the doc is the newest thing that's coming. Skeleton Crew has a slew of stuff that's either in pre-production or production right now. We have a great documentary series that I can’t really talk about too much. The next film I'm directing is called “Domestic Terrorist,” which is so funny, because it takes place in Los Angeles but I'm shooting in South Africa, because that's where the money comes from. We're also doing a terrific movie called “Fat Camp Massacre, “ which will do for people of size what “Get Out” did for people of color.
Interview edited for length and clarity. Follow Adam Marcus at @adammarcus13 on Instagram as well as @heartsofdarkness13 for information on “Hearts of Darkness: The Making of The Final Friday.”
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