The Night Jason Didn’t Show Up (But Something Cool Did)

A Gen X Horror Memory from Author Tom Leveen — and Why Friday the 13th: The Series Deserves a Comeback

👻 Editor’s Note by John Toma

Every once in a while, a TV show slips through the cracks of pop culture memory. It’s buried by the very thing it was named after. Friday the 13th: The Series was one of those shows.

It wasn’t Jason. It wasn’t Crystal Lake. But it was eerie, inventive, and way ahead of its time. I remember watching it and being completely sucked in by the cursed antiques, the atmosphere, and that “store next door” energy.

While everyone expected a hockey mask, what we got instead was something closer to The Twilight Zone meets The X-Files, and this was years before Mulder and Scully ever hit the scene. It was smart, creepy, and wildly underappreciated. I’ve also got to say, it was quite sexy. As a young kid seeing Louise Robey as Micki Foster the first time… let’s just say I was quite intrigued!

If any 80s horror property ever deserved a Netflix-era revival, it’s this one.

So, in the spirit of Halloween, and cursed collectibles (a theme we all love), I’m turning over the spotlight to horror author Tom Leveen, who captures exactly what made this short lived cult series so unforgettable in his guest piece below.

The Night Jason Didn’t Show Up (But Something Cool Did)

Guest Post by Author Tom Leveen
(Author of Hellworld, Zero, and Those We Bury Back)
About Tom → | Tom’s Substack →

I turned on the little color TV in my bedroom that night in October 1987 with great anticipation.

How would filmmakers turn Jason Voorhees’ bloody saga, which up to that point consisted of six feature films, into a television series? Impossible!

And, as the opening credits rolled for Friday the 13th: The Series, it seemed I was right: It was impossible. This very clearly wasn’t Jason. Not even Crystal Lake.

What the—?

So 13-year-old me was pretty disappointed. How did these dumb TV show people manage to ruin what was, to me, a very effective slasher franchise?

Like, you could tell right away this was wrong during those credits, with its slow pan of the store and its items. This felt a lot like Ray Bradbury Theater or Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

So where was my ch-ch-ch, ah-ah-ah (a.k.a. ki ki ki, ma ma ma)?

Jason’s not even listed in the credits!

Then, at minute number four —

The doll.

That white-faced porcelain doll with its tinkling music-box theme, the slow dolly (haha!) forward of the camera…

DUDE, EVEN AS I WRITE THIS I AM GETTING GOOSEBUMPS.

Something inside me clicked. Like all good things from that era, whatever this show was, it wasn’t what I expected, but it was exactly what I needed.

The Allure of Episode One

In one of my horror novels, Those We Bury Back, a doll similar to the one in Friday the 13th: The Series makes a horrifying appearance, and the protagonist tries to understand what is so scary about a toy, and comes to this realization:

“It wasn’t that the toy posed a threat, at least not that he could see; it was more like the helpless horror of watching a car crash. Some feral, animal part of you wanted to reach out and just stop the cars from hitting. But you knew that couldn’t happen. Could not. So instead you’d be gripped by paralyzing fear, unable to act, unable to turn away. The unreality of the whole thing is what made it so frightening. This was something so utterly otherworldly, something having no business on this plane of existence, that it shrank his freezing feet inside his wet shoes and made every open hole in his body shrivel up tight. It did not belong.”

That’s what the Ft13:TS doll was. It didn’t belong.

I’d grown up on video rental stores long before Blockbuster existed in my town, and these places would rent anything to anyone … even if you were in first grade and handed over the clamshell for Tourist Trap (1979). (Tourist Trap was on VHS in 1980. Which means I was in first or second grade when I saw it the first time. Also it had a PG rating. PG!*)

By the time Friday the 13th: The Series aired October 3, 1987, I’d already seen Dolls, either on late-night cable or rented from Your Movie House on the corner. As a little kid, I’d been petrified by the TV trailer for Magic. I’d seen Dark Night of the Scarecrow when it aired in 1981. Amazing Stories had an episode called “The Doll” in ’86 (which, albeit, took a touching turn). Twilight Zone had that chilling Telly Savalas episode “Living Doll.”

As a too-young child, I breathlessly watched them all, and had the nightmares to prove it. In ’88, I even made my own short film in my house about haunted stuffed animals with a borrowed VHS camera.

Dolls, dummies, mannequins — they all scared the hell out of me.

So from minute number four in Friday the 13th: The Series, I was hooked. To be sure, there are stronger episodes than “The Doll,” but my personal terrors make this pilot one of my all-time favorites.

Ryan, Micki & Jack: The Found Family That Fought Evil

Ryan Dallion (played by John D. LeMay) was older than me, but not too much older. He was the cool older brother I didn’t have. (I have many older brothers, but none of them played a role in my childhood.)

I know a lot of guys had crushes on Micki, but I wasn’t one of them; I’d always appreciated Velma more than Daphne.

Ryan was brash and had a devil-may-care (haha!) attitude about life that I admired. But I also admired that his character — as well as Micki — evolved and matured as the show went on.

He spoke, looked, and acted the role of the irresponsible man-child, but when the devil came a’callin’, he stepped up. I hoped I could be like that.

The trio — Ryan, Micki, and Jack — hit all sorts of anthology-horror tropes, and in some ways can be seen as the progenitor to The X-Files, with a smarmy, youthful, black-haired young man pairing with his opposite, a red-haired, serious-minded young woman as they fight evil, a new monster every week.

It didn’t invent the “attractive young people guided by a wise older man battling evil” format, but it brought that dynamic into Gen-X living rooms. The X-Files? Check. Buffy? Check. Both owe a debt to Ft13:TS.

Cursed Objects, Cursed Titles, and the Curse of Cancellation

Friday the 13th: The Series was spawned by one of the producers of the slasher-movie franchise of the same name (Frank Mancuso Jr), who knew very well that naming the show after the Jason movies would generate interest.

Clearly, it worked. The show’s ratings were comparable to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Also like The X-Files (in my opinion), the show is saddled with the loss of one of its two charismatic leads, and another actor is brought in to fill the space left behind. Even if they do an admirable job, the weight of history is always against them.

Worse still, the studio killed the show just short of its final few episodes, denying fans a satisfying conclusion to the arc begun three years prior.

May we never forgive studio heads who cancel shows mid-run without an actual ending!

The Uncanny Lives On

For those of us raised on fuzzy late-night Up All Night horror, grimy VHS boxes, and forbidden rentals (not that my parents ever tried to stop me — did yours?), Friday the 13th: The Series hit right in the soul.

Like many creepy shows, it was both scary and strangely comforting — a found family of misfits doing their best to undo the damage done by the greedy, the foolish, and the cursed.

One of my life goals as an author is to write a book detailing every feature film and TV episode dealing with scary animated puppets, dolls, and the like. There’s something about that uncanny valley that just chills me to this day.

And with the advent of almost-free-thinking, lifelike robots coming soon to a Walmart near you, maybe now’s a really good time to ask if we should make non-humans that look and act like humans do.

Maybe we ought to remember the doll’s chilling whisper to the little girl Mary:

“I can do a lot of things.

And so can you.

We’re going to be the best of friends …”

Which Episodes Do You Remember Best?

Share your memories in the comments, and have a safe, spooky Halloween.

— Tom Leveen