Friday the 13th Part VII – 35 Years Later

Friday the 13th Part VII was always the entry in the series I found hardest to track down as a teenager.

My first sighting of it was in a VHS rental store, it was a big box edition that was rather tarnished but feature a couple of images of a gnarly-looking Jason Voorhees.

These were the days when you would watch entries of franchises in whatever order you could get your hands on and then if you were lucky enough to complete the series, up until that point, you could watch them chronologically.

After a year or so of just going into the store to look at some of the rental boxes and imagine what the film was like, I got a hold of a reissued VHS from a Virgin Megastore on the other side of the country.

I had seen Jason Lives at this point, but The New Blood is quite handy, in that it has a prologue to open its film, effectively getting you up to speed straight away.

What was immediate, was the tonal change from Jason Lives to The New Blood. This was no horror comedy, and aimed to be supernatural, weird and gory (well if the Ratings Board hadn’t cut it).

Billed as Jason versus Carrie, The New Blood sees Jason battle Tina, a teenager who had previously caused the death of her father at Crystal Lake (between Jason’s rampages), and was now returning to face her trauma with her mum and her doctor.

They are joined by a group of teenagers in the next holiday home, who have either forgotten about Jason or just don’t care.

In terms of where I rank The New Blood it’s kind of somewhere just below the middle, for example, it sits between the 2009 remake and Freddy Vs Jason on my Letterboxd, coming in at number 8 out of 12.

The effects and the scope of the film from the late John Carl Beuchler are ambitious, it’s just such a departure from Jason Lives it can be a little jarring.

Despite the cuts, the sleeping bag death remains a franchise favourite, alongside the death of bitchy Melissa while the finale, which included exploding a house becomes a little too hokey as Tina’s dead father, covered algae (I guess) comes up from the depths to wrestle Jason back down to another watery grave in Crystal Lake.

I must admit on a recent watch, I have come to accept the film’s flaws and enjoyed it more plus when you compare it to what comes next in Jason Takes Manhattan, The New Blood can feel like a top tier slasher.

What do you think of Friday the 13th Part VII? Let us know in the comments.