Michael Myers… Freddy… Jason are all fake! Jack Haddonfield is real.
FRIDAY THE 31st revives a classic US horror genre…
Kingston, New York, 07/13/2015 In the rural environs of upstate NY, twin aspiring filmmakers Christopher and Robert Greffrath have been creating a new horror legend from the dead bodies of its forebears. Not old enough even to have been babies when slasher classics Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) first stalked the screen, they have grown up with these movies much as earlier generations of Americans did with regional folktales. For the story of Jack Haddonfield, ëthe Jack-oí-Lantern Maní, is a campfire tale which comes to bloody, pulse-racing life.
Cinematographer Jarek Zabczynski has teamed up with the twinsí independent production company, Greffrath Park Films, to create a trailer which marries the visceral dread of those vintage ëman in the maskí movies with the high production values of 21st-century indie film. Clocking in at a menacingly lean 3:37 minutes, the low-budget trailer gives an evocative sense of what will happen if the Greffraths achieve their funding target and Friday the 31st is shot in the Hudson Valley region during the fall of 2015. For this is the season of Halloween which, as the astute may have gleaned, falls on a Friday during the film and the concept of F31 takes its cue from John Carpenterís scene-setting horror classic of 1978.
The lovingly macabre references donít stop there: Crystal Falls, the site of legendary boogeyman Haddonfieldís murder spree, evokes Crystal Lake, where Jason Voorhees (and his deranged mother) slaughtered young campers in the Friday the 13th series. Just as Jasonís mom lost her head, the legend of pumpkin grower Jack-oí-Lantern tells how he decapitated his own mother. Blades poised at the end of gloves recall nightmare king Freddy Krueger…
FRIDAY THE 31st requires only a $20,000 budget to maintain the impressive production values promised by its trailer. Hauntingly filmed, briskly edited and set to an electronic soundtrack that provokes all the unease of Carpenter in his heyday, its style is equal parts homage to a horror subgenre ñ once damned by the critics for its violence, but loved by generations of moviegoers ñ and also a reboot of that same genre, dragged kicking and screaming into the new millennium.
Christopher Greffrath describes his bloody labour of love in the language of folklore: ìlegends are rooted in evil long before they are ever known, and the pumpkin face killer is no exception.î The slasher movies of yesteryear have become modern folk tales, fuelling the urban legends that young people tell to spook each other. Support Greffrath Park Films in reaching its budgetary target and a new horror legend will be added to the bloody pantheon. When FRIDAY THE 31st comes, horror movies will become scary again…
You can check the Kickstarter out at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/591803910/friday-the-31st-short-film