Curious Goods: Behind the Scenes of Friday the 13th: The Series

“Lewis Vendredi made a deal with the devil to sell cursed antiques, but he broke the pact, and it cost him his soul. His niece Micki, and her cousin Ryan, inherited the store—and with it, the curse. Now they must get everything back—and the real terror begins.” So opens Friday the 13th: The Series. In 1987, Paramount Studios found success selling a new Star Trek series into syndication. Eager to cash in on other studio-owned properties, Paramount asked producer Frank Mancuso Jr. to develop a series around Friday the 13th, and the television series was born. It had nothing to do with the popular slasher film franchise, which was both a blessing and curse. It was a largely young, inexperienced cast and crew, and one of the first Hollywood productions to shoot entirely in Canada. In the first-ever examination of the TV series, author Alyse Wax delves into the series episode-by-episode, with more than sixty exclusive interviews with the cast, writers, directors, and producers, as well as nearly fifty never published behind-the-scenes photos from the cast and crew’s personal collections.