How Carrie Changed Friday the 13th's Ending - and Helped Create the Franchise

Both Carrie and Friday the 13th are horror movie staples, but one wouldn't really exist without the other.

You don't need to see a movie like Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma to know that becoming a long-running horror franchise is as much to do with dumb luck and timing as cinematic quality. With Crystal Lake set to bring audiences back to the Friday the 13th universe this October for the first time since 2009, it feels like as good a time as any to revisit the small, last-minute decision that helped to turn a perfectly successful 1980 slasher movie into a 47-year long horror saga. 

When it comes to churning out sequels, one thing that definitely helps is to establish an iconic looking killer who can come back again and again. Of the longest-running horror franchises, this is more true for the Friday the 13th movies than any others — a franchise that needed more than two movies to introduce Jason’s hockey mask and mightn’t have even had a killer to wear it were it not for the inspiration of another horror classic.

Last Minute Change Helped Create One of Horror's Longest-Running Franchises

Like many great movies in Hollywood, the original Friday the 13th was born less from pure inspiration than cold hard capitalism. Essentially, director Sean S. Cunningham, a fledgling filmmaker who’d worked with Wes Craven on a couple of projects in the 1970s, saw John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1979 and decided he wanted in on the action.

Working with Paramount studios and the writer Victor Miller, he quickly dreamed up a story about a summer camp and a mother out for revenge against the camp counsellors responsible for the death of her son, and managed to get the movie into theatres the following May, hoping to cash in on the profitable slasher craze that Halloween had just helped to relaunch. 

Knowing that Alice (the movie's final girl, played by Adrienne King) decapitates Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) at the end of the movie, Cunningham and Miller hadn't planned to turn Friday the 13th into a franchise, but when the movie made $60m at the box-office Paramount executives started having other ideas. At first, they planned to turn Friday the 13th into an anthology series, with a different story planned for each year, each under the same F13 banner. That is, until a producer named Phil Scuderi had the bright idea to return to Crystal Lake with Jason as the killer.

The brainwave was inspired by the movie's final scene, in which an undead Jason rises from the lake and pulls Alice under — a sequence that wasn't in Miller's original script and was intended as a kind of dream sequence, but which instantly became something more thanks to a crucial final exchange between Alice and a police officer. "We didn't find a boy," he says, to which Alice responds, “Then he’s still there.”

Carrie Inspired That Crucial Decision

The idea for the scene where Jason returns came from special effects legend Tom Savini (a regular collaborator of George A. Romero) who watched Carrie during the production and felt that the movie needed a final scare — or a “chair jumper”, to use Savini's words. 

He was, of course, referring to the finale of Brian de Palma’s legendary 1976 movie (the first adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel) about a teenage girl with telekinetic powers. In De Palma’s movie, just like in the book, the climactic scene sees Carrie go to prom; where she has a dance, gets doused in pigs blood, and finishes the evening by setting the gymnasium (and her classmates) on fire. Carrie then returns home for a last goodbye with her fanatically religious mother before their house gets sucked into the ground. 

In King’s original story, Carrie manages to crawl out for a last exchange with Sue Snell (basically the only girl in class who showed her kindness) before passing away, but De Palma decided to do away with that and end his movie with more of a bang. In his Carrie, the final scene shows Sue (Amy Irving) approach the empty lot where Carrie’s house once stood, where a crucifix-shaped “For Sale” sign now stands, painted over with the words “Carrie White burns in Hell!"

As Sue kneels to place some flowers, a bloody hand reaches out and grabs hers, prompting Sue to wake up in her bed screaming — a legendary chair jumper indeed.

Savini and Cunningham agreed that their movie should have something similar, and so, a legendary monster was born.

What Happened Next for Friday the 13th?

What happened next was 11 Jason movies over the next 30 years, with box-office earnings in the hundreds of millions. Now, a potential 2026 franchise relaunch could well be on the cards with the release of the A24-produced prequel series Crystal Lake, in which Linda Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees.

Back in 1980, however, Cunningham's decision to change the ending prompted a major falling out with Victor Miller which eventually led to a bitter legal dispute that only came to its conclusion in 2021 — with Miller basically receiving credit for creating the first movie and Cunningham being recognised as the father of Jason’s subsequent exploits.

Filmmaking really can be murder sometimes.