Friday the 13th: The Series

Antiques dealer Lewis Vendredi made a deal with the Devil. In exchange for wealth, magic powers and long life, he sold cursed antiques out of his shop, Vendredi's Antiques. In the first episode, "The Inheritance," Lewis tries to break the pact. It kills him, and the Devil takes his soul. (Vendredi is French for Friday.)

Lewis leaves the shop to his niece, Micki Foster, and her cousin Ryan Dallion, who have never met. They start selling off the stock before Jack Marshak shows up. Jack was Lewis's childhood friend, a retired stage magician, world traveler and expert on the occult, and he had found many of the pieces for Lewis before they were cursed. He tells them that every item they sold carries a curse. Using Lewis's manifest of everything he sold, the three set out to get the objects back. The antiques cannot be destroyed, so each one goes into a vault in the shop that makes it harmless. Jack renames the store Curious Goods.

Most episodes follow the same pattern. Someone discovers a cursed object will give them what they want, whether money, youth, love, talent or revenge, but it only works if they kill with it. Often the payoff wears off and they have to keep killing. The trio has to find the person and take the object away. Some objects think for themselves, like the doll in the first episode. A few episodes have no object at all and pit the three against Lewis's ghost or other agents of the Devil.

In season one, Micki breaks off her engagement to her fiancé Lloyd in "Root of All Evil" to keep hunting antiques. Ryan falls for a young woman in a closed religious community in the two-part "The Quilt of Hathor." The finale, "Bottle of Dreams," traps Micki and Ryan in the vault with a cursed urn and introduces Jack's friend Rashid, an Egyptian mystic.

Season two opens with "Doorway to Hell," in which Lewis's ghost lures the cousins to an abandoned house to get back into the world of the living. Micki is killed with a cursed coin in "Tails I Live, Heads You Die" and brought back to life. Late in the season Micki meets Johnny Ventura, a young street kid, in "Wedding Bell Blues." In "The Prisoner," an invisible burglar kills Johnny's father and frames Johnny for it. The season ends with "Coven of Darkness," in which Lewis's old witches' coven hexes Ryan.

Season three opens with the two-part "The Prophecies." Jack goes to France to look into a prophecy about the Antichrist, and Ryan is turned into a small child and leaves the show. Johnny takes his place. The season includes episodes where Johnny's mistakes cause trouble, a road trip where Micki and Johnny run into a family of rural killers, and a story about ghost bikers tied to Jack's father. The last episode, "The Charnel Pit," sends Micki back in time through a double-sided painting into the dungeon of the Marquis de Sade. It was not meant to be the finale. The show was canceled while it was being filmed, so the story never got an ending.

Episodes

Season 1

Season 2

Season 3

Release & Reception

• Status: Ended. Canceled During Production of the Third Season.
• Runtime: 72 episodes in 3 seasons (26, 26, 20). About 45 to 46 minutes each, made for a one-hour slot.

The show premiered in first-run syndication on October 3, 1987, first in late-night slots. It did well enough that some stations moved it to prime time. The New York Times reported that its first season ranked second among men 18 to 49, behind Star Trek: The Next Generation, and fifth among women 18 to 49.

It ran 72 episodes through May 26, 1990: 26 in the first season, 26 in the second and 20 in the third.

Awards: two Emmy nominations for visual and graphic effects (1988 and 1989); two silver plaques in Chicago for "Scarlet Cinema" and "The Sweetest Sting"; a 1990 Best Series nomination from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films; and twelve Gemini Award nominations in Canada for writing, editing, directing, production design, acting, sound and music.

Overseas titles included Misterio para tres (Tele 5, Spain, 1991), To mystirio tis Paraskevis (ANT1 and Makedonia TV, Greece), Erben des Fluchs (Germany) and Aaveita ja kummituksia (MTV3, Finland). It aired in Indonesia on TVRI from 1990 to 1991 and on RCTI from 1992 to 1996.

The format of a team tracking down cursed artifacts shows up in later shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and The X-Files. Critics accused Syfy's Warehouse 13 (2009) of borrowing heavily from it.

Cast

Crew

Production

Frank Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams created the show under the title The 13th Hour. Mancuso's father ran Paramount at the time and told his son he could make any show he wanted, as long as it was scary and used the Friday the 13th name. Paramount had a syndication hit with Star Trek: The Next Generation and wanted another from a property it owned. Mancuso Jr. thought The 13th Hour would scare off buyers and believed the Friday the 13th name would sell it.

Mancuso Jr. never planned to tie the show to the Jason films. He wanted to use the idea of Friday the 13th as bad luck and curses. There was talk of using Jason's hockey mask, but it was dropped so the show could stand on its own. He worried that mentioning the films would pull viewers out of the new world they were building.

The show was one of the first American and Canadian co-productions, which caused its share of headaches. It was filmed in Toronto on an estimated budget of under $500,000 per episode. "Cupid's Quiver," directed by Atom Egoyan, was the first episode shot. The pilot, "The Inheritance," was shot third or fourth so the cast could settle in first. Micki and Ryan were written as cousins so there would be no will-they-or-won't-they romance.

The first season finale, "Bottle of Dreams," was mostly a clip show because the Writers Guild of America was on strike. More than half the writers were in the guild, so a Canadian writer finished the episode.

John D. LeMay left after season two and later said he regretted it. The producers let him out of his contract if he came back for a two-part farewell. Writer and director Tom McLoughlin wanted to do a religious exorcism story, and "The Prophecies" wrote Ryan out by turning him into a child. It was filmed in Quebec, and the production was the first allowed to shoot at the Ursuline Convent.

Director David Winning was 26 when he got his first episode, a killer-bee story with Art Hindle and Tim Webber. The director before him had quit because he did not want to do that script. Winning said he tried hard to make his three episodes look different from the rest of the show, and all three earned him Gemini nominations.

Ratings slipped in season three after Ryan left, and Johnny was not popular with viewers, who saw him mainly as a replacement. The cast and crew learned the show was canceled while filming the 20th episode of the season, "The Charnel Pit." It was too late to shoot any closing scenes. Director Armand Mastroianni wanted to go out big, and a lot of money went into that episode.

Filming locations

• Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Main production base for all three seasons, including the Curious Goods shop
• Ursuline Convent, Quebec: "The Prophecies" parts 1 and 2

Effects and makeup

The show was nominated for Emmy Awards for visual and graphic effects in 1988 and 1989.

It pushed the limits for television at the time, with violence close to R-rated horror films. Director Armand Mastroianni says his first episode, "Better Off Dead," was the first show to run a viewer discretion warning, though records are spotty.

Props and costumes

The cursed antiques drive the show. They include a killer doll ("The Inheritance"), a quill pen ("The Poison Pen"), a mulcher ("Root of All Evil"), an electric chair ("The Electrocutioner"), a trephinator ("Brain Drain"), a quilt ("The Quilt of Hathor"), a cradle from the Titanic ("What a Mother Wouldn't Do"), an urn ("Bottle of Dreams"), a coin ("Tails I Live, Heads You Die"), a stopwatch ("13 O'Clock"), a movie camera ("Scarlet Cinema"), a ring ("The Mephisto Ring"), a pool cue ("Wedding Bell Blues"), a wheelchair ("Crippled Inside"), a car radio ("Hate on Your Dial"), a golden cross ("Night Prey"), a tea set and monkey statues ("Year of the Monkey"), a leash ("My Wife as a Dog"), a jack-in-the-box ("Jack-in-the-Box") and a double-sided painting ("The Charnel Pit").

In "Read My Lips," the killer ventriloquist's dummy is not the cursed object. It is the silk flower on the ventriloquist's lapel.

The shop's vault neutralizes the objects, and Lewis's handwritten manifest lists everything he sold. In the first episode Jack renames the shop Curious Goods.

Director’s Production Recollections

• In a 2021 interview, David Winning recalled directing three episodes and seeking camera positions the established crew had not previously used.
• He described moving from a small independent-film crew to the series’ much larger Toronto production.
• Winning recalled that his first assignment involved killer bees and performers Art Hindle and Tim Webber.

The killers

Deaths

Fred Mollin composed the music.

Friday the 13th The Series: Music from the Original Television Scores, a soundtrack album by Fred Mollin, was released by GNP Crescendo Records in 1989.

Home Media

• All three seasons were released on DVD in the United States by CBS/Paramount (Region 1), later repackaged as The Complete Series.
• Also released on DVD in Germany by CBS/Paramount (Region 2) and in Australia by Umbrella Entertainment (Region 4).

• Curious Goods: Behind the Scenes of Friday the 13th: The Series, a book by Alyse Wax, BearManor Media, October 2015.

Press & Promo