Victor Miller, who wrote the screenplay for the original Friday the 13th, died on August 31, 2026, in Alameda, California. He was 86. Miller was born in New Orleans in 1940, was paid $9,282 for the script in 1979, and was never shy about what he thought was wrong with every Friday the 13th movie that came after his.
The cleanest version of his complaint sat in an FAQ on his own website, online by 2011 at the latest: “To be honest, I have not seen any of the sequels, but I have a major problem with all of them because they made Jason the villain.”
“Jason was dead from the very beginning. He was a victim, not a villain,” the writer added, calling a mother as the killer “the best part of my screenplay.”
Victor Miller Was Not Shy on This Opinion
In Miller’s script, the murderer is Pamela Voorhees, a mother killing camp counselors to avenge the death of her young son, and Jason exists only as her motive. Bring him back as the killer and the motive goes with him.
“Only because it completely destroys the motivation for Mrs. Voorhees!” Miller laughed as he told Vice in 2015 when asked about his website entry. “Which was the only thing I had going for me in that movie, which was that she was avenging her son and then it turns out that he isn’t dead anyway.”
Two years earlier he had put it more bluntly to the site Trainwreck’d Society: bringing Jason back “may have been a revenue stream, but it eviscerated Mrs. Voorhees’ raison d’ murder.” To the fan site Friday the 13th: The Website, he called Jason “just a stock villain” and added, “I don’t have much sympathy for him.”
Different Versions of the Story
He didn’t even get the last word on his own ending. In a sworn declaration quoted by a federal appeals court in 2021, Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham said financier Phil Scuderi proposed the shock in which Jason comes out of the lake, that Jason “never appears in any of Miller’s drafts,” and that Miller “was vehemently opposed to the idea of Jason coming back to life at all.”
Miller told the fan site a different story: he wrote Jason popping out of the water himself, “using pretty much the Carrie ending shot-for-shot,” and drove the pages over to Cunningham’s production office separately. “That’s why the pages never appeared in my own draft.”
The story wasn’t his only grievance. When Vice asked whether his objection was purely about continuity, Miller said, “Well, that and that I wasn’t invited to participate in the sequels,” adding, “The two put together make the whole.”
He said he’d been told he was too expensive for Part 2, explaining, “Sequels have to be made cheaper than the previous one. And I went, ‘Oh. OK.’ What did I know? I’d never written a hit movie before.” He doubted it would have mattered anyway: “I probably would have fought the idea of making Jason the bad guy and been fired from the project anyway,” he told the fan site.
The Legal Issues of Friday the 13th
Miller kept getting paid either way. As he told Vice, “every time they make a new [Friday the 13th movie], I get a little check,” and the court record puts a number on part of it: a Writers Guild settlement of $27,396.46 in the late 1980s over unpaid sequel and residual payments. By then Miller was after something bigger.
In 2016, he served a termination notice under copyright law to take back the rights to his screenplay, and Horror Inc. and the Manny Company sued. He won twice, in federal district court in Connecticut in 2018 and at the Second Circuit on September 30, 2021, which held that he had written the script as an independent contractor, so it was never a work made for hire.
The win covered only the U.S. rights to that first screenplay, and according to Bloody Disgusting, the other side kept the grown-up, hockey-masked Jason—but couldn’t legally put him in a movie without Miller’s permission.
What Miller loved was the villain he actually wrote. He told Trainwreck’d Society that he had made “a mother become a super-villain, breaking the boundaries of horror,” and gotten “a fantasy mom who would kill to punish anyone who was mean to her kid.”
Miller’s own mother, he added, might have said something else if he had drowned: “I told you not to go near the water. You are not a very good swimmer.”
As for the latest entry in the Friday the 13th franchise, A24 and Peacock’s Crystal Lake TV show, Miller served as an executive producer. All eight episodes are now streaming on Peacock.