Entertainment
For 3 Seasons, This Unexpected ‘Friday the 13th’ Show Had Nothing To Do With the Classic Horror Franchise
The first time you see Friday the 13th in a TV listing in the late 1980s, your brain does what horror-conditioned brains do: It conjures a dock, a machete, and a hockey mask catching moonlight in a woodsy setting. Then Friday the 13th: The Series premieres on October 3, 1987, and takes a route that no one expected.
There, you won’t find Jason Voorhees, Camp Crystal Lake, or any attempt to recreate the films scene-for-scene. Instead, there’s an antiques shop called Curious Goods and a collection of everyday objects that behave like they’ve signed paperwork in blood. From 1996 to 1999, Poltergeist: The Legacy borrowed its name from the Poltergeist film franchise. However, that show dealt with a secret organization battling supernatural forces. In both cases, the title opens the door. What’s inside is something else entirely.
‘Friday the 13th: The Series’ Tricked Its Audience
On syndicated television, attention is currency. A title like Friday the 13th does half the marketing for you. The show was originally going to be called The 13th Hour, but the final name carried instant recognition. That awareness got viewers to sample the premiere, and what kept them engaged was the intriguing structure.
The premise is deceptively flexible: Lewis Vendredi makes a deal with the devil, the antiques in his shop become cursed, then he dies. His niece Micki (Louise Robey) and distant cousin Ryan (John D. LeMay) inherit the store, sell off the inventory, and only afterward learn what those items actually are. With the help of occult expert Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), they begin tracking the antiques down and locking them in the shop’s vault.
The Friday the 13th Franchise’s Silliest Kill Has a Terrifying Backstory
You won’t be making fun of it any longer.
Each episode revolves around a different object. A glove that heals by transferring illness in “Faith Healer,” a locket that resurrects the wearer at a cost in “Mesmer’s Bauble,” or other things like a music box, a camera, and a doll. The show becomes a rotating study of desire and consequence. The antiques don’t chase victims, but rather, they wait for someone to want something badly enough, putting them on the main characters’ radar.
Curious Goods Turns Human Weakness Into the Story Engine
What gives the series its staying power isn’t spectacle, but its repetition with variation. Every object offers a shortcut, the user takes it, and the metaphorical price escalates. Many times, the character possessing a cursed object must use it to kill people, often with Jack, Micki, and Ryan coming in to prevent further deaths, such as in “Crippled Inside,” or “Vanity’s Mirror.” Because the objects are ordinary, the horror slides into domestic spaces like kitchens, bedrooms, or even office desks. A cursed antique isn’t a masked killer lumbering through the woods.
Over 72 episodes across three seasons, the trio accumulates scars. Ryan changes the most, drifting from wide-eyed heir to someone who understands how heavy the work is. Micki sacrifices relationships to stay on the hunt. Jack carries a lifetime of occult knowledge like a man who knows every wrong door in town and keeps knocking anyway.
The format almost functions like an anthology, but the core cast anchors it. Their weariness builds as their vault to contain the cursed objects fills. The shop remains open, selling only non-cursed goods, like a storefront trying to look normal while containing something profoundly not.
There Is a Very Loose Connection to the Friday the 13th Franchise
Even though the show has no narrative ties to the films, the production lineage rings in the background. The series was created by Frank Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams, and Mancuso had produced multiple Friday the 13th movies.
Then LeMay walked into Jason Goes to Hell: the Final Friday, and suddenly the separation felt thinner. Not because the stories connected, but because the same face carried history from one corner of horror into another. It played less like a crossover and more like an echo, proving that distant corners of horror culture can meet in subtle ways across time.
Behind the camera, other creative overlaps reinforced that sense of proximity. Writer/director Tom McLoughlin and music composer Fred Mollin worked on the films as well as the series. Even horror auteur David Cronenberg appeared in Jason X, and directed the episode, “Faith Healer.” Thus, the series carried the atmosphere of the film franchise, even while the stories walked a separate path.
‘Friday the 13th: The Series’ Is an Overlooked Horror Gem
The show ran from 1987 to 1990, producing 72 episodes. In the syndicated ecosystem of the late ’80s, that kind of episode count allowed a series to settle into living rooms and stay there. Viewers encountered it weekly — sometimes accidentally — and slowly recognized its rhythm.
As the seasons progressed, the storytelling deepened. Guest stars rotated in and out. Directors experimented with the formula. The cursed-object concept supported everything from body horror to psychological unraveling. Some episodes leaned pulpy while others lingered in moral dread, and that elasticity kept it from feeling stale. The series ended in 1990, and fans who hoped a final episode would bring Jason Vorhees and Camp Crystal Lake into the mix were sadly disappointed.
What remains is one of horror television’s strangest artifacts: a show that carried one of the most recognizable titles in slasher history and quietly built its own mythology instead. The real menace wasn’t a hulking figure in the woods, but the idea that evil could sit on a shelf, waiting for someone to believe they deserved more than fate had given them.