While Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood isn’t one of the best slasher sequels ever written, its bad reviews are not the reason that the screenwriter’s identity remains a mystery decades later. During the 1980s, the Friday the 13th franchise gained an impressively bad critical reputation. While each new sequel reliably raked in millions at the box office and cost almost nothing to produce, the Friday the 13th movies just as reliably earned terrible critical reception (save for 1986’s Friday The 13th Part V: Jason Lives!, a meta-comedy that was widely hailed as an improvement on its predecessors).
This fate of the franchise was almost inevitable since as, from the inception of the series, the Friday the 13th franchise never made much sense. The story of the Friday the 13th movies don't add up upon a re-watch, something that became more noticeable as the series wore on and the premise of each new movie grew sillier and sillier. With such terrible critical write-ups, viewers could be forgiven for assuming that the screenwriter of Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood didn’t want their name associated with the project out of shame.
However, that is not why Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood’s screenwriter remains anonymous even decades after the sequel’s release. The real reason is much murkier and more legally questionable. No one knows who Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood’s screenwriter is because the sequel was written during the Writers Guild of America strike and the unidentified writer broke that strike to write the script. Taking credit for writing Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood would have resulted in this screenwriter’s expulsion from the guild if their identity was exposed, which explains the continuing secrecy around their real name.
Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood’s Writer Doesn’t Exist
Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood does have a screenwriter named in the movie’s credits, but this shouldn’t fool fans of the slasher franchise. “Manuel Fidello” is a pseudonym for the sequel's unknown writer, not a real person. The movie’s writing is also credited to producer and novelist Daryl Haney, who later spoke about pitching the premise of “Jason Vs Carrie” to Friday the 13th series producer Barbara Sachs early on in the production of Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood. However, Haney has never outed himself as Manuel Fidello, meaning there may have been two screenwriters working on the Friday the 13th sequel and Haney might have only provided the idea for the movie’s story.
In any case, it is unlikely that the real name of Manuel Fidello will ever come to light. It has been decades since Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood’s release and the movie’s reviews certainly didn’t leave anyone desperate to claim credit for its script, meaning the identity of the scribe will likely never be known. Unless an intrepid Friday The 13th fan wants to seek out the screenwriter who crossed the picket line some 34 years ago, the real writer of Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood will remain a mystery for good.
