Victor Miller, the writer who sat down to answer a producer’s request for a Halloween knockoff and instead handed horror one of its most durable franchises, has died at 86.
His son, Ian Miller, announced the death on Instagram, writing that his father “went to his final reward” and remembering him as “almost always the smartest, funniest person in whatever room he was in.” Ian credited him with inspiring in himself and in many others “a love of photography, music, and storytelling,” and closed by saying his father “had a helluva run and will be missed dearly.” No cause of death has been made public.
The Script That Built Camp Blood
Miller wrote the screenplay for Friday the 13th, the 1980 Sean S. Cunningham feature that took a shuttered summer camp, a handful of counselors nobody was going to protect, and a grieving mother with a very specific list of grievances, and turned all of it into an industry. Pamela Voorhees came from Miller’s pages. So did the boy she was avenging, along with the geography and grudge that every sequel, remake, crossover, and video game adaptation has been redecorating ever since.
That is worth sitting with for a second. The most recognizable slasher villain in the world exists because Miller needed a reason for a mother to be angry.
Before Camp Crystal Lake, Miller and Cunningham had worked together on Manny’s Orphans, a 1978 kids’ soccer comedy that could not be further from what came next. The two reunited in 1982 for A Stranger Is Watching, a considerably nastier thriller adapted from the Mary Higgins Clark novel.
Most of Miller’s working life, though, happened on television, and specifically in daytime. He wrote for One Life to Live, Guiding Light, and General Hospital, picked up Daytime Emmy recognition along the way, and also logged time on Married… with Children, which is about as wide a range as a résumé can reasonably cover.
He came back to the genre in 2017 with Rock, Paper, Scissors, a psychological thriller he co-wrote with Kerry Fleming for director Tom Holland, whose Fright Night and Child’s Play credits make that pairing a small gift to anyone who keeps track of these things. Miller was also attached as an executive producer on Crystal Lake, the A24 prequel series arriving on Peacock, which means his name sits on the newest chapter of the story he started.
He is survived by his wife, his two sons, and a grandson.
Forty-six years of masks, machetes, and mythology have been stacked on top of what Miller wrote in 1980, and almost none of it works without him. The franchise has been rebooted, litigated, and argued over for decades. The story underneath it is still his.