David Cronenberg helmed one of the best episodes of Friday The 13th: The Series, titled "Faith Healer." Neither Friday The 13th nor A Nightmare On Elm Street feels like obvious contenders for a TV spinoff, but they both received one at the height of their popularity. While there might be something of a campy, retro charm to it, Freddy's Nightmares is widely considered something of a mess that only the most hardcore followers of the franchise could watch from beginning to end.
Friday The 13th: The Series, on the other hand, is regarded as something of a cult gem and debuted in 1987. This is largely because it has no real connections to the movie franchise at all, and Jason Voorhees never appears. Instead, it focuses on a group that run a store called Curious Goods who retrieve cursed items. Despite a low budget, the series could be genuinely pretty creepy and inventive with its premise, and filmmakers like Atom Egoyan and Tom McLoughlin - who previously helmed Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives - directed various episodes.
The Canadian shot production even managed to nab body-horror auteur David Cronenberg for the first season, who was coming off of The Fly. His episode is titled "Faith Healer," which sees a religious charlatan come across a glove that can heal people of illness - even terminal ones. The issue is the glove absorbs that sickness and amplifies it, so the illness must be swiftly passed to another person, who then typically die in a gruesome manner.
To stop the murderous faith healer, series character Jack teams with a religious debunker who has his own reasons to learn if the glove's effects are for real. Friday The 13th: The Series' "Faith Healer" packs many of Cronenberg's tropes in a tight 45-minute runtime, so fans can expect some nasty body-horror mixed with more philosophical concepts like faith versus science. The effects are far less refined than Cronenberg's usual work but they're effectively gory regardless, but there's not much in the way of visual flair and the episode looks a tad dreary now.
The guest performance by Cronenberg's regular player Robert A. Silverman is somewhat stilted too, though he does have a creepy charisma. Episodes like The Inheritance” or “Doctor Jack” are considered some of Friday The 13th: The Series' best outings, but David Cronenberg's "Faith Healer" might just be top. It's got a great hook and the director is clearly having fun with it, though he largely steered clear of TV work following production. The director would later return to the franchise for a fun cameo in Jason X, where he plays a smarmy scientist who is swiftly dispatched by the title slasher.