Victor Brooke Miller, the American screenwriter and television writer who wrote the original Friday the 13th, died on Monday, August 31, 2026, in Alameda, California. He was 86. His son Ian Miller announced his death the following day. A cause of death was not disclosed.

Miller was born on May 14, 1940, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the third of four children of John Dabney Miller and Barbara Leovy Miller. His siblings were Adair, John and Keith. He attended Metairie Country Day for kindergarten, Clay County School in Green Cove Springs, Florida, for first grade, Lawrence School on Long Island for second grade and Lloyd Harbor School for grades three through seven. He completed grades eight through twelve at Milton Academy in Massachusetts. Miller later credited Milton with developing both his attachment to language and the humour and sense of the absurd that became central to his personality and writing.

He entered Yale College in 1958 and graduated in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He took every creative writing course Yale offered at the time, studying fiction with Robert Penn Warren as well as writing with Harry Berger Jr. and Edward Gordon. He later attended Tulane University in New Orleans, where he earned a Master of Arts in Theatre and Speech in 1967.

Immediately after graduating from Yale, Miller married Elizabeth Couzens Thurston, known as Tina, whom he had met during his senior year. They had two sons, Ian Dabney Miller, born in 1968, and Joshua Galleher Miller, born in 1972. In 2001, Miller and his wife moved to Alameda to be near their sons, daughters-in-law and grandson. They remained married until his death.

Miller began his professional life in television programming at the advertising agency Benton & Bowles in New York, where he worked from 1962 to 1963. He then spent three years teaching English and public speaking at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. After his graduate studies, he joined a programme run jointly by the Connecticut State Department of Education and the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford. From 1967 to 1972, he helped develop methods that used theatre games and improvisation to teach subjects ranging from English to physics.

During this period Miller began writing plays and studied playwriting at HB Studio with Herbert Berghof. He subsequently turned to fiction. Pocket Books published Fernanda, his detective novel about a female private investigator, and then hired him to novelise Kojak television scripts. Miller ultimately produced nine Kojak tie-in novels. His other books included Hide the Children, Toga Party, Angel’s Blood, The Glory Sharer, The Book of Worries and Windborne. He also co-authored Aikido in Everyday Life with Terry Dobson, an expanded later edition of their earlier Giving In to Get Your Way.

Miller moved into film writing in the 1970s. He adapted Scott O’Dell’s novel The Black Pearl and then began working with director and producer Sean S. Cunningham. Miller wrote the low-budget baseball comedy Here Come the Tigers, released in 1978 under his pseudonym Arch McCoy, and wrote the screenplay for Cunningham’s soccer comedy Manny’s Orphans, also released in 1978.

The commercial disappointment of those family films helped push Cunningham and Miller towards horror. Cunningham suggested abandoning the G-rated market, and Miller went to see John Carpenter’s Halloween to study how a contemporary horror film worked. Miller later described Halloween openly as his template. From it he took the principles of an evil event in the past, young characters isolated from adult help and the association between sexual activity and death. For his own story, he chose an unopened summer camp as the isolated setting and a boy’s drowning as the historic crime.

The result was Friday the 13th. Miller conceived Jason Voorhees as a child who had drowned while camp counsellors were distracted, and Jason’s mother, Pamela Voorhees, as the killer avenging his death. Miller was emphatic throughout his life that, in his conception, Jason was dead. The famous final scare in which the deformed young Jason rises from Crystal Lake was not part of Miller’s screenplay drafts. Court records from the later copyright case show that the ending was added after financier Phil Scuderi proposed it during development. Miller nevertheless received sole “written by” credit for the screenplay.

Directed and produced by Cunningham, Friday the 13th opened in the United States on May 9, 1980. Made for an estimated $550,000, it earned $39.75 million in the United States and Canada and approximately $59.75 million worldwide. The film became one of the defining early successes of the American slasher boom and helped establish the summer camp as one of the genre’s most recognisable settings.

Miller created Pamela Voorhees, the drowned child Jason Voorhees and survivor Alice Hardy, but he did not write the sequels. The series transformed Jason into an adult murderer and eventually gave him the hockey mask that became the franchise’s defining image. Miller strongly disliked the decision to resurrect Jason. He repeatedly said that Jason’s death was fundamental to Pamela Voorhees’s motive and that making him the killer undermined the logic of the original story. He said he did not watch the sequels.

Miller reunited professionally with Cunningham on A Stranger Is Watching, the 1982 adaptation of Mary Higgins Clark’s novel. Miller shared screenplay credit with Earl Mac Rauch. Decades later, he returned to feature horror as co-writer and producer of Tom Holland’s Rock, Paper, Scissors, also known during production as Rock Paper Dead. He also appeared as himself in the 2022 horror mockumentary The Once and Future Smash.

Much of Miller’s career was spent in daytime television. He became associate head writer of One Life to Live from 1982 to 1984 before moving to All My Children. He subsequently worked on Guiding Light, Another World and General Hospital, sometimes moving between programmes as writing teams changed. Miller regarded daytime drama as the profession that occupied roughly two decades of his working life, and he finished his soap-writing career on General Hospital in 2002.

His soap work brought substantial industry recognition. Miller shared Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama Series Writing with the All My Children writing team in 1985, 1988 and 1998. He also won four Writers Guild of America awards during his television career.

More than three decades after Friday the 13th was released, Miller became involved in the legal battle that reshaped ownership of the property. In 2016 he served a notice under Section 203 of the United States Copyright Act seeking to terminate the earlier transfer of his rights in the original screenplay. Horror Inc. and Manny Company challenged the notice, arguing that Miller had written the screenplay as an employee and that it was therefore a work made for hire.

A federal district court ruled for Miller, and on September 30, 2021, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the decision. The appeals court held that Miller had been an independent contractor, rather than an employee of Manny, when he wrote the screenplay in 1979. His termination notice was therefore effective, allowing him to reclaim the rights he had originally transferred in the screenplay and its constituent elements. The ruling did not hand Miller ownership of the entire Friday the 13th franchise. Rights in later films, later-developed versions of Jason and other franchise material remained separate.

Miller lived long enough to see his original work return to the screen in a new form. Crystal Lake, the A24 and Peacock prequel series based on Friday the 13th, is scheduled to premiere on October 15, 2026. Brad Caleb Kane serves as creator, writer and showrunner, with Miller credited as an executive producer alongside Marc Toberoff, Robert M. Barsamian, Robert P. Barsamian, Stuart Manashil, Tyson Bidner and Michael Lennox.

Announcing his father’s death, Ian Miller described him as almost always the smartest and funniest person in the room and credited him with inspiring in others a love of photography, music and storytelling. He said Miller was survived by his wife, two sons and grandson. The family plans to hold a celebration of his life in November, on Friday the 13th. In 2026, November 13 falls on a Friday.

Miller spent his later years in Alameda, taking photographs, watching films and helping younger writers with their work. His own account of his life was characteristically irreverent about success, failure and the strange route that took a Yale-educated novelist and soap writer into horror history. Whatever reservations he had about the sequels, the character his screenplay set in motion became one of the most recognisable figures in popular horror. Miller’s original story, however, was always simpler and stranger: Jason was the dead child, his mother was the monster, and grief was the engine that turned Crystal Lake into a killing ground.