Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is a 1985 American slasher film directed by Danny Steinmann and the fifth entry in the Friday the 13th series. Set after the events of The Final Chapter, it follows Tommy Jarvis as a traumatised teenager trying to recover from his encounter with Jason Voorhees. He is sent to Pinehurst, a rural halfway house for troubled youths, but a new series of murders soon begins around the facility. The film is one of the more unusual entries in the franchise because it plays heavily with Jason’s legacy rather than simply continuing the same formula directly, turning Tommy’s trauma and the question of the killer’s identity into the central hook.
The film was shot in California rather than in the New Jersey-style camp setting associated with the original Friday the 13th. Pinehurst was filmed at a rural property in Camarillo, giving the film its halfway-house setting of barns, open ground, dirt roads and isolated farm buildings. Additional Los Angeles-area locations were used for the surrounding world, including Agoura Hills for the diner sequence at The Rock Store on Mulholland Highway, and Franklin Canyon in Beverly Hills for wooded road and trailer-park material. This gives A New Beginning a noticeably different geography from the earlier camp-based films: instead of cabins around Crystal Lake, the story unfolds in a more scattered rural Southern California landscape of farms, roadside stops, back roads and scrubby woodland, which helps separate Tommy Jarvis’s damaged new chapter from the mythology of the original camp.
The Rock Store is used as the diner where Lana works. The location’s small roadside layout and slightly worn character fit the film’s rural atmosphere, even though the real building is in the Santa Monica Mountains outside Los Angeles. The diner becomes one of several isolated places in the film where ordinary surroundings are turned into part of the horror.
Rock Store
Rock Store has appeared in Panic in Year Zero!, Charlie’s Angels, Dallas, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, Cobra, The Wonder Years, Twin Peaks, and many more.
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