Old Academy Drive

Old Academy Drive is a short, sloping street in the historic centre of Blairstown, New Jersey, running uphill from Main Street. The road takes its name from the nearby Old Academy, the original home of Blair Academy, which opened in 1849 after local businessman John Insley Blair donated land for the school. The street is lined with historic buildings and leads down towards the town’s traditional commercial centre. Despite its modest size, this particular stretch of road has a connection to the Friday the 13th franchise, having been used for two remarkably similar scenes filmed more than four decades apart.

Old Academy Drive has appeared in Friday the 13th (1980) and Crystal Lake (2026–). Both productions used the same downhill approach towards Main Street, with the later television series deliberately recreating the sequence from the original horror film.

In Friday the 13th (1980), directed by Sean S. Cunningham, Old Academy Drive appears near the beginning of the film as Annie Phillips (Robbi Morgan) arrives in the fictional town of Crystal Lake. Carrying her backpack, the young woman walks down the sloping road towards Main Street on her way to the summer camp where she has been hired as a cook. The sequence shows the surrounding houses and historic buildings, including the distinctive structures near the junction with Main Street. Annie subsequently visits a local diner to ask for directions to Camp Crystal Lake, where she encounters the eccentric Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney), who warns her about the camp’s troubled history. The brief walk along Old Academy Drive is one of several scenes filmed in the real town of Blairstown during the autumn of 1979.

In Crystal Lake (2026–), the Friday the 13th prequel series, Old Academy Drive returns in the fourth episode, “A New Beginning”. Willow (Oona Roche), a young hippie hitchhiking through the area, walks down the same hill towards Main Street, following almost exactly the route taken by Annie in the original film. The sequence deliberately recreates the earlier camera angles and character movements, with Willow approaching the town along the same recognisable stretch of road before continuing to the local diner. Remarkably little has changed in the surrounding streetscape since 1979, allowing the filmmakers to reproduce the original shots with considerable accuracy. The recreation was intentional, with series creator Brad Caleb Kane explaining that the production returned to Blairstown specifically to reproduce Annie’s arrival from Friday the 13th, using the same locations and matching the original compositions as closely as possible.

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