Before Jason Voorhees became a hockey-masked killer, Victor Miller wrote him as the drowned child whose loss drove a mother's revenge at Camp Crystal Lake. Miller, the screenwriter of the original Friday the 13th and a three-time Daytime Emmy winner for All My Children, died on August 31, 2026, in Alameda, California. He was 86. His son Ian confirmed the death directly to Variety.

TheWrap reported that Victor Brooke Miller was born on May 14, 1940, in New Orleans, and attended Milton Academy and Yale University. He graduated from Yale College in 1962 after taking every creative-writing course then offered, including fiction with Robert Penn Warren, and earned a master's degree in theatre and speech from Tulane University in 1967.

Before movies, Miller worked in television programming, taught English and public speaking, and helped create a Connecticut education program using theater games and improvisation. He wrote a detective novel, turned Kojak scripts into tie-in novels, and adapted Scott O'Dell's The Black Pearl for film. With producer-director Sean S. Cunningham, he wrote the family sports films Here Come the Tigers and Manny's Orphans.

When Cunningham proposed a horror picture in 1979, Miller studied Halloween and built his story around a summer camp before opening day, beyond ready adult help. His treatment began as The Long Night at Camp Blood. The screenplay made Pamela Voorhees the avenging mother of a boy who had drowned at the camp, establishing the names, setting, and grief-driven premise that the later series transformed. The film's production history documents that Miller drafted at home on his typewriter and consistently received sole written-by credit.

Friday the 13th opened on May 9, 1980. Its success produced eleven sequels and a durable place for Camp Crystal Lake in popular culture, although Miller did not write the follow-ups. In his film, Pamela was the killer, while Jason was the absent child whose death set the story in motion.

Miller found the steady center of his professional life in daytime television. He became associate head writer of One Life to Live in 1982, moved to All My Children in 1984, and also worked on Guiding Light, Another World, and General Hospital. He briefly served as co-head writer of All My Children with Lorraine Broderick. His work contributed to three Daytime Emmy wins for the show's writing team, and the Writers Guild of America lists him among its 2004 daytime-serial winners for All My Children. He finished his daytime career at General Hospital in 2002.

Miller and his wife, Tina, moved to Alameda in 2001 to be near their sons and grandson. Ian told TheWrap that his father inspired a love of photography, music, and storytelling in him and others. Variety reported that Miller was survived by Tina and their sons, Ian and Josh.

What persists bears the range of a writer who never stayed in one lane: the summer camp and grieving mother at the center of Friday the 13th, and decades of intertwined lives on daytime television. Miller supplied horror with a foundational story, soaps with years of daily craft, and other storytellers with a model of how a single screenplay could keep speaking across generations.