Monstrosity and Immortality: The Life, Death, and Life Again of Jason Voorhees
By Sydney Bollinger
When most people think of Friday the 13th, the thing that comes to mind is most likely an image of Jason, the series’ killer, wearing a hockey mask, maybe wielding an ax. In the films, he plows his way through groups of dispensable teenagers and 20-somethings, with no regard for their lives or humanity. After all, as a boy, he drowned while at summer camp because the teenage camp counselors were too busy having sex to pay attention to him.
It’s the making of a monster — but is he the monster? As horror fans well know, Jason isn’t even the killer in the first film. That honor instead goes to his mother, Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), who seeks revenge on those same camp counselors for taking her son from her. In the horror canon, it’s an interesting play on the unknown, violent killer, which viewers often perceive to be male. Friday the 13th (1980) did exceedingly well — making nearly $60 million on a budget of $550k — and the studio and its filmmakers would be remiss to not make a sequel. So, they did just that, but, since final girl Alice (Adrienne King) killed Mrs. Voorhees at the end of the film, they decided to bring Jason up from the depths of Crystal Lake.
Immortality is a Cash Grab
Studios were motivated the way studios usually are: by money. Not able to pass up cashing in on the popularity of slasher films, it only made sense to continue making Friday the 13th films — and they did. From 1980 to 1989, eight Friday the 13th films were released. In the Halloween franchise’s first ten years (1978–1987), three were released, and Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) didn’t even follow the same storyline as the rest of the films. Only A Nightmare on Elm Street kept up with the Friday the 13th release schedule in its first ten years (1984–1993) with six films.
In many ways, Friday the 13th was the blueprint, and not just for how fast it pushed out several box office successes in a short period of time. The films also created a framework for the inexplicably immortal killer. Jason began as a human, and according to the mythos of Friday the 13th (1980), he died as a child. However, he soon became a non-human killer, escaping death time and again. Many of Jason’s unbelievable survivals happened because the filmmakers realized that the latest sequel did well financially and decided to make another one to cash in on the success.
In itself, this is not wholly surprising. Of course, they wanted to continue the series, but continuation caused problems for the believability of the storyline about a killer who was meant to be human the whole time. Plot holes and questions abound. Was Jason ever really dead? Did he live in the woods his whole life? How does he keep coming back to life? These aren’t the kind of movies that care about answering these questions, because they aren’t digging deep into the world of Camp Crystal Lake. They don’t need to. Audiences flock to the theater for topless girls and gruesome kills.
In 1984, the producer Frank Mancuso Jr. tried to end the series once and for all with the release of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, but it didn’t work.
Mythmaking Your Way to Immortality
Two films after Mancuso tried to end the story of Jason, he comes back from the dead — again (Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives) — he also comes back from the dead in Friday the 13th (1980), Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, and later in the series in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (of course, it’s not the final Friday), Jason X, and Freddy vs. Jason.
Despite being a human man, Jason is turned into a monstrous killing machine, whether that is out of necessity to keep making more movies or because his kills upon kills upon kills made him finally lose the distinct qualities that make humans human.
Crystal Lake itself became a kind of shrine to Jason and the murders. Campers play card games themed around Jason. Jason himself becomes a local bogeyman taking the form of fact or fiction, depending on which townsperson you talk to. The boy who was killed because of teenage neglect is now a fearsome dead and undead killer, terrorizing the town where he took all of his last breaths. To make this possible, the writers had to create a new mythos that would both fit the existing storyline and also extend the tale of Jason and Crystal Lake, as if they were haphazardly trying to “make it make sense.”
This all comes to a head in Jason Goes to Hell, which features a rather convoluted “explanation” for why Jason has never died: he can only be killed by a member of his bloodline. Of course, that goes out the window…because he is brought back.
Really, the entire existence of Jason’s immortality is just writing and rewriting the rules. In one film, he just apparently seemed dead but never really died. Others take a Frankenstein-like route, hinting at galvanism as the cause. There’s a film where he’s brought back unknowingly when a girl uses her powers of telekinesis.
The pursuit of money forced the creation of a man who was no longer a man, but a monster, a vehicle for just entertainment. The films get both better and worse as they go on because of the nonsensical plots trying to explain why he can’t just die. So, he becomes something else entirely, akin to those classic unkillable monsters like vampires and zombies. Perhaps you could overpower them, but the road is hard, and long, and will result in many deaths.
Inexistent Safety
To have an immortal character, especially a character like Jason who dies and is resurrected in nearly every film in the franchise, means stripping all characters away from the surety that they could ever be safe, a fear ingrained so deeply in humanity that it is hard to think of anything worse. Jason is always out there, ready to kill. His rage and anger will never subside. He might be killed, but he’ll just come back to life to swing his ax and kill people with the flex of a muscle. People are dispensable to him; there’s no reason not to keep killing.
This innate fear has wide influence on horror media, especially as popular franchises just became more and more popular. In Halloween, despite its incredibly convoluted timeline, Michael Myers lives on as the incarnation of evil. In Scream, someone new can become Ghostface at any moment. Freddy (of A Nightmare on Elm Street) is already supernatural in some sense, able to live outside the walls of reality.
The looming fear is just as powerful as the monster itself. Jason lurks around every corner, behind every tree, beneath every ripple of water. An immortal killer creates everlasting fear. Sure, the characters in these films aren’t real, but Jason’s existence represents something deeper than that. Not Michael Meyers and the threat of evil, nor Ghostface and the threat of imminent betrayal, nor Freddy and the threat of nightmares coming to life. Jason’s immortality is a reminder, just like Death himself, that life’s end could be around any corner.
About
Sydney Bollinger (she/her) is a writer, editor, and the Words Lead at Peregrine Coast Press. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Northwest Review, Hash Journal, Dunes Review, Hear Us Scream, This Present Former Glory, and other places. She performed original poetry in “Collective Truths” at the 2022 Free Verse Poetry Festival and is a featured reader for the 2023 Park Circle Pride Poetry event. Her first zine, Death Wish, was published in 2023. She lives in Charleston, SC, with her partner and their two cats. Follow her on social media @sydboll and find her work at sydboll.com.
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