HORROR 101: Everything You Need to Know About Jason Voorhees

Welcome back to Horror 101, a series of articles where we explain horror movie legends and their lore. For beginners, the confused, or just those who need a refresher, these articles are for you. 

Though Summer has ended, the things we did over the summer will never leave us. The cookouts, the drinks by the fire, that masked guy who put an axe in our friend’s spine. Have you ever wondered why that happened? Well, today’s article is for you. We’ll be going through the history of one of horror cinema’s most famous slashers, Jason Voorhees, explaining how he does it, what makes him tick, and perhaps even answering what’s going on in that lumpy giant brain behind the hockey mask.

The usual rules apply for this type of article: I will not be taking into consideration any comics, books, or television shows. We’re strictly doing the official films, beginning with Friday the 13th (1980) and ending chronologically with Jason X. 

We’ll also consider the 2009 reboot for one crucial detail. 

So, let’s make like a machete and cut right to it.

WHO IS JASON VOORHEES?

It all begins with Camp Crystal Lake, a campground (in New Jersey!) owned by the Christy family. Born to Pamela Voorhees, the cook at Camp Crystal Lake, Jason was born disabled, which led to being bullied as a child. Often mocked and teased by younger campgoers and ignored by irresponsible camp counselors, Jason lived a short and miserable “first” life. 

While swimming in Crystal Lake in 1957, the counselors left Jason alone and surrounded by cruel children who chased him down and threw him off the dock. A panicked Jason drowned, which caused the camp to be closed temporarily when his body was never recovered. 

Unbeknownst to Pamela and the rest of the world, Jason survived drowning and wandered the woods surrounding Crystal Lake until adulthood, surviving in an old shack. Pamela was nonetheless struck with grief and became bitter and resentful, murdering two of Camp Crystal Lake’s counselors in 1958. She would go on to set several fires and sabotage the camp’s many reopenings, leaving the Christy family destitute.

In 1980, the eldest son of the Christy family, Steve, attempted to reopen the camp and ended up drawing the ire of Pamela, who began murdering to tarnish the camp once more. Her spree ended when she was killed in self-defense by camp counselor Alice Hardy. Jason would recover her remains and create a shrine for his mother’s head, soon mirroring her habits as he became full of rage and resentment.  

Taking up a machete as his weapon of choice, and later donning his iconic hockey mask in Friday the 13th Part III, Jason Voorhees became a menacing killer, whose legacy would span decades and even extend outside of the camp to places like Manhattan, and eventually the stars themselves. 

WHY DOES JASON VOORHEES KILL?

The two most prominent reasons for Jason’s bloodlust are to seek vengeance for drowning and to get revenge for his mother’s murder. In the 2009 reboot, we see it explicitly. Still, it’s only implied a grown Jason saw Alice killing his mother and started targeting teens because of it.

While it’s lampshaded that Jason hates drug use and premarital sex in a couple of films in some very funny ways, that was really Pamela’s gripe about the counselors. I think it’s safe to say those concepts are probably lost on him, given that he’s not very smart. 

Respectfully, of course.

HOW DOES JASON VOORHEES DIE?

After years and dozens of kills, Jason Voorhees had become the stuff of nightmares. But he was still human, and after suffering wounds throughout the first 3 films, was eventually weak enough to be killed during the events of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, where his skull was cleaved with his own machete.

The person who took him out was Tommy Jarvis, a young boy, and special effects hobbyist living at Crystal Lake. His traumatic experience with the killer and legends of his uncanny survival made him believe Jason would return. This fear was only exacerbated when Roy Burns took up Jason’s mantle and terrorized a teenage Tommy at Pinehurst Halfway House. 

WHO IS ROY BURNS?

He’s the replacement “Jason” after Tommy Jarvis killed Voorhees the first time. He was a paramedic who went mad when his son, Joey, was murdered by a disgruntled member of Pinehurst. He got thrown on a wall of spikes and died. 

I like Roy, but he’s not the focus of this article, so let’s move on!

HOW DOES JASON VOORHEES KEEP RETURNING FROM THE DEAD?

After Tommy Jarvis’ encounter with Roy Burns, he becomes especially paranoid and goes to dig up his nemesis during a thunderstorm, intending to destroy his body. In the process, Jason’s corpse is struck by lightning, and he inexplicably returns from the dead. This raises many questions, and the Friday films have spent a lot of time explaining why that happened. 

Throughout the series, it’s stated that Jason has an unrivaled regenerative capability. In Jason X, it’s shown that the U.S. government was keeping him in cryostasis specifically to study that ability. The rules are vague, but we can make a few assumptions about how this ability works. 

Jason Voorhees can take just about any amount of physical punishment as long as his body is still mostly intact. For instance, the ending of Jason Takes Manhattan shows him being dissolved in a flood of toxic waste and drowned, but he still keeps going. If his body is blown apart or significantly dismembered though, as seen in Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X, he can’t return without assistance. In Jason X, a swarm of nanites accelerates his natural healing and turns him into Uber Jason.

In Jason Goes to Hell, we see he has one last trick up his sleeve to evade death: transferring his spirit into another person. In the film, Jason is described as an entity that wears bodies like suits; this degrades anyone he possesses, filling them with disease and slowly melting them from the inside out. From there, he can return to his complete form by possessing another Voorhees blood relative, which allows him to regain his hulking zombie body.

And his mask… For some reason? 

SO…IS JASON VOORHEES A DEMON THEN?

There are two schools of thought on this question: 

1. Jason Voorhees himself is a demon who can naturally regenerate his body, or 

2. The Voorhees bloodline is cursed, and that forces Jason to keep coming back.

In Jason Goes to Hell, Professional Jason hunter Creighton Duke says Jason is something humankind has never seen before but doesn’t actually explain what he is, or why only Voorhees blood relatives can take him out. A scrapped effect for the film showed Jason in a much more demonic form, implying it’s the former, but this never actually made it to the screen.

Some people say he may be a demon of another kind. Jason being a deadite is an idea popularized by director Adam Marcus for the film Jason Goes to Hell. It’s still only a fan theory with very little backing outside the props Marcus borrowed for the film. 

Jason doesn’t explicitly enjoy causing suffering; instead, he seems to do it mostly out of sheer rage. His eyes aren’t white, he never verbally mocks his victims, no one ever calls him a deadite, and they never call the weapon that destroys him a Kandarian dagger. Most importantly, the Necronomicon is never read in any of the movies to summon his spirit. He just gets struck by lightning and comes back. 

So regardless of whether he’s a demon or not, he most definitely isn’t a deadite. 

HOW DOES JASON VOORHEES MOVE SO FAST?

Among Jason’s abilities, post-resurrection are superhuman strength, durability, and speed. Most instances of Jason “teleporting” result from his victims getting disoriented (as they’re often running through a forest and may or may not be intoxicated). This, combined with Jason’s athletic ability and bad film editing, creates the illusion of teleportation. 

In the case of Jason Takes Manhattan, it’s a lot of bad editing. 

CAN ANYTHING ACTUALLY KILL JASON VOORHEES?

The answer is yes, but also, no! Satisfying, I know. 

Creighton Duke says there’s only one real way for Jason to be destroyed: “Through a Voorhees was he born, through a Voorhees may he be reborn. And only by the hands of a Voorhees will he die”. 

This is true in the short term, as he is killed by his niece, Jessica Kimble, using a…mystical Voorhees dagger that she stakes his heart with. Eventually, Jason would be freed by Freddy Krueger, using the last traces of power he had to pull the Voorhees out of hell in Freddy vs. Jason. 

Meaning there is no surefire way to put him down permanently. 

And as a fan of the Friday the 13th films, that’s quite alright by me. I prefer my nonsensical super-zombies erring on the side of completely unkillable. The only hell Jason Voorhees has to worry about now is the legal hell his film and character rights are in. And with the new Crystal Lake series still in development, it’s anybody’s guess as to when we will see our soggy rotten boy again.

…SO YOU’RE SURE JASON ISN’T A DEADITE? 

Oh my god, no. Stop trying to make deadite Jason happen. It’s not going to happen. 

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And that will be it for today’s Horror 101 lesson. See you in the next class and stay tuned to Horror Press’s social media feeds for more content on horror movies, television, and everything in between!