Friday the 13th: What Really Happened
A deep dive into Crystal Lake, circa 1980 . . .
The original Friday the 13th (1980) is as much a murder mystery as it is a campy slasher flick. The film gives us few clues as to who could be slaying the ill-fated counselors at Camp Crystal Lake, but in the end we get our answer. It’s now well known (but I’ll offer a spoiler alert here anyway) that Pamela Voorhees, one-time cook at Camp Crystal Lake, is responsible for carrying out the murders. She’s undertaking the killings in order to avenge the ostensible drowning death of her son, Jason, twenty-three years before.
But this reveal leaves us with more questions than solid answers. Perhaps the most banal runs as follows: How could a waif-like senior citizen pull off a half-dozen murders, and with such gusto?
And there are unanswered questions involving Jason Voorhees, too. At the very end of the film (spoiler alert again), an adolescent Jason jumps out of the water to attack the sole survivor, Alice. And so initially, and less importantly, we ask: how could Jason appear in this movie as a youth, given that his death occurred in 1957? We have two possible answers for this question. Firstly, Jason could be some sort of ghost or undead revenant. Secondly, and more conclusively, the movie’s final scene shows Alice waking up in the hospital, making it seem as if Jason’s surprise attack was part of a dream. The waterlogged, zombie-like Jason, then, appears to have been a chimera. Yet we still don’t have conclusive answers, especially with the advent of Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), where we watch as a full-grown Jason commits further murders. Hence, a more vexing question arises: if Jason Voorhees truly drowned back in 1957, how could he appear four years after the events of the first movie? To put it more pointedly, if Jason is alive, why is Mrs. Voorhees so hellbent on revenge for his death?
In order to answer these pressing questions — that is, the ones italicized above — I’m going to extract some evidence from the first two Friday the 13th films, and then do some exegesis and eisegesis. By eisegesis, I’m borrowing a term from Biblical scholarship that refers to reading into a text. If the Biblical scholars can get away with it, then what’s the harm in foisting your own ideas on an old slasher film? Accordingly, I’m going to focus more heavily on eisegesis than exegesis, and I’m also going to direct the majority of my attention to the first Friday the 13th movie.
By drawing from and reading into the material we have, I’m going to try to articulate an explanatory model that provides answers to the most urgent questions above, namely how the murders were carried out, how Jason could appear in the sequel, and why Mrs. Voorhees seeks revenge despite Jason’s survival. My model is based on the proposition that Jason was fully alive and fully grown for the events of the first movie, and that he was helping his mother. After I establish this through cues taken from the films, I’m then going to articulate some corollaries regarding Jason, his mother, and their enigmatic relationship.
Evidence: She Had Man Hands
Over the course of Friday the 13th, we see a number of truly Herculean kills, along with the aftermaths of some impressive off-screen butcheries. A young woman’s corpse is thrown through a window. A young man is pinned high up on a door with arrows. An arrow is driven upward through a bed and into a young man’s throat in one fluid motion. These kills, among others, are beyond the physical capabilities of a fifty- or sixty-year-old woman, especially one as slight of frame as Pamela Voorhees. These feats of violence would be challenging enough for a strapping man. As such, it seems that a strapping, full-grown Jason had to be assisting his mother with these murders.
We can find evidence of Jason’s participation in the first film, whether the filmmakers intended to put it there or not. The first such example involves the death of Annie, the would-be cook for the re-opening camp. While making her way out to Camp Crystal Lake, Annie hitches a ride with a motorist in a Jeep. We never see the Jeep’s driver, though we can assume, having watched the film’s ending, that it’s Mrs. Voorhees. After all, a young woman such as Annie likely wouldn’t hesitate to hitch a ride with a grandmotherly matron. However, Annie soon realizes something is very awry with this driver. When the driver accelerates past the Camp Crystal Lake sign, Annie balks and promptly bails out of the moving vehicle, injuring her leg. The driver gets out of the car and pursues her. Annie eventually collapses, confronted by a figure in a plaid shirt. The figure slashes Annie’s throat. Again, after seeing the conclusion of the film, we look back and assume that this, too, is Mrs. Voorhees. But is it? Among internet commentators, it has often been remarked upon that the hand wielding the knife that cuts Annie’s throat clearly belongs to a man. Production notes reveal that this is the hand of Taso Stavrakis, assistant to makeup maven Tom Savini. Betsy Palmer, who played Pamela Voorhees, was not present for the filming of much of the movie, leaving the visual effects crew to take care of the kill scenes in her absence. The appearance of a man’s hand in this kill scene has typically been taken as little more than a cinematic gaffe. But what if we were to interpret this visual not as a continuity error but rather as being canonical, regardless of the writer’s and filmmaker’s intentions? Is it possible that this hand does belong to a man in a diegetic sense, namely the full-grown Jason Voorhees? Perhaps Pamela’s plan was to dump this hitchhiking girl in the woods and effectively feed her to Jason. While Annie jumped from the car of her own volition, Pamela’s on-foot pursuit could have served the purpose of guiding Annie to Jason’s approximate location, leaving Jason’s killer instinct to take things from there. Alternatively, Jason may have even been waiting in the back of the Jeep. Whatever the case, this murder scene provides our first clue that Pamela and Jason might be working in tandem.
Later in the film, the character Jack is subject to one of the most improbable kills in the movie. After some tender lovemaking with his girlfriend, Marcy, she goes off to the shower-house to use the facilities. Jack, played by Kevin Bacon, lays back to smoke a post-coital joint. Promptly, a hand reaches up from under the bed — a man’s hand, I might add — and palms Bacon’s forehead. An arrowhead then pierces Bacon’s throat, and we are led to believe that the person under the bed has pushed an arrow through the mattress and the box-springs to carve through a young man’s neck. Realistically speaking, the strength required to pull off this feat is probably uncommon among even the brawniest of men, let alone a diminutive woman in her late fifties or early sixties. The sheer strength necessary to accomplish this task, in combination with the visual of the man’s hand (that of Savini or Stavrakis, yet again), suggests that it pretty much has to be Jason waiting under the bed to make this kill happen.
The killer’s vigor does not diminish as the film moves on, and the feats of strength continue. Later on, when business is really picking up in terms of plot, Alice lurks nervously in the main cabin. Then, out of nowhere, a body comes crashing through the window. Alice sees that the body belongs to her fellow counsellor, Brenda, stone dead, and she is understandably horrified. It’s highly unlikely that the petite Pamela threw the relatively statuesque Brenda through the window, especially when we consider that Brenda was literally dead-weight. It’s more reasonable to think that the heavy lifting was done by a full-grown Jason, who is revealed in Part 2 to be a sizable man (his size and strength only growing in subsequent sequels). Further to that, a Jeep pulls up just seconds after the crash, and it’s Pamela at the wheel, making her first onscreen appearance in the film. It seems improbable that she tossed an adult woman through a window, beetled to her Jeep without taking a breather, and then turned on the headlights and ignition so as to wheel up onto the scene. She was more likely lying in wait while her son did the dead-lifting.
We get more evidence for Jason’s involvement when Alice finds Bill’s dead body. Bill has been pinned to a door with a series of arrows. This death happens off-screen, so it’s not clear whether Bill was shot with the arrows, or if he was pinned to the door with some other edged weapon and then stuck with the arrows. Either way, the logistics are improbable. And no matter how it happened, Bill is located fairly high up on the door. This suggests that an exceedingly strong person lifted Bill up onto the door and left him suspended there. Certainly, an elderly woman, no matter how amped-up on adrenaline and rage she may have been, could not accomplish this feat alone. I’d venture to say that Jason and Pamela hoisted Bill together.
Thus, we have more than just a little evidence of Jason’s involvement in the murders that take place in the first Friday the 13th. This has a number of connotations and consequences. Most notably, if Jason is stalking about the camp, it’s likely he witnessed his mother’s beheading at the climax of the film; indeed, the character Ginny even hypothesizes as much in Part 2. The fact that Jason did nothing to prevent Pamela’s killing, then, raises some serious questions. We might presume Jason was paralyzed by what he was seeing, completely debilitated by the sight of his mother being defeated and decapitated. Given his supposed intellectual deficits, which are hinted at in future films, Jason may not have entirely understood what was taking place. Alternatively, he may have carried some decidedly ambiguous feelings about his mother, an idea to which we’ll return in the next section.
Exegesis & Eisegesis: Muddled Waters
Having established Jason’s involvement above, we must now turn our attention to a pressingly obvious question: if Jason wasn’t dead, then why was Pamela seeking revenge? Whether you believe that (a) Jason helped her with the murders, as I’ve suggested above, or (b) that Jason actually came out of the water at the end of Part 1, or even just (c) that Part 2 is canon, this question still stands. From Part 2, it’s clear that Jason has been alive all along, so it seems puzzling that his mother would put so much effort into avenging his death. For decades, the stock answer to the question of Jason’s survival put forward by bloggers, podcasters, and YouTubers has run something like this: Jason only appeared to drown, saving himself and then subsisting on his own in the woods, unbeknownst to his mother. Writer Simon Hawke even tendered as much in the novelization of Part 2 (which was published in 1986, long after Jason had become indispensable for the franchise).
I’m going to posit a slightly modified version of this theory. In my reading, wherein Jason is helping his mother, Pamela obviously knows that her son survived the apparent drowning. In fact, I’d propose that the incident in the water in 1957 may not have even been particularly serious. Nonetheless, something happened where a young Jason went under the surface at a moment when both the camp counselors and Mrs. Voorhees weren’t paying close enough attention. Racked with guilt on some level, Pamela lashed out at the counselors and blamed them for everything. After all, she resented their free and easy lovemaking — or at least her perception that they took part in free and easy lovemaking. In Mrs. Voorhees’ fixation on this image of teenagers “making love,” we can almost hear the strains of the Trump supporter or the QAnon conspiracy theorist insisting, say, that all Democrats are globalist pedophiles. These are the warped and compulsively sexual ravings of an acutely distressed individual. Pamela’s obsession with teenagers’ sex lives, or what she imagines teenage sex lives to be, is hyperbolic, and this could very well bespeak some psychosexual trauma of her own. Her “Mrs.” title notwithstanding, Pamela Voorhees gives every indication of being a single mother (as we don’t hear anything about Elias Voorhees until Jason Goes to Hell, long after the franchise transferred from Paramount to New Line, and so the canon status of Jason’s father is questionable). It’s not inconceivable that seeing (or hearing about) the supposed near-death of her son, as well as being in proximity to the kind of premarital shenanigans that saddled her with a child to raise on her own in the first place, occasioned Pamela’s psychotic break.
Picture it: this child that Pamela does not entirely want, who may be higher maintenance than she can handle on account of his special needs, almost drowns, thereby confirming what Pamela has already suspected — she’s not fit to raise a child, and all of her life decisions have been grossly negligent. It’s almost predictable that she’d neglect said child, given this kind of emotional baggage. And, if the reader will entertain a feminist angle here, too, Pamela was presumably facing constant pressures from her family members and the less-than-progressive town folk to raise a child she might not have carried to term had the choice been all hers. It’s hardly a surprise that this unwitting mother snapped when her child fell into peril, even if he didn’t die.
Jason’s near-fatal, pseudo-drowning still represents something of a symbolic death, though. Given her guilt and negligence, Pamela conceivably could have registered the incident as a full-blown death, regardless of Jason’s survival. While Jason survived in the body, it could easily have been that he was effectively dead to Pamela going forward from the incident in the water onward. In some ways, his near-drowning would have fulfilled a deep, dark wish within Mrs. Voorhees. The incident in the water marked a fortuitous postnatal abortion in what was approximately the thirtieth trimester.
But this doesn’t mean that Jason was out of Pamela’s life after his near-drowning. Though he was dead as her son, he now lived on as a sort of elemental or helpmate in her life. He became akin to a mascot for all her resentment and anger towards the Crystal Lake community and the wider world. Perhaps she was instrumental in hiding him away. From the opening scene of Friday the 13th, we know that Pamela stayed around at the camp for another year, and she took the opportunity to exact some revenge by killing two counselors in 1958. She avoided detection in the process, but suspicions may have been aroused among the townsfolk. After that, she presumably withdrew from her community, at least to some degree. The camp closed down, bringing Pamela some limited measure of solace. All the while, she may have communed with Jason from time to time after he’d taken up residence in the woods. The townspeople, meanwhile, treated the arrangement as a don’t-ask, don’t-tell situation. In time, the story evolved into local legend. Few details were known about the incident in the water, but those that were available started to take on a life of their own. In the eyes of community, Jason was out of the picture, and, as such, accounted for. He was missing and, perhaps, presumed dead. No one was especially interested in Mrs. Voorhees’ pain. While Jason’s status may have been ambiguous, the simplest explanation was to say he had “drowned” and to leave it at that. Unpacking the rumors hinting at a complex and ongoing relationship between Pamela Voorhees and her absentee son would have been altogether too involved for locals, who were only interested in details insofar as they could gossip about them. Meanwhile, Jason lived in a shack out in the woods, and Pamela occasionally visited him, possibly even bringing along food and other necessities.
In Pamela’s mind, her son became something of a zombie. He was not literally undead (not until Part 6, at least), but he was dead to the world while remaining alive in Pamela’s heart as an emblem of what could have been. Living in his shack, he became equivalent to an ornament in her life. Jason was effectively shelved. While he grew in size, the relationship between Jason and his mother remained in stasis. Visiting Jason in the woods became a ritual for Pamela, a holding pattern in which mother and son co-existed. In the time between Jason’s pseudo-drowning and that cataclysmic Friday the 13th in 1980, Jason and Pamela lived in an extraordinarily liminal relationship. This arrangement may very well have brought some sustained solace for mother and son, or at least the former.
But then an enterprising Steve Christy comes along and reopens Camp Crystal Lake, ripping the bandage off Pamela’s wounds. Pamela realizes that the first two murders in the 1950s have not satisfied her desire for revenge. Thus, she pools her resources with Jason — her brains and his brawn — and together they aim to cut a swath through Camp Crystal Lake’s prospective staff. Now, dear reader, we’re entering into the deep waters of eisegesis.
Dutiful and none-too-fleet of mind, Jason has little choice but to help his mother with her project. He’s just grateful to be spending time with her and to have an active, instrumental role in her life. This may be the first time he’s legitimately felt like kin with his mother. They bond in their rage. And yet, all the while, Jason has not forgotten what it feels like to be shunted into the background, and to be kept at arm’s length. He’s often felt rejected by his mother, both after and before the incident in the water. It’s not hard to fathom that Pamela was an arm’s-length parent, overburdened with the busyness of her bread-winning and child-rearing, and also somewhat ashamed of her high-maintenance son. Just as she expressed ambiguous feelings for him, he maintains ambiguous feelings toward her. And when he got into the deep water, well, she proved to be just as absent as those counselors. Jason would never forget this.
And so, when the business of killing all the new counselors falls apart on that fateful Friday the 13th, and when the one resilient young woman named Alice starts fighting back, Jason gives up on his mother’s game. He retreats to the shadows while Alice and Pamela wrestle in the sand. And then the resilient young woman does something unfathomable, cutting off Pamela’s head. As horrified as Jason would have been by seeing blood spouting from his mother’s severed neck, I posit that he also would have experienced some strange sensation of release, too. Part of this would stem from a newfound freedom from his bizarre relationship with his mother. But even more than that, after the shock wore off, Pamela would now, from Jason’s perspective, enter an undead, zombie-like state of her own. After the beheading incident, Pamela would become for Jason what he had long been for her after the water incident. She would thenceforth be the ornament or the mascot for his own resentment towards the wider world (largely put in place by and because of his mother.) She lived on through her severed head and, to a comparable extent, through her gray sweater (as we see in Part 2). These became totems of Jason’s burgeoning desire for vengeance of his own. Horrible mother or not, Pamela was the only mother Jason had known, and so he had to avenge her very real death just as she’d avenged his 1957 pseudo-death in 1958 and 1980. Pamela’s beheading effectively completed this mother-son relationship by bringing it around full-circle; for Jason, this relationship with his mother probably became more livable after her death.
Upon witnessing the beheading, Jason was no longer just Pamela Voorhees’ helpmate in homicide, but now he’d graduated — or better yet broken through — to the same level of psychosis as his mother. His ambiguous feelings about his mother in their life together and his ambivalent reaction to the circumstances of her death could now all be sublimated into killing interlopers on Crystal Lake territory. But Jason’s quest for vengeance seems altogether more authentic than that of his mother. While Pamela took revenge for a family member’s death that never happened, Jason avenges a family member’s death that he witnessed with his own eyes. Poignantly, and perhaps even tragically, Jason fulfills his mother’s delusion regarding the untimely death of family members, in that he has to live the experience for real. Following Mrs. Voorhees’ example, Jason deals with the trauma by resorting to further delusion, treating his decapitated mother as if she’s still alive.
Concluding Remarks
So now, at long last, we have answers to our questions. Waif-like Pamela was able to commit the murders in the inaugural Friday the 13th film because she had help from her son Jason, who was very much alive. Accordingly, Jason did not drown in Crystal Lake, though something much more profound happened in those waters. On account of that catastrophic incident in the water, Mrs. Voorhees was forced to confront her own parental negligence. She then shifted the blame to the counselors at Camp Crystal Lake and made them the target of her vengeance in 1958. These killings, however, are more saliently Pamela’s way of dealing with the fact that she had failed as a parent, letting her son become dead to her. For it was during that incident in the water that Jason died to his mother as a son, becoming less of a family member and more of a familiar, in the sense of a spirit that acts as a servant to a witch. With this new kinship in place — that is, one in which Jason is both dead and alive, the mother and child both distant and intertwined — Pamela Voorhees and Jason could collaborate on an epic kill spree when Camp Crystal Lake attempted to re-open. Jason would continue to recreate this feat of mass murder over and over again in his mother’s corporeal absence after her death.
All told, the motivating delusions of mother and son fit each other aptly. Pamela Voorhees insisted her son was dead when he was still alive. Jason Voorhees insisted his mother was still alive when she was dead (as we see in Part 2 and later entries in the series). Their warped relationship effectively turned death and life inside-out. For mother and son alike, these profoundly complicated and confused viewpoints motivated countless killings at Crystal Lake and its surrounding area. Given the psychologically complex relationship traced here, it’s hard to accept the criticisms of those who dismiss Friday the 13th as slasher-flick fluff. Anyone who says Friday the 13th films are shallow should dive a little deeper down into Crystal Lake.
