Leo656
10-08-2021, 08:47 PM
This has probably come up before, but I'm currently discussing this on another forum so I figured I'd drop it here, too. It's the Halloween Season, and plenty of folks will be doing a Friday the 13th marathon, so it seems like a good thing to toss around for fun.
https://411mania.com/movies/friday-the-13th-and-the-multiple-jasons-theory/
In brief... "Jason" isn't Jason at all. In fact, "Bag-Head Jason" and "Hockey Mask Jason" aren't even the same guy at all. Bag-Head was Pamela's unseen accomplice who carried on her work after she was decapitated, and Hockey Mask was just some random woods-dwelling psycho who happened to be active within the same relative area. But neither of them are actually Jason Voorhees; Jason died as a child and was never seen again. People within the movies' universe simply tacked the name "Jason" onto every serial killer who came along because of the local legend.
Evidence in support of this theory includes...
- Pamela 100% had to have had an accomplice. She physically wasn't big or strong enough to have done some of the things we witness in the first movie, such as pinning a dead body to the wall with arrows or flinging a corpse through a window like a goddamn Olympic shotputter. Also, there are lots of physical inconsistencies between the murders, such as most of the kills being conducted silently while Pamela is a total Chatty Cathy with Alice at the end for no reason whatsoever (aside from "We need to explain the plot to the audience"). Or the fact that a lot of the kills were conducted in a very slick fashion, while Pamela's entire "strategy" with Alice was "Flail a knife around and hope to hit something by accident." Also, in shots where we see the "killer" (but not the killer's face) it's clearly a man, given the build and the hands.
Therefore, Pamela probably killed SOME of the people in Part I, but she had a male accomplice who killed some/most of them, and handled all of the "theatrics" such as staging the corpses or throwing them through windows.
- If "Jason" is Jason, and he saw Pamela get decapitated, he clearly was in close proximity to the events of Part I. This raises TONS of questions, such as...
Didn't Jason drown in the lake as a kid?
If he didn't drown, how did he not? (Remember, Jason isn't supposedly anything supernatural until his corpse gets hit by lightning in Part VI)
If he didn't drown, why is Pamela so convinced that he did?
If he survived, and was alive for decades in between his "drowning" and the events of the first movie, why did he never reveal himself to his mother? You'd think he would.
Why did he just watch the whole thing and not get involved?
Jason somehow surviving his drowning, and then never revealing himself to his mother, add up to something that requires a TON of suspension of disbelief to swallow. Too much, perhaps.
- "Bag-Head" is never positively identified as "Jason". People assume he is, but only Pamela would know. And she's dead. More likely, he's some mentally-handicapped hillbilly who was helping her for whatever reason. He maybe even THOUGHT he was "Jason", either because he'd developed a fixation on Pamela throughout their partnership or maybe she even flat-out told him he was her son so that he'd help her. Not too farfetched, because he's clearly effectively retarded.
- Bag-Head is shown unmasked in Part II, and Hockey Mask is unmasked in Part III, and they are CLEARLY not the same person at all - different height, build, head shape, facial deformity, hair and facial hair... they are entirely different people. Yet II and III take place within the same day-plus. So it HAS to be two different people if you take the films at face value. The only logical thing to assume is, Bag-Head gets killed and then Hockey Mask just sort of wanders into things and starts killing people, and since it all happened within the same time and place everyone ascribes ALL of the murders to just one "Jason". Who probably isn't even "Jason", but some rando. Or pair of randos, more likely.
- Hockey Mask, like Bag-Head, is never CONFIRMED to be "Jason Voorhees" by anyone who would actually know. Things like "Elias Voorhees paying for Jason's burial" and all that, pretty much anything that "proves" the killer running around Crystal Lake is Jason, is stuff from deleted scenes or novelizations of the movies. In short, NOT officially canon. Only Pamela could tell us if the Hockey Mask Killer (OR Bag-Head) was Jason, and she can't say anything.
- Later movies like "Jason Takes Manhattan" and "Jason Goes To Hell" DO explicitly state that this guy is Jason Voorhees, but there are a lot of problems with that - aside from, again, how the f*ck would any of THESE people even know, anyway? Those two movies are "disowned" by a lot of fans given their general crappiness and the fact that they contradict a LOT of earlier-established canon. "Jason Goes To Hell", in particular, is pretty much its own universe entirely, so that movie's handling of Jason and his family tree really can't be taken at face value. Chreighton Duke is not a reliable narrator, and past that, that movie is terrible even by F13 standards.
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SO, that's the meat of it. There were THREE killers in the F13 franchise - Pamela, Pamela's Accomplice, and The Hockey Mask Killer - and NONE of them was actually "Jason Voorhees". Jason drowned tragically and was never seen again. All murders attributed to him were either Bag-Head or Hockey Mask, who in turn were just some mentally-handicapped woods-dwelling psychos.
Obviously, this is all bunk. The people making these movies simply did not put a lot of thought or care into them, hence a ton of plot holes and discrepancies. And obviously the killer is "Jason Voorhees" because that's the character's trademarked and copyrighted name for legal and merchandise purposes.
But if you REALLY think about it... this is one instance where the fan theory actually makes a LOT more sense than what the movies themselves present to you. There's SO much "WTF-ery" in those movies, especially the earlier ones, that a lot of it honestly does correct itself if the fan theory is in play. Otherwise, all you're left with is, "Yeah, they're just kinda sh*tty movies" and that's no fun.
I definitely recommend reading the article, and furthermore, even if you don't accept the fan theory, I highly suggest re-watching the first three movies (or the whole series... why not?) with these theories in mind, anyway, just for fun. Let's be honest, we're gonna be doing that this month anyways. And you may be surprised just how much the theory re-frames the entire viewing experience.
Again, I KNOW the real-life answers to ALL of this stuff is, "They're honestly just plain bad movies". That's not the point. I generally roll my eyes hard at fan theories, since most of the time they're just "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if..." and then they fall apart under any scrutiny at all. But this one actually holds up pretty well, even though it's absolutely not at all what the filmmakers ever intended.
Discuss.
https://411mania.com/movies/friday-the-13th-and-the-multiple-jasons-theory/
In brief... "Jason" isn't Jason at all. In fact, "Bag-Head Jason" and "Hockey Mask Jason" aren't even the same guy at all. Bag-Head was Pamela's unseen accomplice who carried on her work after she was decapitated, and Hockey Mask was just some random woods-dwelling psycho who happened to be active within the same relative area. But neither of them are actually Jason Voorhees; Jason died as a child and was never seen again. People within the movies' universe simply tacked the name "Jason" onto every serial killer who came along because of the local legend.
Evidence in support of this theory includes...
- Pamela 100% had to have had an accomplice. She physically wasn't big or strong enough to have done some of the things we witness in the first movie, such as pinning a dead body to the wall with arrows or flinging a corpse through a window like a goddamn Olympic shotputter. Also, there are lots of physical inconsistencies between the murders, such as most of the kills being conducted silently while Pamela is a total Chatty Cathy with Alice at the end for no reason whatsoever (aside from "We need to explain the plot to the audience"). Or the fact that a lot of the kills were conducted in a very slick fashion, while Pamela's entire "strategy" with Alice was "Flail a knife around and hope to hit something by accident." Also, in shots where we see the "killer" (but not the killer's face) it's clearly a man, given the build and the hands.
Therefore, Pamela probably killed SOME of the people in Part I, but she had a male accomplice who killed some/most of them, and handled all of the "theatrics" such as staging the corpses or throwing them through windows.
- If "Jason" is Jason, and he saw Pamela get decapitated, he clearly was in close proximity to the events of Part I. This raises TONS of questions, such as...
Didn't Jason drown in the lake as a kid?
If he didn't drown, how did he not? (Remember, Jason isn't supposedly anything supernatural until his corpse gets hit by lightning in Part VI)
If he didn't drown, why is Pamela so convinced that he did?
If he survived, and was alive for decades in between his "drowning" and the events of the first movie, why did he never reveal himself to his mother? You'd think he would.
Why did he just watch the whole thing and not get involved?
Jason somehow surviving his drowning, and then never revealing himself to his mother, add up to something that requires a TON of suspension of disbelief to swallow. Too much, perhaps.
- "Bag-Head" is never positively identified as "Jason". People assume he is, but only Pamela would know. And she's dead. More likely, he's some mentally-handicapped hillbilly who was helping her for whatever reason. He maybe even THOUGHT he was "Jason", either because he'd developed a fixation on Pamela throughout their partnership or maybe she even flat-out told him he was her son so that he'd help her. Not too farfetched, because he's clearly effectively retarded.
- Bag-Head is shown unmasked in Part II, and Hockey Mask is unmasked in Part III, and they are CLEARLY not the same person at all - different height, build, head shape, facial deformity, hair and facial hair... they are entirely different people. Yet II and III take place within the same day-plus. So it HAS to be two different people if you take the films at face value. The only logical thing to assume is, Bag-Head gets killed and then Hockey Mask just sort of wanders into things and starts killing people, and since it all happened within the same time and place everyone ascribes ALL of the murders to just one "Jason". Who probably isn't even "Jason", but some rando. Or pair of randos, more likely.
- Hockey Mask, like Bag-Head, is never CONFIRMED to be "Jason Voorhees" by anyone who would actually know. Things like "Elias Voorhees paying for Jason's burial" and all that, pretty much anything that "proves" the killer running around Crystal Lake is Jason, is stuff from deleted scenes or novelizations of the movies. In short, NOT officially canon. Only Pamela could tell us if the Hockey Mask Killer (OR Bag-Head) was Jason, and she can't say anything.
- Later movies like "Jason Takes Manhattan" and "Jason Goes To Hell" DO explicitly state that this guy is Jason Voorhees, but there are a lot of problems with that - aside from, again, how the f*ck would any of THESE people even know, anyway? Those two movies are "disowned" by a lot of fans given their general crappiness and the fact that they contradict a LOT of earlier-established canon. "Jason Goes To Hell", in particular, is pretty much its own universe entirely, so that movie's handling of Jason and his family tree really can't be taken at face value. Chreighton Duke is not a reliable narrator, and past that, that movie is terrible even by F13 standards.
---------------------
SO, that's the meat of it. There were THREE killers in the F13 franchise - Pamela, Pamela's Accomplice, and The Hockey Mask Killer - and NONE of them was actually "Jason Voorhees". Jason drowned tragically and was never seen again. All murders attributed to him were either Bag-Head or Hockey Mask, who in turn were just some mentally-handicapped woods-dwelling psychos.
Obviously, this is all bunk. The people making these movies simply did not put a lot of thought or care into them, hence a ton of plot holes and discrepancies. And obviously the killer is "Jason Voorhees" because that's the character's trademarked and copyrighted name for legal and merchandise purposes.
But if you REALLY think about it... this is one instance where the fan theory actually makes a LOT more sense than what the movies themselves present to you. There's SO much "WTF-ery" in those movies, especially the earlier ones, that a lot of it honestly does correct itself if the fan theory is in play. Otherwise, all you're left with is, "Yeah, they're just kinda sh*tty movies" and that's no fun.
I definitely recommend reading the article, and furthermore, even if you don't accept the fan theory, I highly suggest re-watching the first three movies (or the whole series... why not?) with these theories in mind, anyway, just for fun. Let's be honest, we're gonna be doing that this month anyways. And you may be surprised just how much the theory re-frames the entire viewing experience.
Again, I KNOW the real-life answers to ALL of this stuff is, "They're honestly just plain bad movies". That's not the point. I generally roll my eyes hard at fan theories, since most of the time they're just "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if..." and then they fall apart under any scrutiny at all. But this one actually holds up pretty well, even though it's absolutely not at all what the filmmakers ever intended.
Discuss.