The Friday the 13th movies get categorized as slashers, but the series can also be called a mystery. Due to accelerated filmmaking schedules and little concern for continuity between sequels, the Friday the 13th universe poses countless questions, many of which remain unanswered. How could Pamela Voorhees singlehandedly carry out an elaborate, one-night murder spree? Who (or what) comes out of the water at the end of the first movie? If it is Jason, how could he appear as a youth, given that his supposed death occurred two decades before? Did Jason witness his mother’s decapitation? More broadly, where does Jason get his power from and how does he recuperate so quickly? Why does Jason’s appearance change so drastically from movie to movie? These are just a few of the queries stimulating fan speculation. While fans have conjectured a host of answers to specific questions, no singular explanatory theory has emerged. Just as physicists work toward a Theory of Everything to provide an all-encompassing framework for the material universe, we Friday the 13th fanatics have clamored for a unified field theory to better understand our beloved franchise. This article aims to review the major advances in Friday the 13th fan theories and then analyze them so that we can move toward a Fan Theory of Everything.
The first hypothesis we have to treat is the Jason is a Deadite Theory, which explains Jason’s indefatigable capacity to recover from injury and death. It’s good to get this out of the way early. Attributed to Reddit user BARGOBLEN, this theory focuses upon references made in Jason Goes to Hell to the Necronomicon, a flesh-bound grimoire that plays a pivotal role in the Evil Dead films. In the Evil Dead franchise, the act of reading from the Necronomicon summons Kandarian demons that can possess human beings and turn them into Deadites. Jason Goes to Hell reveals that Pamela Voorhees experimented with black magic, utilizing the Necronomicon to resurrect her son. Through this lens, then, the original Friday the 13th film depicts not just murders but rather ritual killings at Camp Crystal Lake. The Deadite theory posits that Pamela’s beheading marked the final sacrifice needed to bring back Jason, prompting his return from the lake in the film’s denouement. The demonic possession also clarifies why Jason became so strong in subsequent films. By Part VI, when Jason gets resurrected via lightning bolt at the cemetery, he has become a full-blown Deadite under a Kandarian demon’s control. While Jason Goes to Hell director Adam Marcus has confirmed that he believes his movie references the very same Necronomicon from Evil Dead, he cannot speak for the Paramount-made Friday the 13th movies that preceded his contribution to the franchise. Many fans have rejected the retroactive Evil Dead-inflected reading of Jason, due in large part to debates about whether or not Jason Goes to Hell can be considered canon (an issue to which we will return).
The Friday the 13th fanbase has been more amenable to what can be thought of as The Accomplice Theory. This theory, sketched out in varied forms by Movie Timelines and your present author, among others, attempts to refine our understanding of how an elderly, diminutive woman such as Pamela Voorhees could perform the intricate and physically intensive murders in the original film. It’s doubtful Mrs. Voorhees could throw a young woman’s corpse through a window or force an arrow through a mattress and into Kevin Bacon’s neck. Accordingly, the Accomplice Theory postulates that Pamela had help from none other than Jason. After all, we can clearly see a man’s hands in several of the kill scenes (which belonged to special effects wizard Tom Savini or his assistant, Taso Stavrakis), giving every indication that the killer is going to be revealed as a male. We can then extrapolate to conclude that this man, Jason, is responsible for the corpse-tossing and the neck-stabbing, among other Herculean feats. This means that mother and son are working in cahoots, with Pamela obviously well-aware that her son survived the alleged drowning.
In my reading, this could suggest that Jason’s incident in the water in the 1950s may not have been especially serious. Nonetheless, the incident racked Pamela with guilt, and she lashed out by blaming the counselors for everything, unable to consider her own culpability in the ordeal. Conceivably, the near-death of her son in proximity to the sort of sex-play that saddled Pamela with a child that she appeared to be supporting on her own brought on a psychotic break. Going forward from the alleged drowning, it could easily have been that Jason was effectively dead to Pamela, and so she let him go off on his own. After the camp closed, she may have communed with Jason after he’d taken up residence in the woods, potentially even bringing along food and other necessities when her guilt surged. And so, when Camp Crystal Lake reopened, Pamela and Jason collaborated to cut a swath through the staff. But when Alice started fighting back and Jason realized his mother’s plan was falling apart, he retreated. After witnessing his mother’s death, Jason was now the one racked with guilt. His ambiguous feelings about his mother in their life together and his ambivalent reaction to the circumstances of her death could now be sublimated into killing interlopers on Crystal Lake territory.
Other fan theories have built upon the idea that Pamela couldn’t possibly be acting alone, including the Multiple Killers Theory. Now, of course, we know there are multiple killers in the Friday the 13th series, namely Pamela, Jason, and Part V’s Roy Burns. But this theory, spelled out by Rob Stewart of 411Mania, holds that “Jason” is literally multiple people, none of whom are the boy who drowned in Camp Crystal Lake. Stewart notes that in the first movie, when Annie hitches a ride to the camp, she does all the talking while the driver of the jeep, her eventual killer, stays silent. Given the movie’s ending, we assume that the driver must be Pamela Voorhees. But Stewart points out that, when we meet Pamela in the final reel, she’s extremely voluble and can’t stop talking about her fiendish plans. The person in the jeep, Stewart deduces, is an assistant who’s helping Pamela with the murders. The theory becomes more compelling vis-à-vis Part II, where we never get confirmation that the killer is Jason. Rather, Stewart contends that the counselors simply presume the killer to be Jason because they’ve been “wound up” by the campfire story told by their supervisor Paul early in the movie. Thus, Jason with the bag on his head could very well be, in Stewart’s estimation, Pamela’s jeep-driving accomplice from the original film. Having failed to save Pamela five years prior, this redheaded, overall-wearing man has been living in the woods with her severed head ever since. Boldly, Stewart goes on to argue that this individual is most certainly not the antagonist of Parts III and IV, as that killer has a more muscular body type and is bald. In Part III, when Chris has her flashback to being attacked by a mystery man in the woods two years before (whom she later recognizes as the killer), the attacker is also bald. Stewart deems it unlikely that a feral woodsman would change hairstyles so drastically and so often.
Doubling down on his theory, Stewart goes so far as to suggest that we meet yet another “Jason” in Part VI, given that the gravedigger in that film is a bumbling alcoholic who could have mixed up the body of the real Jason with that of someone else. This resurrected corpse stays on as the killer for the rest of the Friday the 13th movies. Stewart then discusses Rennie’s flashback in Part VIII, when she recalls being thrown into Crystal Lake by Dr. McCulloch. Under the surface, she encounters a spectral child, and Stewart interprets this as an affirmation that Jason never left the lake in spirit or body. This incident, then, marks the first legitimate encounter with Jason throughout the series, in Stewart’s estimation. And how does Stewart fit Jason Goes to Hell into his framework? He avers that it’s a movie about Jason that has been made within the preexisting Friday the 13th universe.
The Elias Voorhees Theory also builds on the notion of an accomplice, labelling Pamela’s helpmate as Jason’s father. Elias Voorhees is first referenced in Jason Goes to Hell, and commentator Dustin Whitlock of Movieweb proposes that the man’s hands we see in the original01 Friday the 13th belong to him and not Jason. Elias undertakes another killing spree that spans Parts II through IV, continuing to exact the revenge that he and Pamela took in the first movie. This helps account for how the killer manages to find sole survivor Alice, navigate a route to her house (presumably by car), and kill her inconspicuously at the beginning of Part II. Whitlock submits that simple genetics explain the facial resemblance between Elias and Jason, with the asymmetrical features and hydrocephaly having been passed from father to son. While Pamela may have loved Elias regardless of his physiognomy, Whitlock acknowledges a darker possibility—that Jason may have been conceived by way of a sexual assault. Indeed, the attack described in Chris’s flashback in Part III carries strong overtones of attempted sexual violence, implying that Elias was a predator with what Whitlock calls a “pattern of behavior.”
Alternatively, Whitlock hypothesizes that Elias’s resemblance to Jason could also be accounted for by mask-making, with the father creating elaborate foam-latex disguises in order to perpetuate the myth of his son’s survival or return from the dead. The drastic alteration in the killer’s appearance between Part II and III, then, is little more than Elias changing masks. Whitlock points out that mask-making marks a recurrent theme in the series, what with Tommy Jarvis’s savant-like ability to create masks proving integral to the plot of Part IV. Whitlock also relies on the masking sub-theory to make sense of the more symmetrical look of “Jason”/Elias in Parts VI through VIII. Over the passage of time, he conjectures, the deceased killer’s flesh and the mask’s foam-latex would have decomposed in the grave, revealing Elia’s original symmetrical skull structure. Whatever the case, Whitlock insightfully encapsulates his Elias Voorhees Theory (and the Multiple Killers Theory) when he muses that “The plot of Part 5 is the plot of the franchise—that people accept the ghost story of Jason without questioning it.” The killer, though, was never Jason.
One of the most promising Friday the 13th fan theories has come to us from the pen of Chris Snellgrove of Giant Freakin Robot in late 2024. The Chaos Magic Theory, as I’m labelling it here, once again deals in the dark arts, though it moves out of the realm of Deadite Theory. Snellgrove postulates that Pamela Voorhees dabbled in black magic before the events of the first movie in hopes of resurrecting her son. This required sacrifices, and Pamela’s murder spree in the first film marked an attempt to complete the spell. However, Alice decapitated Pamela before she could kill her final victim and finish the rite. At this juncture, Snellgrove posits, the dark energies within Pamela’s body seeped into Crystal Lake and the surrounding area. Thus, Crystal Lake truly had a “Death Curse,” as Crazy Ralph would phrase it in the first two movies. The “chaotic magic,” as Snellgrove calls it, proceeded to bring Jason back not as a boy but as a monstrous man and rendered him indestructible in the process, enabling his subsequent resurrections. Snellgrove suggests that the lingering magic in the area could solve the mystery of why the surviving women in the first three films all experienced “dream visions” of being attacked by someone who was supposedly dead (youthful Jason, adult Jason, and Pamela Voorhees, respectively). Snellgrove also speculates that the restorative powers of the spell could be responsible for preserving Tina Shepherd’s father beneath Crystal Lake in Part VII even after he’d drowned due to prepubescent Tina’s violent telekinetic reaction to his spousal abuse. In that spirit, Snellgrove advances the notion that Tina’s psychic powers may have been enhanced by the echoes of Pamela Voorhees’ curse in the Crystal Lake area.
We are now in a position to evaluate the various circulating fan theories, selecting the most useful parts in order to move toward a Theory of Everything in Friday the 13th. First off, I think it’s undeniable that Pamela Voorhees had a male accomplice in the first movie, and that he was Jason. Alternatively, as per Whitlock, I suppose the participation of Elias could also make sense in Part I, III, or even II. Elias strikes me as a far more reasonable choice for the killer than a bunch of random psychopathic backwoodsmen operating in the same territory, as per Stewart’s rather outlandish theory. Still, Stewart’s assertion that Jason Goes to Hell is a fictional portrayal of Jason within the Friday the 13th universe stands as one of the most cogent explanations for the film’s place in the lore. And because Jason Goes to Hell is not, by that token (and by the judgement of many fans), in the Friday the 13th continuity, the fact that Elias only enters the franchise in a movie far afield from the canon makes it highly implausible that he’d be the killer in earlier installments.
Whatever the case, I think we can say for certain that the union between Elias and Pamela was not a happy or healthy one, having resulted from some kind of inauspicious or coercive liaison—either a shotgun wedding, paternal dereliction, or outright assault. Killer or not, Elias was probably a predator.
Finally, looking at Snellgrove’s work, I think we can accept that there is a cursed or magical quality to Crystal Lake. This does not necessarily involve black magic rituals or Necronomicon nonsense, but more likely connects to some kind of malevolence in the water and the surrounding land that predated the camp. Crystal Lake would seem to contain some sort of enchantment that awakens or augments specific capacities in particular people, both for bad and for good. This explains Jason’s ability to regenerate and resurrect, as well as Tina Shepherd’s enhanced psychic powers. More broadly, this would shed some light on why Crystal Lake seems to attract malefic events.
Thus, we can summarize our Fan Theory of Everything for Friday the 13th as follows: Pamela accomplished the Friday the 13th murders with help from her semi-unwanted son Jason, product of a toxic relationship with Elias. Five years later, Jason went on a multiday killing spree at Crystal Lake, rapidly recuperating thanks to the enchanted waters until he was definitively killed by Tommy Jarvis. The legend of Jason lived on, allowing Roy Burns to convince locals he was Jason. Then Tommy Jarvis resurrected Jason’s remains and, with help from some leftover Crystal Lake magic, Jason became an undead, unstoppable killing machine. He received some resistance from Tina Shepherd and her deceased father, each of whom were turbocharged by Crystal Lake magic, and he ultimately wound up in Manhattan. In the ensuing years, a movie came out called Jason Goes to Hell dramatizing the myth and exploits of Jason Voorhees. Oh, and then Jason was cryogenically frozen and reconstituted in outer space in the future.
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Image Credit: Rodrigo Paredes from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Alterations were made by adding the Hubble Telescope Imagery as the backdrop.
