A Tale of Two Jasons

I think it’s safe to say that Overlord Miller is not a fan of the horror genre, though he does make the occasional exception where suave nosferatu and earthbound seraphim are concerned. By and large, his tolerance (or perhaps appetite) for grisly death and gore is significantly lower than mine. Despite this, I often suspect that Overlord Miller’s latent capacity for violence is greater than mine. I have neither anecdotal nor empirical evidence to bolster this suspicion, but there’s a reason I make a point of walking behind Overlord Miller whenever possible:¹ I don’t want to be the first thing he sees when he eventually snaps and goes on a convention-wide killing spree.

Whereas Overlord Miller is a seething cauldron of barely-contained fury and does not enjoy a good on-screen splatterfest, I have all the pent-up rage of a two-week-old kitten and likes me some cinematic blood and guts. It ought not surprise anyone, therefore, to learn that it was I—and not Overlord Miller—who watched three Friday the 13^th films in the last four days.

I don’t claim to be a connoisseur of horror films in general, nor of the Friday the 13^th franchise specifically, but I do enjoy watching Jason Voorhees dispatch a camp of college students from time to time.² The machete-wielding giant in the hockey mask, more than any of his ilk (Leatherface, Michael Meyers, Freddy Krueger), fascinates me. To me, Jason Voorhees is the bipedal equivalent of a giant crocodile, and we all know how I feel about giant crocodiles.

Or rather, Jason Voorhees was the bipedal equivalent of a giant crocodile until he got rebooted.³ In Friday the 13^th (2009),  Jason is pretty much the deformed love child of Alan “Dutch” Schaefer and Angus MacGyver; instead of an implacable, lumbering, unstoppable murder machine, the new Voorhees is a nimble, stealthy survivalist whose lair at Camp Crystal Lake is rigged with traps, an elaborate alarm system and a guest suite.⁴

While I could hardly argue that New Jason⁵ fails to get the job done (where “the job” is killing camps of horny, pot-smoking college kids), the way he goes about it lacks a certain je nais se quoi. Okay, that’s not true; I know exactly what New Jason lacks: inevitability. There’s something about the way Old Jason⁶ moves that speaks of a deadly inevitability; it doesn’t matter how fast you can run or how clever you are, he’s going to get you eventually. Old Jason lumbers tortoise-like, where New Jason dashes to and fro like a hare. Granted, New Jason is a hare with a machete, but the simple fact of the matter is that he doesn’t evoke the sense that he’s simply not going to stop until he crosses that finish line.⁷

My personal favorite performance by Kane Hodder as Old Jason is probably the least-popular Friday the 13^th installment among those who are true connoisseurs of the series: Jason X (2001). Also known as “Jason in Space”, the film begins in the far-flung future of 2010,⁸ when a captured Jason Voorhees is cryogenically frozen, and continues more than 400 years later when a group of students returns to a now-dead Earth (presumably on an archaeological field trip), finds the chilly killer and brings him back aboard their spaceship. Upon thawing him out, the students learn why Jason was put on ice in the first place: he’s pretty much impossible to kill. To make matters worse, Jason gets an “upgrade” about two-thirds of the way through the movie; down for the count after facing off against an ass-kicking android (Lisa Ryder), Jason is revived by a malfunctioning medical bay that uses nanobots to turn him into a nigh-invincible cyborg. Nothing but trouble, those nanobots.

Jason X may not be as gritty as some of its predecessors—I’ve dubbed it “novelty horror”—but Hodder’s Voorhees is perfect. He moves slowly with an occasional lethal burst of speed; he is an unrelenting, brutal killer, and he’s always turning up where his hapless victims least expect to find him. Jason Voorhees doesn’t need agility, cleverness or traps to do what he does. He’s not a cat or a spider; he’s a giant crocodile. And above all, he is inevitable.

1. In an invisible cone I call “Miller’s Wake”. [↩]
2. Much as a group of geese is commonly referred to as a “gaggle”, a group of college students—in the context of a Friday the 13^th film—is known as a “camp”. At least by me. [↩]
3. There’s been a lot of that going around lately, hasn’t there? [↩]
4. Oddly enough, the reason given for Jason’s murderous behavior is one often used when large predators seem to kill indiscriminately: he’s just protecting his territory. [↩]
5. Portrayed in the 2009 Friday the 13^th reboot by Derek Mears. [↩]
6. Portrayed most notably by Kane Hodder, thus far the only actor to ever don the hockey mask more than once. [↩]
7. What’s finished at that line? You. [↩]
8. Hey… [↩]

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