Jason Voorhees

Jason Voorhees (born June 13, 1946) is a fictional character from the Friday the 13th series of slasher films. A vicious mass murderer, he features in all the films, with the exception of Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. With his trademark goalie mask and machete, he is arguably among the most recognizable villians from any slasher film.

Childhood years

Jason was born on June 13, 1946 to Pamela and Elias Voorhees. Born with mental retardation and severe facial disfigurement, children his age frequently teased and bullied him. However, his mother never drew attention to his illness and loved him deeply.

In the summer of 1957, Jason attended Camp Crystal Lake, where his mother worked as a chef. The other children chased him into the lake while the camp counselors were having sex in a nearby cabin, thus leaving the children unattended. Because he could not swim, he began drowning. The camp counselors didn't hear his cries for help, so Jason slipped under the water and was washed away to the other side of the lake. It is unclear whether he survived, or died and came back to life, but his growth into adulthood by the time of Friday the 13th Part 2 suggests that he survived.
[edit]

Pamela Voorhees' revenge

Mrs. Voorhees went insane with grief after her son's disappearance. She swore revenge on the people responsible for her son's death. She waited one year to act out her vengeance. On June 13, 1958 she murdered the two teenagers she believed to have been responsible for Jason's drowning. After the incident, the camp was closed. A few years later, Mrs. Voorhees sabotaged an attempt to reopen the camp by setting fire to it. Later still, Mrs. Voorhees poisoned the camp's water to prevent the camp from reopening. Because of these incidents, the locals around Crystal Lake began to believe that the camp was cursed and dubbed it "Camp Blood".

The camp was deserted for years, until a man named Steve Christy, whose parents originally owned the camp, spent $25,000 to try to reopen it. Mrs. Voorhees snuck into the camp and murdered Christy and the six teenage counselors he had hired. The only remaining person, Alice, decapitated Mrs. Voorhees with a machete during a struggle.
[edit]

Jason resurfaces

Living as a hermit in the camp's forest, Jason witnessed his mother's bloody demise and was devastated. When Alice returned to Crystal Lake to face her fears, Jason stabbed her in the head with an ice pick. Jason then returned to the forest. Five years later, a man named Paul Holt opened up a camp counselor training ground near the Camp Crystal Lake site. Jason, wearing a pillowcase on his head to hide his disfigured face, went into the area to drive them out of his home. After dispatching six counselors, he struggled with a girl named Ginny, who drove a machete into Jason's shoulder. Ginny returned to the training ground with Holt and they locked themselves in one of the cabins. A few minutes later, Jason appeared to burst through the window and attacked the two remaining counselors. However, it is disputed whether this was only a hallucination by Ginny, who awoke to find herself being loaded into an ambulance and Holt nowhere to be seen (in Making Friday The 13th: The Legend Of Camp Blood by David Grove, it is confirmed that Holt was killed off camera), or that it really happened.

The next day Jason killed a couple living in a home near Crystal Lake and got new clothes. Then he made his way to a vacationing spot called Higgins Haven and killed 10 vacationing teenagers there. It was there where he replaced the pillowcase with the trademark hockey mask that he took from a teenager he killed. The one person who survived Jason's rampage, a girl named Chris Higgins, whose parents owned Higgins Haven and was attacked several years before by Jason, took an axe and gashed it into the left side of his head, knocking him out.

Jason's body was taken to the Wessex County Morgue, where he regained consciousness, killed the coroner, and quickly escaped. When he returned to the camp, he killed the teenagers resting there. As he was about to kill a girl named Trisha Jarvis, her brother, Tommy, distracted the mute murderer by shaving his head and dressing as Jason when he was a boy. Tommy then hacked Jason in the left side of his face until Jason fell onto the machete and split his head open. Tommy would spend the next four years in a mental institution. Jason was buried at Eternal Peace Cemetery near his mother.
[edit]

Jason comes back from the grave

Years later, Tommy Jarvis, now in his early 20s, was released from the mental institution, but was still plagued by nightmares about Jason and a man named Roy Burns, whom he had killed a year earlier because he was masquerading as Jason and killing people in the mental institution. After he got out of the institution, Tommy and a friend went to Eternal Peace Cemetery to dig up Jason's grave and cremate him. After they dug him up, Tommy stabbed a metal rod from a cemetery fence into Jason's rotting corpse and threw his hockey mask into the grave. As they were about to cremate him, however, a lightning bolt struck the rod in Jason's chest, reanimating him. The reanimated Jason killed Tommy's friend as Tommy escaped. Jason was now considerably stronger and even more resilient than ever before. With a bloodlust in his eye, Jason put on the hockey mask that Tommy threw into the grave before proceeding to Camp Crystal Lake, which was now called Camp Forest Green. When Tommy told the sheriff his ordeal, the sheriff just thought he was crazy and put him in a jail cell for the night. After escaping from the jail cell Tommy made his way to Camp Forest Green, where Jason had already killed several counselors. Tommy wrapped a metal chain with a rock attached to it around Jason. Then he pushed Jason into the lake, where he (seemingly) drowned. Jason's body lay at the bottom of the lake and decomposed for some time.

Five years later, a girl at Camp Forest Green named Tina Shepard accidentally released Jason from his underwater tomb. Jason then proceeded to do what he did best: slaughter the people at the camp site. Tina then confronted Jason, using her telekinetic abilities to knock Jason's mask off, to see that Jason's face was now even more deformed from decomposing underwater for several years. Tina then forced Jason back into the lake with her powers.

Then after that, Jason was resurrected by an electrical cable and climbed aboard a cruise ship full of teenagers bound for New York. He was close to being unleashed in all of Manhattan, but he was (seemingly) killed again by toxic waste in the sewage system, where his body washed up back in Camp Crystal Lake.

A few years later, he came back yet again, only to be supposedly blown to bits by a team of FBI agents. Unfortunately, he was reincarnated in several bodies through his evil soul. His only surviving family member, his 22-year-old niece Stephanie Kimble, stabbed Jason with a magic dagger, sending him to Hell.
[edit]

Freddy versus Jason

Years later, Jason would be resurrected once again. This time, by Freddy Krueger, another mass murderer with supernatural powers. Disguising himself as Mrs. Voorhees, Krueger manipulated Jason into killing the children of Elm Street. Freddy's plan was for the murders to make people relate the teens' deaths to the almost-forgotten memory of Freddy Krueger. Thereby, Freddy would once again be feared, which was key to his power. Eventually, Jason interrupted Krueger's plan by killing so many teens in public places that he left behind witnesses. These witnesses described not Krueger to the people of Elm Street, but an almost 7-foot-tall maniac wearing a hockey mask and wielding a machete. The realization of the general populous that the killer was Jason Voorhees, not Freddy Krueger, took Freddy's newly-found power away from him again. This infuriated Freddy, and he challenged Jason-- not once, but twice: first in the dream world, and then in the real world. During the struggle, Jason ripped off Krueger's right arm and impaled him through the chest with his own glove, striking the decisive blow. Stunned and dying, Krueger fell to his knees and was then decapitated by Lori Campbell with Jason's machete, while Jason sunk to the bottom of the lake. Jason, however, came up from the lake the next morning carrying the decapitated head of Freddy Krueger, which winked and laughed, into the forest.

Jason's current location is unknown.
[edit]

What the future may hold

While much of the details leading up to his capture are unknown, by 2010 Jason will be held in the Crystal Lake Research Facility (built on the site of what was once Camp Crystal Lake). They fail to actually execute the killer in conviction for hundreds of murders due to his unique regenerative ability, and the government operates on him, probably trying to find the source of his invulnerability. Eventually, the researchers decree that Jason be held in cryogenic suspension. Jason manages to escape and murders several guards before he is frozen by the project manager, Rowan, who is both fatally wounded and frozen along with Jason. The Facility is wisely left undisturbed as Earth itself eventually becomes uninhabitable. By 2455, a ship full of students find Rowan and Jason's still-frozen bodies and take them back to their ship. Rowan is thawed and healed, with the aid of nanotechnology, and warns them of Jason's nature. These warnings are dismissed. While being thawed and studied, Jason awakes and begins wreaking destruction until an android stops him, destroying huge chunks of his body. But because his remains are lying on a bed used to help regenerate tissue, the nanotechnology repairs the gaps in Jason (including the hockey mask), even adding the metal from the machete stabbed into his body as part of the tissue. Once the process is complete, his build is not only bigger, but he himself is virtually indestructable. Jason is even powerful enough to withstand gunfire, punch through a titanium hull, and withstand being in the center of a massive explosion with no visible damage done. It is unknown exactly if he survived entry into the atmosphere of Earth 2. If he has, his last known whereabouts are believed to be in the bottom of one of its lakes.
[edit]

The men behind the mask

Much like his masked counterpart Michael Myers, the part of Jason Voorhees has been played by various actors; some uncredited, others taking great pride in their parts. Due to the physical demands the character requires and the lack of emotional depth depicted, it comes as no surprise that almost all of the actors are stuntmen with no pre-existing history solely in acting. The best known among them is Kane Hodder who has become a favourite amoung fans and is often cited as the best to take up the role; there are others, however, that argue against these claims, pointing to another one of the actors as a better or "best Jason." Although, it is worth noting that there are those do not see any distinction between the portrayals and do not find it worth arguing over.

In the original Friday the 13th Ari Lehman portrayed a young Jason, seen only in a brief flashback and the surprise ending. Although he is not the only actor to portray a young Jason (a role that went to Timothy Burr Mirkovich in Jason Takes Manhattan and Spencer Stump in Freddy vs. Jason) he stands as the first actor to ever play Jason Voorhees.

For the role of the first adult Jason, some controversy arose over the role in Part 2. While Warrington Gillette is credited as Jason, the majority of the role was actually played by Steve Daskewisz, who was simply credited as the stunt double. Gillette only played the role in the unmasked scene, with Daskewisz playing the role in almost all of the character's other scenes. Although this credit was corrected of sorts in Part 3 (in which Daskewisz is credited as Jason for the reused footage from the climax of the film), this confusion existed for years.

Daskewisz was asked to reprise his role in the third film, but turned it down simply because of the money he would have had to put out during filming and refrained (though he later says he regrets this). Instead, the role went to Richard Brooker, a trapeze artist, cast simply because of his big frame. He took the role believing that dialogue was not a necessity to acting.

More controversy stirred for the part in The Final Chapter when the role was handed over to professional stuntman Ted White. He refused credit for the role, feeling bad about the treatment of the actors who would play the victims. He claims that he took the role solely for the money, not wanting his name on what he called a "piece of shit." Although, he has been cited as later saying that the film come out better than he had expected and is credited in reused footage for later films.

Much like with Part 2, there has been confusion over the role in A New Beginning, partly due to the crediting of the killer and not Jason himself. While Dick Wieand is credited as Roy Burns, the film's actual murderer, it was stuntman Tom Morga who performed in the few flashes of Jason, as well as portraying Roy in all but the unmasked scenes. Wieand, while not ashamed, has been outspoken about his lack of enthusiasm over his role in the film.

C.J. Graham auditioned for the role in the sixth film. He initially lost the role, but was called back five days later for the role when the hired stuntman failed to give the desired performance. A nightclub owner with a military history, Graham performed all of his own stunts in the role. Although he was passed over for reprising the role, he has often been cited as speaking highly of his time in the part.

The part was then taken up by Kane Hodder in The New Blood where he carried the role consecutively into Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes To Hell, and Jason X. He remains the only actor to reprise the role, and is often cited as perfecting the role. His strong following caused obvious upset among fans when he was turned down the role for a fifth time.

For Freddy vs. Jason, the role went instead to Ken Kirzinger, a Canadian stuntman who worked on Jason Takes Manhattan. There has been conflicting reports over the reason behind the casting of Kirzinger, although many believe that it may have simply been due to his residence in Canada, where the film was shot, and thus done to save money.