Pamela Voorhees

Pamela Sue Voorhees is the mother of the fictional slasher serial killer Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th films.

In the original Friday the 13th film, the character is simply named Mrs. Voorhees, her first name not being revealed until Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.

The character was portrayed by Betsy Palmer in the first two films.

Some mistakenly believe it was her son doing the killings in all of the films, but she was the killer in the first film, in which she had nine victims.

Her motive for her killings were out of revenge for the death of her son. Despite his deformity, she loved him dearly. Mrs. Voorhees was a cook at the camp and was working the day he drowned in that summer of 1957. She blamed the counselors at Camp Crystal Lake for his death as some were having sex instead of watching the campers while he drowned. A year after the incident, she killed two counselors as they were fooling around, causing the camp to close. Attempts to reopen it were thwarted. The final attempt in 1979 by a Steve Christy resulted in Mrs. Voorhees murdering several counselors including Mr. Christy over the course of a single night (one counselor early in the day never even made it to camp). As there was but one lone survivor, Pamela came out of the shadows and played herself to the last victim as a kind old woman. But her true nature leaked when she brought up the grief over reopening the camp and told of her son Jason. She turned mad and suddenly claimed that the girl is responsible for his drowning and began attacking her. As she's chased over the campgrounds, the girl is forced to defend herself and uses Pamela's machete to behead her.

Two months later, Jason carried out his own revenge by killing his mother's murderer. Jason had kept his mother's severed head, first to frighten the girl (by placing it in her refrigerator) and then took both her corpse and the head to his shack in the woods. In it, he built something of a shrine to his mother and subsequently placed some victims there. After he is hit in the shoulder with a machete and left for dead at the end of his first killing spree, he leaves his crudely made home and his mother.

Mrs. Voorhees was born in 1930 and initially laid to rest in a run down cemetery. When Jason was murdered by Tommy Jarvis a few years later, it's presumed that she was relocated (now with her head) to Eternal Peace Cemetery along with her son in accordance with arrangements made by Elias Voorhees, the father of Pamela's son.
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Life after death

Although Pamela does not share her son's immortality, she does reappear in later films. The character is seen again in the climax of Friday the 13th Part 2 in which Betsy Palmer reprises her role when Jason sees his mother talking to him while in reality it is the character of Ginny trying to fool Jason. She is seen again in Friday the 13th Part 3 when lone survivor Chris Higgins has a nightmare that ends in the corpse of Mrs. Voorhees (played by an unknown actor), wearing her blue sweater with head attached, reaching up from the lake to pull her under. She is seen again in Freddy vs. Jason (played this time by Paula Shaw) when in Hell she commands her son to kill the children of Elm Street - although it turns out that it is actually Freddy Krueger disguised as his mother.

Reportedly, the character was to make another appearance for Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday in a flashback sequence, but was dropped when Palmer turned it down. Another jettisoned idea took place in Jason X where Mrs. Voorhees would appear during the virtual reality scenerio, but in a demonstration of how he had changed from his recent transformation, Jason winds up trying to kill her.