While the Friday the 13th franchise includes some of the most famous and beloved slasher movies ever made, the series' overarching story of the series doesn’t make sense upon re-watch. The Friday the 13th movies are not famous for their ingenious plotting. Like the Halloween movies, Friday the 13th and its sequels are renowned for their effectiveness as quintessentially '80s slashers that set up a sub-genre formula that has been endlessly copied, subverted, and parodied in the decades since their release.
However, it is still striking to note that the Friday the 13th movies don’t add up in terms of the plot even on a basic storytelling level. While this is not necessarily unusual for slasher movies, which often expand their lore and backstory with each sequel, it is notable in the case of the Friday the 13th franchise. After all, the inciting incident that leads to all the carnage in the Friday the 13th movies never happened, according to the events of the sequels.
While Halloween’s first sequel infamously revealed that Laurie Strode wasn’t just another victim to Michael Myers but secretly his long-lost sister, Friday the 13th’s first sequel took its series-shaking twist a step further. 1980’s original Friday the 13th saw a grieving mother, Pamela Voorhees, avenge the death of her young son, Jason, by killing a string of camp counselors who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Friday the 13th Part II (and every subsequent sequel) then saw a still-living and seemingly un-killable Jason Voorhees avenge the death of his mother, Pamela. So, viewers are left to wonder who died when, and what was Pamela avenging if Jason never even drowned—two questions that the Friday the 13th sequels never answer.
Friday the 13th’s Original Movie Backstory
Although it began life as a Halloween knock-off (by the creator’s own admission), the original Friday the 13th’s wildly successful slasher story owed as much to Giallo and Agatha Christie as John Carpenter. While Halloween’s killer was not a mystery and the movie’s tension came from waiting for him to strike, the original Friday the 13th’s story encouraged viewers to work out which of the counselors was the unseen killer. When everything is revealed at the end, the plot of the original Friday the 13th turns out to be pretty simple. A pair of camp counselors are killed in the '50s, the camp is shut down, a couple of counselors try to reopen the camp in the '70s, and then they too get killed. It seems that for most of Friday the 13th’s runtime the killer must be one of them. However, in an absurd twist, it turns out to be the hitherto-unmentioned middle-aged mother of a boy who drowned in the camp in the '50s. Friday the 13th’s Pamela Voorhees is revealed to be the killer and swiftly killed, which seems to bring the story to a close.
How Friday the 13th’s Twist Ending Complicated Things
In the original Friday the 13th's twist ending, the heroine Alice has a nightmare about Pamela’s son attacking her in the lake and dragging her underwater. This sequence is clearly a dream since the version of Jason Voorhees who attacks her hasn’t aged a day since he died as a child in the '50s. He is a small boy who seemingly lives beneath the lake’s surface, a deeply creepy image that evidently stuck with viewers. This, along with the movie’s massive box office success, led the creators of Friday the 13th to quickly shoot a sequel wherein Jason avenged his mother’s murder by killing another set of camp counselors. If it sounds like there is a logical Gordian knot happening here, that’s because there is. While a few of the sillier Friday the 13th sequels suggested that Jason was some form of demon or revenant, the early sequels portray him as a hulking, deformed, but still-human killer. This then leads to the question of what Pamela was avenging.
Jason Voorhees Was Actually Alive All Along
Pamela couldn't have been avenging her son’s death as she claimed in the original Friday the 13th since Jason was very much alive and proceeded to spend the rest of the series avenging her death. If he was alive, what was Pamela angry about? She could have been killing the two counselors in the '50s due to anger and trauma over her young son’s near-death experience, but that is hardly sufficient reason for her to return to the scene of the crime twenty years later and kill another group of people who had no connection. While Nightmare On Elm Street’s 2010 remake garnered criticism for failing to expand on the story of the original, 2009’s Friday the 13th made a similar mistake when it came to clarifying Jason’s origins. The remake provided a backstory for Jason’s hockey mask but never explained why Pamela killed people as revenge for his supposed death when he never really died in the first place.
Did Jason Voorhees Ever Actually Die?
If Pamela was raising Jason in the shuttered Camp Crystal Lake all along, there is another reason for her to go after the new generation of counselors. They could have represented a threat to her and Jason’s relatively stable existence in the abandoned summer camp, thus justifying Pamela’s murder spree (in her eyes, if not those of the law). However, this justification doesn’t explain why Pamela claimed that Jason drowned shortly before she tried to kill Alice. While focusing too much on the killer’s backstory can be a major slasher franchise mistake, Friday the 13th’s failure to explain anything about Jason’s origins makes the villain’s history hard to parse.
Friday the 13th’s Plot Holes Answered
One conceivable (but by no means canon) answer to the question of why Jason and Pamela are avenging each other’s death is that Pamela could have revived Jason through supernatural means. Although viewers don’t know much about Jason’s mother (something Jason Lives director Tommy McLoughlin’s proposed project Diary of Pamela Voorhees would address), there is no reason to think she couldn’t have brought Jason back to life after his death and made him the murderous monster he is in the sequels as a result. However, this then leads to the question of why Pamela commits the killings seen in the original 1980 Friday the 13th movie when her huge, hulking, possibly immortal now-adult son could have done so — another plot hole that the franchise never cleared up.