Friday the 13th famously features Jason Voorhees' mom Pamela claiming victims, but the scene that reveals this twist makes a baffling mistake. The fact that Jason's mom was the killer in the first Friday the 13th movie was of course immortalized in the iconic opening scene of Wes Craven's Scream, when Drew Barrymore fails to answer a question about it correctly. Thankfully, Pamela Voorhees was no slouch in the slaughter department, showing off where her son gets his talents from.
As has been pointed out by many fans over the years, as fun as the first Friday the 13th movie is, it's not really much of a whodunit. After not being shown for the entire film, the killer turns out to be a character the audience had never been shown anyway, making it impossible for anyone to have guessed the culprit's identity. That's an enormous cheat, and contrary to most slasher movie reveals, in which the mystery killer was a character that had been lurking on the periphery of the story the entire time.
What prevents that from hurting the film too much is just how good actress Betsy Palmer is at playing Mrs. Voorhees, chewing the scenery in the best possible way, and still managing to be downright creepy. However, if one pays attention to her introductory scene, it appears Pamela can also teleport.
Friday the 13th Mistake Undercuts The Villain Twist
Near the end of Friday the 13th, Alice (Adrienne King) finds Bill's body shot full of arrows and pinned to a door. Horrified, she rushes into Camp Crystal Lake's main cabin to hide, only for the killer to terrorize her further by throwing the body of another character, Brenda, through the window of the cabin. Mere seconds later, Alice sees a vehicle pull up outside, and thinking it's her boss Steve Christy returning, she heads out to meet him. Instead, the driver is Pamela Voorhees, and while Jason's mama first pretends to be friendly, the ruse doesn't last long.
While the timing is easy to overlook on first viewing, anything after that makes the plot hole readily apparent. There's no way, short of her having superpowers, that Pamela could've physically thrown Brenda through the cabin's window, then somehow gotten back to her vehicle quick enough to look as though she's arriving outside when Alice sees it pull up. She would have had to either literally be in two places at once during this sequence, been born with the ability to teleport, or possess speed that would make The Flash jealous. It entirely undercuts Friday the 13th's reveal of Pamela as the killer, and reeks of both lazy writing and the filmmakers not caring about continuity.