While the Friday the 13th franchise has always featured plenty of plot holes, there is one nonsensical twist that almost derails the best sequel in the series, Friday the 13th Part III. The Friday the 13th story started pretty simply, the 1980s original film saw a group of counselors revamp an abandoned summer camp, only for them to be picked off by Pamela Voorhees, a disgruntled mother whose son Jason drowned at the camp decades earlier.
Friday the 13th’s Final Girl Alice killed Pamela in self-defense, only to be accosted by the vengeful spirit of her son in a nightmare. This twist went on to derail the entire Friday the 13th franchise, whose plot-hole-ridden story centered around Jason avenging the death of Pamela even though she was already avenging his death and, clearly, he wasn’t really dead in the first place. Despite this storytelling snag, however, the Friday the 13th sequels turned a tidy profit and earned the series a massive fan base.
One of the strongest Friday the 13th sequels makes this plot hole far worse, throwing in a last-minute twist that ends up rendering the rest of the movie indecipherable. At the end of Friday the 13th Part III, Final Girl Chris kills Jason and takes a canoe out onto Crystal Lake. Following this, she is inexplicably chased by an unmasked Jason who then turns into the corpse of Pamela Voorhees and tries to drag her out of the canoe, only for the whole scene to turn out to be a dream sequence. This Final Girl’s “death” is a cliche that the Friday the 13th series used in almost every sequel, before the moment was revealed to be a takeout dream sequence. The problem is, if this was Chris’s dream all along, how did she know who Pamela was and what she looked like? While a bizarre plot hole on its own, this twist does fit into a larger tonal shift that the franchise undertook around this time.
Friday the 13th Part 3’s Ending Plot Hole Explained
Friday the 13th Part III's ending could make sense if viewers assume that there is something supernatural going on and the nightmare wasn’t just a normal dream, which then leads pretty well into the later Friday the 13th sequels continuing to revive an increasingly supernatural Jason. If viewers assume that Chris had some sort of under-explained psychic link with Pamela Voorhees, this might explain how she knew what Jason’s mother looked like and who she was. While rival slasher villains like Pinhead or Jason’s nemesis Freddy Krueger could invade the minds of their victims, Jason was never that explicitly supernatural in the early Friday the 13th movies.
Later sequels in the Friday the 13th series saw Jason survive unimaginable injuries, hop between bodies, and possess people. As of Friday the 13th Part III, he was just a very strong, very angry masked murderer and not a revenant, but the twist ending seen in Friday the 13th Part III’s trippy dream sequence introduced the idea of Jason as a paranormal being by including Pamela Voorhees in Chris’s creepy dream. The sequel never made this clear, but this explanation at least offers an answer for one of the Friday the 13th franchise’s most gaping plot holes as well as helping Friday the 13th Part III to set up the stylistic shift seen throughout the rest of the series.