Jason Goes to Hell director Adam Marcus says that Crystal Lake killer Jason Voorhees is in fact a Deadite from the Evil Dead franchise. This might sound like an odd proclamation, but according to Marcus, he designed it that way from the ground up, following a conversation with Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi. Released in 1993, Jason Goes to Hell is considered by many Friday the 13th fans to be the least of the sequels, if for no other reason then that it features an appalling lack of Jason himself.
For those unfamiliar with this particular entry, Jason Goes to Hell was the first Friday the 13th film made after New Line Cinema acquired the rights to the franchise from Paramount. Instead of simply trotting out yet another story of Jason killing camp counselors, Jason Goes to Hell changed things up drastically. The wacky ending of Jason Takes Manhattan was understandably ignored, and the film began with Kane Hodder's Jason back stalking Crystal Lake. The seemingly immortal killer is then blown to bits by the FBI, and is revealed to actually be an ancient, body-jumping demon. The majority of the film's kills are performed while Jason's spirit resides in the bodies of others.
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While many fans rightly balk at the sudden shift of Jason from being a zombie who misses his mama into a parasitic demon, it turns out that director Marcus has a good explanation for the whole thing. As stated above, he intended Jason to be a Deadite. Unfortunately, he couldn't outright say that, since New Line doesn't own the rights to Evil Dead. Marcus recently offered the following details on the subject to Horror Geek Life.
"[Pamela Voorhees] makes a deal with the devil by reading from the Necronomicon to bring back her son. This is why Jason isn’t Jason. He’s Jason plus The Evil Dead, and now I can believe that he can go from a little boy that lives in a lake, to a full grown man in a couple of months, to Zombie Jason, to never being able to kill this guy. That, to me, is way more interesting as a mashup, and Raimi loved it!"
"It’s not like I could tell New Line my plan to include The Evil Dead, because they don’t own The Evil Dead. So it had to be an Easter egg, and I did focus on it…there’s a whole scene that includes the book, and I hoped people would get it and could figure out that’s what I’m up to. So yes, in my opinion, Jason Voorhees is a Deadite. He’s one of The Evil Dead."
As Marcus points out above, it's not like he didn't offer viewers a clue to his intentions. A scene inside the Voorhees house during Jason Goes to Hell shows male lead Steven Freeman (John D. Lemay) discovering the Necronomicon on a table, and it is indeed the exact same prop used in The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II. The camera focuses directly on the book, and it's not subtle. Additionally, to defeat Jason in Jason Goes to Hell, he needs to be stabbed with a mystical dagger. This dagger looks almost exactly like the Kandarian dagger featured in the Evil Dead movies.
Despite what Marcus says above though, lots of Jason fans are likely to dismiss the character's Deadite status as nothing more than the director's personal fan fiction. Jason Goes to Hell isn't even considered canon by many Friday the 13th devotees, and its plot is never referenced again in later films. In the eyes of Adam Marcus though, it "absolutely is canon." One now wonders if the only true way to defeat Jason for good would be to call up Ash and tell him to gas up his chainsaw.
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Source: Horror Geek Life