Jason Voorhees was insane. The violent things he’d seen and the savage life he’d lived out in the woods had their irreversible effects upon his feeble mind, but those things had only completed what nature had started. He had never been completely normal. Strange forces had been at work in his life from the very moment of his conception.  

From his premature birth, at the stroke of midnight one Friday The 13th, there had been something different about him. It was not only that he had been an unusually large infant, with striking, pronounced features that gave him an almost adult expression, but there was something ominous about him that filled all those who came near him with a profound sense of unease—all except his mother. A mother loves her child.  

Pamela Voorhees never had a chance to make it to the hospital. Her labor had been unnaturally short, as if the child within her were trying to claw its way out of her womb. The doctor had arrived just in time to deliver Jason in the bedroom. Even from birth, Jason was curiously silent. When the doctor held him up and slapped him, Jason didn’t make a sound. For a moment, the doctor was alarmed, thinking that the child might have been stillborn. He slapped Jason once again, a little harder this time, again with no response, and then he noticed that the child’s eyes were open and staring straight at him with an astonishing expression—one that almost seemed like cold, venomous fury . It staggered him to see such searing hatred in the gaze of a newborn child. But that surely would have been impossible and he decided that it must have been only his imagination. Yet, for months thereafter, he dreamed of those loathsome, hate-filled infant eyes.  

Even as a child, Jason was unusual. No one ever saw him smile. He never gurgled with delight at the brightly colored mobile that was hung above his crib or at the toys that he was given. He never screamed when he needed to be changed and he displayed no reaction whatsoever when his first teeth came in. He acted as though he didn’t feel the pain.  

He never woke his mother in the middle of the night with crying. Sometimes, feeling the anxiety that every mother of a newborn child feels, Pamela Voorhees would awaken at night and tiptoe to the baby’s room just to reassure herself that there was nothing wrong. She would look down into the crib and see her infant Jason lying on his bed, his eyes wide open, staring at her. He never made a sound.  

For a while, she was afraid that there might be something wrong with him and that perhaps he was autistic, one of those tragic children who were withdrawn into their own secret, silent world. But Jason was not withdrawn. He noticed everything. His reactions were unusually quick and sharp. He was incredibly alert and his senses were remarkably acute. He grew strong quickly, and he never became ill.  

He had no playmates because the other children avoided him. They seemed to be afraid of him. They ran away from him and complained about his “creepy eyes.” In truth, there was nothing at all unusual about his eyes, except for the fact that, like a cobra, he never seemed to blink. The neighbors could never really explain why, when they were walking back from the train station after riding home from work, they always crossed to the opposite side of the street whenever Jason was outside playing. It was as if some involuntary reaction had taken hold of them, some primal instinct warning them away.  

As commuters who worked in the city, they understood the subtle instincts that were at work. In a city full of predators, you learned to trust your feelings. And they had some very strong feelings about the little Voorhees boy. He made their skin crawl. It wasn’t something they openly admitted to themselves, because it would have sounded silly and it made no sense, but irrationally, it was there. It felt profoundly disturbing to be near him.  

He baffled all this teachers, although he affected a few of them much more strongly. Once of them abruptly quit her job and moved away from town.   His third-grade teacher, a shy young woman, offered her body to the principal if he would only move the boy out of her class. And a school psychologist who had tried to reach him wound up being “reached” himself and had a breakdown. The poor man was put into a straightjacket and taken to an institution.  

It seemed that something strange happened to everyone who came near Jason Voorhees. All except his mother. A mother loves her child . She was always hovering near him protectively, always ready to defend him. She had wanted her son to experience the pleasures of a summer in the woods and so she had taken the job as cook at Camp Crystal Lake just so she could stay near him. Only as it turned out, she wasn’t able to stay near enough.  

She was beside herself with worry the night he disappeared, and when his clothes were found by the lake, Pamela Voorhees went berserk. It had been necessary to restrain her and take her to the county hospital, where she was sedated. Although they never found the body of the boy, the official verdict was that it was death by drowning. Pamela Voorhees never recovered from the shock.  



So after reading the above we learned that as a child Jason wasn’t retarded or a Mongoloid (Down's Syndrome) as he is commonly called. Yes, he is feeble-minded, but he isn't exactly stupid. As we’re about to read below, Jason not only survived on his own in the woods as an adolescent, but for a killer as efficient as he is, who can outthink his victims and be rather creative with his handiwork, he can’t really be all that dumb. The above excerpt also dispels the common assumption that Jason was picked on as a child due to his deformity, but it clearly states (and again confirmed in the F13 Jason Lives  novel) that the other kids were too scared or intimidated by Jason to go near him, let alone tease or make fun of him.

Now if Jason drowned as a little boy, how then did he return from the dead?
 

Jason’s memories of what happened on the night he drowned were very dim. He remembered being frightened as his legs cramped up and he started to slip beneath the surface of the lake. He had a vague memory of struggling to stay afloat, of water rushing down his throat and filling up his lungs; he could recall the terrifying sensation of sinking down into the murky lake, the fading light, the roaring in his ears. . . and then nothing.  

At some point, consciousness returned, but he had no way of telling how much time had passed. He came to on the shore, covered from head to toe with slime, apparently having dragged himself out of the lake somehow. He coughed up water for a very long time. He remembered lying in the bushes and retching, vomiting up slimy worms and maggots as his body fought its way back to life.  

It never occurred to him to wonder what it was that made him different from the others—why they shrank from him as rabbits shrank from snakes. He never asked himself why he was always healthy, why the slight injuries of childhood had always healed so quickly. He had never broken any bones, so no one ever had the opportunity to notice the supernatural way his body could repair itself. Pamela Voorhees never questioned it, just as she never questioned his peculiar silence. A mother loves her child. She was simply grateful for having been blessed with a healthy little boy. Like father, like son.  

It did not occur to Jason Voorhees to wonder just how long he had been underwater. He merely dragged himself deeper into the woods, some primitive urge driving him to find a hole somewhere that he could crawl into; a dark place where he could rest, and heal, and wait until he could think of what to do.  

After a while, he returned back to the camp, his simple mind telling him that perhaps it was what he was supposed to do. Only there was no longer anybody there. The season had ended and the camp was closed. He broke into several of the cabins and found some cans of food and some old clothes for himself. In the process, he happened to catch sight of himself in a mirror and he recoiled in horror from the image that confronted him. He had been at the bottom of the lake for much longer than he’d realized. His flesh was trying to regenerated and heal itself, but decomposition had set in. The worms had eaten at his face.  

He fled into the woods, terrified of his own reflection. After a while, he found a sack and cut some holes in it, then put it over his head and tied it down around his neck, so that he wouldn’t have to see the grotesque thing he had become if he saw his reflection in the lake.  

He had no idea what to do or where to go. He wondered why his mother didn’t come for him. He was afraid to leave the vicinity of the camp, for that was where he’d seen her last and he didn’t want to miss her if she came looking for him. He didn’t want to get into trouble.  

He lived like an animal, hiding in the woods, avoiding people, killing small creatures for food. He was vaguely aware of time passing, though his days became and endless succession of wondering in the woods and foraging. He was aware of feeling cold as winter came. He took shelter in the cabins at the camp and huddled before fires he built inside the hearths. He had learned to make fires in camp. Thought several times he did it wrong and let the flames get out of control, burning down a couple of the cabins before he got the hang of it.  

On occasion, a policeman would drive by and see smoke curling from the chimney of a cabin that was supposed to be locked up for the winter. He would stop to investigate, but Jason always ran back into the woods whenever anybody came. He was waiting for his mother and he did not want to get into trouble. He knew she would be very angry.  

And then, one day, his mother had returned.  

Some people had come to open up the camp again and he had run off into the woods, hiding from them and watching as they rebuilt the place. Years had passed and he was now full grown, though still with the mid of a small child. But whatever vestige of sanity might have been driven out by the hardships he had suffered and by the sight of his mother, mad with grief, embarking upon her bloody murder spree.  

He had been afraid, because she had seemed so angry. He had hidden in the woods and watched on that fateful night when Pamela Voorhees had unleashed her vengeance on those whom she blamed for her son’s death. She had killed them all except one girl, and Jason had watched her struggle with the last survivor, Alice. He had seen that awful moment when the girl had picked up the machete his mother had dropped and swung it with a savage desperation.  



Apparently Jason was not only born with an uncanny durability towards injury and illness, but death as well. After his first resurrection, Jason had spent a long time wandering in the woods, fending for himself, and avoiding contact with people and as it said, “years had passed and he was now full grown.” So that may answer the question F13 fans have been asking on whether Jason rose out of the lake as a boy or a man. As we now know, he was indeed still a boy. But how long was he down at the bottom of the lake? Judging by the above physical description after he came out of the water (and if he looked anything like Alice's vision in the canoe), he wasn't that badly decayed and was still quite fleshy, so I'm assuming it was a few weeks. So how long then did Jason live in the woods before becoming a serial killer? Since Jason was 11 when he drowned and about 33 years old when he killed his first victim Alice, he spent 22 years hidden in the woods; confused, somewhat frighten, and even placid. Although, deep inside of him there was something sinister that laid dormant.

As the novel mentioned, there was an evil phenomenon about Jason, but it wasn’t “triggered” until after he saw his mother beheaded.
 

He would never forget the sight of his mother’s decapitated body falling to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, the stump of her neck spouting arcs of bright-red blood, her head falling to the ground like a ripe melon, rolling several feet and then stopping, the eyelashes still fluttering as it lay upon the ground.  

When the girl had pushed off from the shore in the canoe, he had hesitantly crept out of hiding and approached his mother’s body. He had stared down at it uncomprehendingly, at the vivid red of her blood soaking into the ground, at the awful, torn flesh and the white bone where the machete had chopped completely through the neck like an ax through a small sapling.  

He had knelt down and picked up his mother’s severed head, holding it tenderly so that the sightless, death-glazed eyes looked up at him. He had stared out into the darkness of the lake, looking in the direction where the girl who had done this to his mother had gone, and whatever fragile links his tortured mind still had with reality had snapped like the neck bones of the little forest creatures that he caught and killed for his survival.  

The girl named Alice had escaped him once, and the fury of his frustration knew no sounds, but then she had come back and he knew that he had been given another chance to make things right. He had spotted her that day when she had returned to camp. She had stood at the lakeshore near the board dock, staring out over the water. She had returned to the place where her nightmare had happened, to see it once again, to confront it and to reassure herself that it was over now and that there was nothing left to fear.  

When Jason had seen her standing there the lust to kill had welled up within him, burning like napalm in his mind. He had started for her, but before he could reach her, she had gotten back into her car and driven off. Fueled by a grim determination, he had followed her on the road back to the town of Crystal Lake, staying out of sight –waiting until night fell.  

Each night thereafter, he had stalked the streets of Crystal Lake, always keeping to the shadows, looking for her car. He had always taken his mother with him, carrying her decaying head inside a sack so that she could be with him when he did it, so that she would know that he was doing the right thing. Then one night he had seen her car parked outside an old Victorian house that had been converted into several apartments. And he had seen the opened window.  

He had killed her, punching the ice pick through her skull and driving it deep into her brain, and then he had taken her body with him back to the cabin in the woods, carrying it over his shoulder and slipping out of town like a grisly specter in the night. For a while, there had been a peace. The rage had gone away and the hunger that had clawed at him like a ravenous animal left him alone. He had stayed with his mother in the woods and, for a while, he had been happy. They were together. He had done the right thing and he knew she would be pleased. Yet now they had returned once more, the same ones who had hurt him, the same ones who had hurt his mother, and he knew that there would be no more rest for him until he killed them all. He had to do it. It’s what his mother would have wanted.  
      

He stood perfectly still and watched the girl approach. He imagined what it would be like to kill her—the way he had killed Alice or the way he had killed Ralph. The way he would kill all of them, one at a time, drawing it out so that each death would, if only for a little while, quench the relentless flame that burned within him. “Muffin! Here, girl!”

It had begun with Alice. The sensation of holding her while he drove the ice pick through her skull, sensing her terror when she realized what was happening, feeling her life draining away. . .it had awakened something deep within him, some primordial predatory instinct that made him lust to kill again.

“Muffin!”

It was as if some voice within him urged him on, commanding him to kill. After Alice, there had been a brief respite from the frenzy that had made his head feel as if it were about to burst. It made his chest feel tight, and it was difficult to breathe. He had felt as if he were on fire. Burning up. . .“Here, girl! Here, Muffin!”

For a little while, after he had killed Alice and brought her home to Mother, it had gone away. And then it had returned once more, even stronger than before. Much stronger. After he killed, he felt relief again, but it didn’t last very long. This time, it came back not only stronger than before, it came back faster. He felt it now, the tightness in his chest, the shortness of breath, the fire in his mind.  



At first Jason’s drive to kill was for revenge, but as time went on with each kill, the murderous lust grew more intense until Jason had gone completely mad and his only purpose in his wretched life is to kill anyone he encounters by any means necessary. What really makes Jason so dangerous compared to other slashers is there is no stopping him. Jason's one-track mind and drive to destroy is too powerful for a victim to escape from by mere persuasion; there is no begging for mercy, making a bargain or talking one's way out of it. Jason has no friends and he doesn't discriminate between victims, except maybe a child, so unless you can physically escape him, you're dead meat.

During one of Jason's killing sprees, he is eventually killed by young Tommy Jarvis; hacked up by his own machete, Jason dies and is quickly buried in a cemetery. That very well could've been the end of Jason, but he's a hard man to keep down. Several years later Tommy, still suffering from anxieties over Jason, snuck into the cemetery to cremate his remains in hopes to rid the masked killer from his mind forever. Well, fortunately for Jason the attempt failed and instead he was resurrected, but unlike his other “awakenings” this was different. Now Jason was more powerful and invincible then before. He was no longer the clumsy zombie-like man that was hard to kill, he was now an entity all his own.  Jason may be able to be temporarily put out of commission, but Jason will always come back, more powerful and madder than before, and he will always keep coming back until  he decides when he’s done.
 

QUESTION: In Friday the 13th Pamela Voorhees said Jason was her only child, but yet in Jason Goes to Hell, he had a sister, Diane. Which is it?

ANSWER: Yes, in the first Friday the 13th film, as well as the novel, Jason was indeed an only child, so it wasn’t until Jason Goes to Hell that he suddenly had a sister. Since the filmmakers of Jason Goes to Hell had admitted to disregarding the other F13 movies so they could do whatever they wanted with their film, we could disregard their movie as well and stick with the original theory that Jason was an only child. Or we could use the theory that some F13 fans have come up with on Jason’s mystery sister and that is she’s his half sister, daughter of Elias who left Pamela.

The grand total of victims is 132

QUESTION: What are the names of all the actors that portrayed Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th movies?

ANSWER:

Friday the 13th……Ari Lehman

Friday the 13th Part 2……Warrington Gillette/Steve Dash (Daskewisz)*

Friday the13th Part 3……Richard Brooker

Friday the 13th The Final Chapter Part 4……Ted White

Friday the 13th A New Beginning Part 5……Tom Morga*
Friday the 13th Jason Lives Part 6……C.J. Graham

Friday the 13th The New Blood Part 7……Kane Hodder

Friday the 13th Jason Takes Manhattan Part 8……Kane Hodder

Friday the 13th Jason Goes to Hell Part 9……Kane Hodder

Friday the 13th Jason X Part 10……Kane Hodder

*Dash played Jason for most of the movie, while Gillette portrayed the unmasked & disfigured Jason at the very end.
 

*Morga was the stuntman who actually played the Jason imposter -not the actor who played the paramedic, Richard Wieand.

Question: Who are the other Jasons? Where are they now?

Answer: Coming soon -a new page on the other actors that portrayed Jason Voorhees. Even a little piece on Mommy Voorhees, Betsy Palmer.