May is Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Month, so I’d like to talk about Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives.
That sentence may or may not make more sense by the end of this. No guarantees.
Being a product of divorce, I spent more time than I’d like at the workplace of whatever parent was in charge of making sure I didn’t choke on my own mucus. My mom worked in the retail part of a large pharmacy chain and I considered most of the staff to be my friends, though looking back they probably considered me the little kid who wouldn’t shut up but they had to deal with because his mom was the manager. In any case, I often hung around with some Cool TeensTM and made them explain the plots of movies I was too scared to see. Chief among them, the Friday the 13th series.
Sick of telling a first grader the plots of slasher films, one of the kids asked me why I didn’t just see the movies myself. I told him my mom wouldn’t let me. This was a lie. Perhaps owing to the fact that I was a Tiny Tim of a child or just that it was the late 80s, no one ever gave a fuck about what I watched. The truth is, I was scared shitless.
(I do want to take a moment to give a shout out to that guy, Joe, who would occasionally babysit me. Thank you for renting Bloodsport and I’m sorry I almost got you swept up in some vestigial Satanic Panic because I told my grandma you let me try to put a figure four on you and she didn’t understand what that meant.)
One day—either August or October of 1993, when I was ten years old—a friend from school was staying over with me at my grandma’s apartment. On these overnighters, we would usually take turns getting absolutely destroyed by M. Bison in Street Fighter II Turbo and clowning on infomercials until the sun came up. But for whatever reason, my grandma suggested we watch the 8 o’clock movie on WPIX: Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives.
I’ll say this: the title rules and the main villain has a cool name. But I had to disassociate when horror trailers showed in the theater and change the channel when they came on tv. Just renting the Friday the 13th game for the NES somehow convinced a slightly younger me that Jason Voorhees was going to come out of my toilet and stab me in the asshole while I pooped. But being 10—basically a grown man—I couldn’t say any of that. I tried to weasel my way out of it with “oh, that sounds stupid”, but my friend seemed really into it. It strikes me now that he could have been full of shit too, but he seemed sincere at the time. Either way, neither one of us blinked and at 8 o’clock, I saw my first “modern” horror movie (which at that point was 7 years old).
I suppose it was inevitable. Thanks to a combination of the Crestwood House Monster books in my school library and some aggressive marketing of new VHS releases, I had become obsessed with the Universal Monster films of the 30s and 40s, suffering few sleepless nights in the process. Maybe if there was a Crestwood House book about Jason Voorhees, I would have jumped in sooner. Though since I lived in absolute terror of a Freddy doll I accidentally brushed past at Toys r Us once, I’d probably still have to be pushed.
After high school, I lost touch with the friend that watched the movie with me, though I somehow doubt he would even remember seeing it. It’s funny how things affect people differently. I was never in a completely dark room for probably a year after that viewing and had started sleeping under the covers as if a thin, borderline transparent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comforter was going to stop a machete, but I still felt the need to march to the local video store and take advantage of their 99 cent catalog rentals to see all the Friday the 13th movies. Then I saw all the Halloween movies. Then all the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. You know the rest.
Over the years, I’ve found myself explaining the particular joys of the Friday the 13th series to many a befuddled coworker or acquaintance. “Why do you watch that filth?” they ask. “Psychic pollution” they call it. It’s easy to fall back on “you just don’t get it” and feel that little outsider rush, but I legitimately want everyone to enjoy Jason Lives and I feel a particular failure when I can’t explain it’s charms. So let me try here.
The first thing that struck me about Jason Lives is that Jason is a Frankenstein. He’s resurrected by a lightning bolt and the first shot of him in the movie is a succession of three increasing tight shots stitched together just like James Whale showed Karloff for the first time in 1931’s Frankenstein. Then he rips out a guy’s heart by punching him straight through the chest. I do not know if that says anything about the human condition, but it sure does make me glad to be alive (I did not yet know this guy as Ron Pallilo, Horschack from Welcome Back, Kotter because that didn’t start showing on Nick at Nite until 1995)
Being that I consider myself a bit of a Frankenstein—a genetic abomination cursed to wander the world in search of purpose—I’m a sucker for a good Frankenstein story. Though Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives isn’t really a Frankenstein story; it’s a story about a murder machine who happens to be a Frankenstein now. Still that lightning bolt was helpful in bringing me on board and adds a level of unreality that makes the rest of the film a little more fun.
Like Karloff’s Frankenstein, there’s something lovable—or at least likable—about Jason Voorhees. I think it’s because Jason doesn’t toy with his prey. Michael Myers will show up in your neighbor’s house, steal his sister’s tombstone and put it above your dead friend just to get a reaction. He’s a dick. Freddy will talk shit the entire time he’s murdering you with a goddamn power glove. Total dick move. Jason will punch your heart out, but only because you tried to light his corpse on fire and lightning happened to strike. Not being killed by Jason follows similar rules to not being killed by a shark. If you want to keep your leg, stay out of the ocean. If you want to keep your heart, don’t go to Crystal Lake.
Aside from the lovability of mass murderers, Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives is a movie that starts conversations, often between the screen and the audience, about what you would do if you did find yourself in Crystal Lake (though the town attempted a rebrand in this movie and changed it’s name to Forest Green). Famously, director Tom McLaughlin added a shot of a victim’s American Express card silently floating in a puddle so the audience could add their own “Don’t Leave Home Without It” punchline (for the younger audience, this slogan was everywhere for roughly 20 years). And anytime Jason shows up, it’s bound to start a round of “What would you do?” For example, if I were 10 years old and Jason busted through the door of my summer camp cabin, I would shit every pair of pants I’d ever owned. Honestly, my answer is probably the same at 38. I’m not going to pretend I’d be a hero or find a way to weasel my way out. If I managed to make it out of that situation without being folded in half the wrong way, it would be pure dumb luck. The machete came close but didn’t swing my way that day.
I suppose that machete can represent anything you want it to, though if you’ll allow me a moment to connect the obvious dots for you, seeing Jason would make me shit myself and having CF has made me shit myself.
A movie starting up those conversations—about death, not about me shitting myself—was important to me at that time. Very few people want to talk about death with a kid. I get it. It’s weird. It seems like you say the wrong thing and you’ve broken that child for years, or at least given them something to talk about in therapy. But you can’t hand a child a bunch of pills and be like “if you don’t take these every time you eat, your body will have a booboo” forever. I constantly wanted to talk about death, but I also didn’t ever want to have a Very Special Conversation about it, which seem to be the only two acceptable conversations the average person will have about death.
I think that’s what made staring death in it’s hockey masked face so appealing to me as a rat-tailed wheeze machine. Other than the specter of my own, I hadn’t seen a lot of death at that point, so it was a mystery to me. Horror helped me talk about it. Even when the “booboo” talk has to go, it’s usually replaced with flowery, soft focus inspiration, or worse yet, bible stories.. I’m not really interested in either of those.
But all these years later, I’m still interested in Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives. I’ve seen more death and so I can truly appreciate that there are no dignified deaths in Friday the 13th Part VI (or any other part for that matter). It’s a beautiful touch, because while there’s a chance that dignified death exists in real life, I’ve never seen one. More often it seems to involve being broken beyond recognition and then put out of your misery way too late. It’s not fun.
It is fun to see a hockey masked Frankenstein use the wall of an RV to make an imprint of someone’s face. Contrary to the popular wisdom (and perhaps some other entries in the franchise), the characters in Friday the 13th Part VI – Jason Lives are mostly likable, save for a paintball guy or three, so it’s not like you end up cheering for every death. But there’s something to be said for looking death directly in the face and seeing it rip a guy’s arm off while you get to walk away. No, it’s not real, but there’s a small part of the brain that registers a “I can’t believe I made it through that.”
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May being both Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Month and the month of my birth, I end up thinking about Jason Lives a lot around this time. In fact, last year while I was furloughed from my job, I was going to do a livestream/concert for the dogs that consisted of the Theme from Cheers, a wrestling entrance theme I wrote for Mayor McCheese, and the Alice Cooper song “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)”, which plays over the credits of Friday the 13th Part VI. I ended up going back to work before that happened, but I did manage to dig up a demo I made of “He’s Back”, which I present to you below.