Kom Kunyosying and Carter Soles
Jason Voorhees is the most popular backwoods slasher killer. While Leatherface and the largely suburban Michael Myers came first, neither of those masked psychopaths have achieved the same iconic status as Jason, whose identity can be evoked simply via the image of the hockey mask he wears from Friday the 13th Part III (1982) onward. Fans wishing to masquerade as Jason simply need a hockey mask and a machete, his preferred weapon. Imitating Jason’s stalking motif (ch-ch-ch) is shorthand for evoking a slasher movie villain.
Jason has a changing significance that seems always to meet its evolving cultural moment. For example, he begins the franchise as an abject backwoods monster, essentially a rural Michael Myers. He gradually morphs into the darkly humorous star of his franchise, an anti-hero whom fans root for. In both cases, as a rural stalker killer, he foreshadows how white hillbillies will signify in identity politics, authenticating white masculinity in the Trump era. Jason’s connection to the primal and rural allows him to render his suburban and urban victims as ineffectual and impotent, emphasizing his dominance as a (certain type of) white man.
Jason as Hillbilly
Jason’s legend begins in Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), but in that movie it is his mother (Betsy Palmer) who actually kills the Camp Crystal Lake counselors, avenging the death of her son at the negligent hands of their predecessors. The film is an homage to and literalization of Psycho’s (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) reveal of the mother as the killer. Whereas Mrs. Bates is a persona introjected into Norman’s psyche, however, Mrs. Voorhees is alive and real. Seen only in protagonist Alice’s (Adrienne King) film-ending vision of him emerging from the waters of Crystal Lake, Jason is presumed dead.
In Friday the 13th Part 2 (Steve Miner, 1981), however, Jason (Warrington Gillette) is revealed to be an adult dwelling in a crude shed in the deep woods near Camp Crystal Lake. He is an expert wilderness stalker, mostly visible as a pair of legs or feet, or from the neck down. When fully revealed, he doesn’t yet wear a hockey mask but instead a crude gunnysack pulled over his head — a backwoods improvisation. He blends into the woods and is often depicted lurking near trees and behind vegetation.
A skilled backwoods stalker, Jason blends into his forest surroundings in Friday the 13th Part 2. His blue trousers and workboots suggest his working-class origins
Like Michael Myers, the slasher killer he most closely resembles, Jason Voorhees is above all an elemental force of nature, the embodiment of what Dawn Keetley calls “the terrifying confrontation with the nonhuman (the inexplicable, irrational, and implacable) at the heart of horror.” Discussing Jaws and its influence on slasher films, Keetley writes that
“The encounter of the three men with the shark, and Quint’s story of his five days in shark-infested water after the Indianapolis sank, embody humans’ confrontation with a devastating nonhuman force—a force that surpasses our ability to explain, understand, and often defeat. In Jaws, the implacable nonhuman is embodied by the shark; in the slasher film, the “shark” is incarnate as Michael Myers (and, later, Jason Voorhees).”
While Jason embodies the terrifying nonhuman force that lurks inside the human, his animality and savageness may also be traced to his identity as an abject backwoods dweller. As a poor backwoodsman strongly associated with the woods around Crystal Lake, Jason is a slasher killer gone native, a Natty Bumppo (from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels) or Ethan Edwards type (from John Ford’s The Searchers), a white man playing ecological Indian / wild man.
Part 2 opens with Alice’s dream sequence, in which Jason, here depicted sans mask as a kind of undead boy’s corpse, springs forth from beneath the surface of Crystal Lake. This dream echoes Ed’s nightmare of a dead hillbilly’s arm emerging from the dam reservoir at the end of Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972). Jason’s activities in this film could be seen as a riff on what would happen if Deliverance’s symbolically drowned hillbillies really did come back to wreak vengeance on the city folk who kill them.
Like the fictional Cahulawassee River in Deliverance, which is exploited by privileged, citified canoers for recreational purposes, Camp Crystal Lake functions as an emblem of Euro-American settlement, a cultivated, civilized place to safely and comfortably enjoy the wilderness as a tourist. In fact, the summer camp commodifies as tourist activities the development of backwoods survival skills — skills Jason, by contrast, earned the hard way, living alone for years in the wilderness. Just like the unnamed Deliverance hillbillies, Jason punishes those who would blithely consume those woods.
Like many rural stalkers and post-apocalyptic survivors, Jason allows viewers to indulge the insidious fantasy of “simpler times,” a fantasy analogous to “Make America Great Again,” in which old-fashioned, white, masculine values trump the values of other cultures because they are seen as superior through the lens of American/white exceptionalism. Jason’s working-class clothing and use of mundane tools as weapons visually align him with these values.
Jason as Berserker
Yet Jason’s appeal is also based on another association—to northern climes and Viking culture. There has been a recent rise in appreciation for Medieval European and Viking culture among blue collar Americans as well as the middle and upper middle class. A growing connection to Crusader ideology in response to Muslim extremist terrorism is connected to this rise and explains the conservatism attached to this particular brand of imaginative nostalgia. Donald Trump Jr. recently posed with his assault rifle which has a crusader’s helmet on it along with “Made in the USA” and “Crusader.”
Mandalorians are new crowd favorites of the Star Wars franchise via Disney’s show, The Mandalorian. Their ethos is Viking-esque whereas the Jedi were samurai. Pieces of armor and weapons are tokens of Mandalorian citizenship. They prioritize ship maintenance and long-range travel. The zeitgeist has shifted in masculine US fandoms in recent decades. “Oriental” warriors like samurai and monks don’t hold the sway they used to when the Jedi were introduced. Warrior cultures which emphasize European exceptionalism such as the Vikings, Spartans, and Crusaders have outpaced them. Like many of these warrior cultures, and Jason Voorhees, the Mandalorians wear head gear that masks their faces.
Therefore Jason Voorhees, while celebrating whiteness as a hillbilly, also signifies as a berserker when read through the current celebration of things European, Viking, and/or Medieval. Jason’s Dutch/Viking surname solidifies this connection.
Furthermore, Camp Crystal Lake, Jason’s paradigmatic locale, is located in the American northeast, an area famous for sleep-away camps. There is a real Voorhees Township in New Jersey, the state in which the first film was shot. Jason wears a hockey mask which connects him to a sport that is most popular in the region. And while Jason’s connection to the lake and the recurring image of his emerging from it evoke hillbilly horror classic Deliverance (or possibly Apocalypse Now), Camp Crystal Lake’s location puts a northerly spin on the usual backwoods protagonist, who typically hails from the rural South.
Jason’s Whiteness
With the rise of multiculturalism in the US, there has been a pushback to represent white male protagonists as also authentic and marked, or suffering in some sense. We trace this rise in our “Postmodern Geekdom” essay. Reading Jason Voorhees as a berserker and/or hillbilly highlights his role as the ultimate marked character. Jason possesses limiting, marked characteristics (e.g., his impoverished, backwoods existence and limited access to technology) that are intertwined with his abilities as a near-invincible stalker/killer. The shift toward seeing Jason as the protagonist/ fan favorite in the films coincides with reading him as an unkillable warrior/berserker and a representative of hillbilly strength and backwoods toughness.
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan cements Jason as a rural signifier full of potency and authenticity. This meaning sees its culmination when Jason (Kane Hodder) takes on an African-American boxer, revealing the former to be the truer and more masculine fighter. The skill of the boxer, Julius Gaw (V. C. Dupree), is no match for the toughness imbued in Jason by his backwoods upbringing, berserker qualities (basically his hyperreal whiteness and authenticity), and/or his demonic roots.
Jason Takes Manhattan premiered in 1989, which also saw the prime of Mike Tyson, who had been boxing heavyweight champion of the world in unmatched dominant fashion for three years at that point. Before the ascension of mixed martial arts, the boxing heavyweight champion was regarded as the world’s toughest man by sports fans and mainstream audiences alike. The success of Black athletes historically caused white audiences to try to re-masculate through a rotation of “great white hopes” in boxing and through fictional portrayals of athletic dominance, such as Hulk Hogan or Rocky Balboa. In this era, characters like Mick “Crocodile” Dundee and Jason Voorhees would also show Black men who the “real men” were.
Jason vs. Julius in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
The scene: Resigned to fight Jason, Julius tells himself, “Just use the combos, and keep the feet light,” while taking a low stance reminiscent of Mike Tyson’s (whose white opponents were significantly larger than he was). Like Tyson, Julius puts his faith in the science of boxing. Jason shows Julius his training means nothing and Jason contains a more potent masculinity. Images of Jason versus Julius have become widely used in memes.
Exerting no effort, and taking no damage from Julius’s best punches (over 50), Jason vanquishes Julius not only physically but spiritually. Flaccid from exertion, Julius lowers his hands, telling Jason to take his best shot, which results in a one-punch decapitation.
Julius’s death scene mirrors the famous knife scene in Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986). A trio of muggers accosts Dundee and his date. The lead mugger is African American and pulls a switchblade. Dundee reveals his larger bowie knife. Despite outnumbering Dundee, having lost the battle of phallic symbols, the muggers become unmanned and flee. This allows Dundee his trademark line, “That’s not a knife. THAT’s a knife.” Further emphasizing the impotence of the muggers, Dundee calls these men “kids having fun” as they flee in terror. One of the three muggers is white but he is clearly included to defuse the obvious racial subtext of the scene. All three muggers represent the inferiority of urban masculinity to Dundee’s rural masculinity.
Dundee is an early representative of white rurality as superior to people of color and urbanity, and he serves as a harbinger of how this attitude would come to grip US identities. As an Australian, Dundee is not a direct commentary on US culture yet, just as Jason, a monster, is also an indirect commentary, although both still clearly put urban people of color and their skills in positions of impotence and inferiority. Dundee was a love letter to conservatives. It was racist, sexist, and homophobic in its portrayal of marginalized groups.
Other iconic scenes mimic this racial hierarchy of masculinity. Indiana Jones dismissively defeats an Arab sword master in Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981), insulting the training and culture behind his opponent’s skill and reducing it to a punch line. Similarly, James Bond outwits and unmans two Thai martial artists in their own school in The Man with the Golden Gun (Guy Hamilton, 1974). In a culmination of this conceit, Quentin Tarantino portrays Bruce Lee as an over-hyped blowhard versus white stuntman and green beret Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), drawing protest from Lee’s daughter, which caused Tarantino to double-down on the portrayal.
Jason’s 1989 The Arsenio Hall Show interview promoting Jason Takes Manhattan can be read as an extension of the movie. Voorhees appears on the show as stoic and rural, while Hall plays a grinning urbane jester. Also, Jason’s presence on a talk show as the main promotional celebrity reveals that he is fully the protagonist of his movies by this point. None of the actors who serve as Jason’s prey are deployed alongside him to promote the film.
Hillbilly Melodrama
More recently, Freddy vs. Jason (Ronny Yu, 2003) features Freddy Kreuger (Robert Englund), the paradigmatic suburban slasher killer (from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise), in an alliance / showdown with Jason (Ken Kirzinger), the definitive rural stalker. In the film, Freddy tricks Jason into killing people to make the community feel fear, paving the way for Freddy to return from exile in hell. Jason starts the film doing Freddy’s bidding — Freddy appears to Jason in the guise of his mother Mrs. Voorhees, repeating the trick Ginny (Amy Steel) uses in the climax of Friday the 13th Part 2. While Jason’s falling for this particular ruse once again is connected to his weirdly Oedipal, Norman Bates-ish relationship with his mother, his gullibility also reminds us that berserker characters don’t dissemble — they just charge forward like barbarians. In contrast to Jason’s guilelessness, Freddy is characterized as a suburban con-artist who manipulates and betrays Jason, thereby earning the backwoodsman’s vengeful ire. This berserker-as-victim-hero scenario is a form of hillbilly melodrama, in which rural, poor white people gain authenticity and cultural cachet via their perceived (and real) socioeconomic disenfranchisement vis-à-vis middle- and upper-class whites.
The last few shots of Freddy vs. Jason reveal in condensed form the opposing iconography and core persona of each of its titular franchise-spawning killers. Morning dawns on the mist-strewn surface of Crystal Lake. Having physically defeated Freddy in battle the night before, Jason emerges in slow motion from beneath the lake waters, carrying a machete in his left hand and Freddy’s decapitated head in his right. As he walks up onto the shore, toward the camera, Freddy’s head turns, looks into the camera, and winks. Jason is the undefeatable, invincible backwoods berserker warrior, while Freddy is the ultimate tongue-in-cheek trickster.
The iconic image of Jason rising from beneath the surface of Crystal Lake in Freddy vs. Jason
The hillbilly and the Viking warrior are cultural identities that allow white people to celebrate their whiteness and foreground their guilelessness and (from a melodramatic perspective) their innocence. Marvel’s Thor, especially when with the Avengers, emblematizes this Viking warrior trope. Thor charges forth while his adoptive brother Loki villainously leads with his brain. The backwoods Viking Berserker, on the surface at least a non-thinking and non-strategic fighter, is perceived as being simple, straightforward, and authentic, in contrast to shifty, manipulative urbanites and people of color.
Jason’s authenticity equals Trump’s authenticity. Acting without thinking equals authenticity in an era where acting thoughtfully or communicating with so-called “political correctness” is often maligned as dissembling. Conversely, Freddy Krueger is framed as a thinking, non-Trump type. Freddy is ironic and deconstructive in that he foregrounds the smirk in his character.
Jason uncannily anticipates cultural trends of today. The celebration of Jason as a cult figure predicts the suffering white male anti-hero protagonists who will come after him. Combined with the contemporary rise of backwoods white protagonists such as Daryl Dixon of The Walking Dead, and the tank-like warriors in shows like Vikings and Game of Thrones, Jason’s identity is poised to resonate with the cultural specifics of today’s fandom. Murderous violence as an authenticating feature has been well-established by iconic characters such as Tony Soprano and Walter White. Jason anticipates these and more immediate trends as well: violence without thought, signifying authenticity, is now in the zeitgeist.
