Matthew Jones
In 1986, a cataclysmic environmental disaster at a nuclear plant in Russia fell upon the whole of the continent, afflicting and forever altering the life inhabiting its natural world. Other anthropogenic ecological disasters within and outside of the United States in the years prior to the Chernobyl catastrophe had invariably led to a public consciousness stricken with a new type of anxiousness and dread. The Times Beach incident in Missouri, Love Canal, pesticide poisoning in California, and the horrors of the Bhopal disaster in India had merely set the stage for the heightening of an emerging ecophobia for an already traumatized populace. After decades of real-world ecological nightmares, a new perspective on horror surfaced on cinema screens and a once romanticized view of the natural world was transmuted into a threatening vision of monstrous nature.
Only a few months following the Chernobyl incident, Tom McLaughlin’s Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives was released. The film is undoubtedly a departure from the prior entries in the series as it is a more decidedly gothic re-conception of the narrative strain that includes distinctive subtextual commentary on the conflicted relationship between the human and non-human world. This article employs an ecogothic lens primarily in order to examine this conflict but also to reassess the iconic slasher as a force of monstrous nature, the result of materialized fears stemming from environmental poisoning and mutation resulting in what I will be calling collective ecological nightmares. This perspective will allow for a close textual analysis that will bring to bear unconscious impulses at work while providing a visual examination of various gothic elements present in the text and their connection to a threatening nature. The gothic woods and landscape omnipresent in the film are also key to my analysis and provide more than a foreboding ambiance. Instead of the perceived classical atmospheric passivity, the natural environment here is active and possesses a certain agency that allows it to influence characters as well as provoke narrative direction.
Jason as a hybrid force of monstrous nature, both human and non-human
The most pivotal point of my ecogothic reading of the sixth entry in the Friday series is Jason as a force of monstrous nature. Undoubtedly a focal point of iconographic significance within the horror genre, the hockey-masked slasher had indeed survived seemingly countless run-ins with death throughout the prior films yet he is presented as fundamentally human in all of them leading up to Jason Lives. It is only here where he is reanimated and subsequently transformed into something that defies what we may consider a natural classificatory scheme or as Noel Carroll puts it “that which violates our conceptual schema.”[1] Thus, this work argues that Jason is truly a Carrollian monster, a malevolent force of hybridity, simultaneously both human and non-human and a violation of the boundaries of those worlds.
Long viewed by critics as a derivative and painfully formulaic clone of John Carpenter’s 1978 horror opus Halloween, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980) managed to carve important in-roads for the slasher variation of the horror film. By most accounts, the original Friday was merely intended to capitalize on Carpenter’s film and its numerous sequels did adhere to a rigid narrative structure.[2] However, along with the arrival of the sixth entry came a new perceivable impulse which itself had formed within the public’s collective unconscious through decades of environmental contamination and the accompanying dread of its potential consequences. The result of these unconscious and conscious anxieties take shape as what I call collective ecological nightmares, which are in essence repressed fears arising from real-world eco-crises manifesting themselves in the form of horror monsters. Sharae Deckard refers to such a manifestation as the projection of a sort of “environmental unconscious”[3] where a text reveals deeply buried anxieties resulting from an environmental crisis. These unearthed anxieties give shape to our eco-nightmares which are then projected and played out within a text where the unleashing of the monster results in a threatened humanity, an idea that in part echoes Robin Wood’s conception of repressed collective subconscious fears rising to the surface to threaten the social order in horror fictions.[4] However, unlike Wood’s theory, and closer to Deckard’s, eco-nightmares always find nature at their core, both as the force of monstrous manifestation and source of the threat. In short, eco-nightmares see the horror monster distinctly and inherently adhered to the natural world. For Jason Lives, the collective ecological nightmares of the (recent) past are reanimated and made manifest within the fabric of its narrative ultimately forming an ecogothic mise-en-scène which plays part in the construction and reformulation of the iconic slasher as an indomitable force of threatening nature.
Nature as animating agent resurrecting evil to threaten humanity.
Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland see the ecogothic as a means of “interrogating and interpreting the intriguing darkness in our increasingly troubled relationship to and representation of the more-than-human world.”[5] Using this as our basic framework we should also consider Simon Estok’s conception where “an agential nature is menacing in itself; a vengeful one is truly horrifying” and how imagining nature in this way is at the core of ecogothic texts.[6] With this in mind, Jason Lives can then be seen as an ecogothic text that when peering into its gothic darkness a variant of our collective ecological nightmares is revealed, one where a dreadful agential nature animates a terrible force of monstrous eco-vengeance. When Tommy and Hawes show up to the graveyard where Jason is buried, the pair seem to accidentally resurrect the killer when a traumatized Tommy repeatedly stabs Jason’s maggot-ridden corpse with a metal rod broken off a nearby fence and a seemingly freak pair of lightning strikes reanimate the deceased monster. However, this was no accident and the film makes perceptible an agential nature at work as the electricity from the lightning strikes act as the solitary source of Jason’s animation throughout the film, much like the creature in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1930). The primary difference here is that Jason’s resurrection is not a purposeful act of human agency as was the case for Henry Frankenstein in Whale’s film. Instead, Jason Lives portrays this scene as one of a resurrection driven by what appears on a surface-level to be (not one but two) completely random lightning strikes; however, a closer look reveals an act of purposeful agency committed by a non-human force. This is coupled with and made clearer by a seemingly freak third act of nature occurring in the same scene after Jason brutally ends Hawes (importantly establishing nature as threatening and oppositional to humanity). Tommy attempts to light a match after dousing the lumbering, cow-webbed covered Jason in gasoline only to have a sudden rain shower extinguish the flame causing Tommy to flee and allowing the monster to freely threaten the human world. Indeed, from the start, the film presents nature both as a powerful agent in a purposeful resurrection of evil and as an adversarial and kinetic force of the non-human world.
Interestingly, the film never presents Jason as either completely human or non-human; rather it conceives of the monster as a hybrid. In his hybridity, Jason violates the boundaries between human and non-human, living and dead and even past and present. After Tommy flees the aforementioned graveyard scene, instead of giving chase, Jason opts to retrieve his hockey mask from the mud and put it on, an act of expeditious recognition correlating to the presence of human memory. Jason also wields weapons with a kind of recognizable brutal efficiency seen throughout the series as he stabs and maims the familiar archetypal band of victims in a return to the site of his original demise, Camp Crystal Lake (now renamed Camp Forest Green, an implied nod to the dominance of the non-human in the area). The film seems to confirm the return of a human Jason when Sheriff Garris mentions someone using “Jason’s old M.O,” in the murderous acts. Jason Lives then makes clear its resurrected antagonist possesses a functioning memory, a certain self-recognition, and a motive, all typically associated with the biological human.
Yet, despite this, the film is ultimately paradoxical. Although he appears to be something of a human zombie, Jason is not only resurrected by and represented as intrinsically singular with the nonhuman world, but he is also powered and made deathless by it. For instance, the first time we see the monster he is depicted as visually synonymous with nature (an important visual motif throughout) in that he has become a natural repository for worms and maggots, much like the soil that surrounds his coffin. This aspect, coupled with the earthy tones of the corpse’s color palette, eerily matches the greens and browns of the natural world which come to signify the confluence of life and death. Indeed, the monster’s deathlessness is on display towards the end of the film when Jason, after getting up from several shotgun blasts at close range, continues after the sheriff unabated before gruesomely subduing him. Later, the monster continues to threaten when he grabs from below a swimming Megan after being held underwater for an inhuman amount of time by a large boulder chained around his neck.
The film, not un-problematically, also exemplifies this view of the monster as non-human when the frightened little girl, after seeing Jason, tells the counselors “he was everywhere,” making evident the monster’s nonhumanness illustrated through his omnipresence. Although this is a clear narrative conceit in the previous Friday films, it is only here that Jason has achieved a true omnipresence that coincides directly with his hybridity. Jason’s ability to appear in front of soon-to-be victims after giving chase from the rear is nothing new for the series, yet here his presence is preceded by an ominous gothic mist that functions as a boundless ethereal extension of his humanoid physical form, which in itself is a terrible instrument imbued with nature’s vengeance. In turn, the entirety of the film’s human world is in essence threatened by the monster due to its proximate interiority within the bounds of the surrounding natural world. Thus, as a hybrid ecogothic monster, Jason does indeed transcend the boundary between the human and material worlds and in doing so, illustrates the dichotomy between the two, ultimately embodying the anthropocentric dread of a threatening, omnipresent, deathless and monstrous nature that is active, vengeful and an animated manifestation of perhaps the worst of our eco-nightmares.
An ominous mist stalks Steven and Annette’s night picnic.
As we are told, camp Crystal Lake (as well as Forest Green) is cursed and forms the film’s gothic landscape which in itself exemplifies nature’s agential threat and its terrible metaphysical power. Fred Botting, in his important study on the gothic, characterizes the gothic landscape as “desolate, alienating and full of menace.”[7] Much in the same way, Jason Lives’ gothic landscape breeds an apocalyptic menace concealed by the desolation of pitch-black darkness and foreboding storms which serve to further forge the connection between the film’s monster and the non-human world. Although Jason does appear in the daytime to make bloody quick work of a clueless corporate team, the most crucial points of the narrative action occur at night, preceded by a storm. The film opens with a sequence that constructs a kind of ecogothic mise-en-scene, where a sudden thunderclap visually reveals the blackness of storm clouds accompanied by distant peals of thunder and howling winds. An icy, slow-moving mist can be seen snaking through the gothic woods and across the frame, a visual motif that serves to both foreshadow and indicate Jason’s proximity.
Not only do these acts of nature denote doom and the approaching threat but they also possess the ability to intervene in the narrative action. The previously mentioned lightning strikes that resurrect and animate the monster are the initial instance of this but it important to consider how several of the victims meet their end after the metaphysical glow of the mist has crept into their vicinity. The mist lurks in the woods, seen in a wide shot surrounding Lizabeth and Darren’s car before blocking the road (and bringing with the implication it had concealed Jason evidenced by the couple’s need to make a sudden stop) causing the pair to halt their progress and make a poorly calculated attempt to fight with the monster. Later the eerie mist hovers behind and above Steven and Annette during their night picnic, concealing and seemingly transporting Jason in front of them (both illustrating the monster’s omnipresence as well as the agency of the natural world) where he skewers the pair simultaneously.
Interestingly, in the opening two-shot of the scene, there is a perceivable mist moving from frame right to left where, via the film’s established screen direction, we witness the murder of the drunken gravekeeper not far from the couple. Importantly, Steven sees Jason in the violent act (beyond frame left) and tries to escape with his girlfriend in the opposite direction (toward frame right) before the two meet their end at the hands of the mysteriously transported omnipresent monster. Later on in the film, the mist creeps outside Cort’s RV before we see Jason enter the frame. After Nikki and Cort move outside to investigate the power outage, Nikki is suddenly struck with fear after gazing upon the threatening mist lurking in the nearby wood, causing her to move quickly inside where she eventually finds Jason (who has slipped inside while the mist acts as an uncanny diversion) and ultimately a painful death. Gazing at the ominous mist outside a cabin causes a suddenly frightened Paula to run inside before howling storm winds blow open the door allowing the threat entrance and leading directly to her grisly demise. The gothic landscape, primarily in the form of the mist and storm, then takes on a metaphysicality that makes it both synonymous with Jason as well as an intervening force on its own.
Thus as a variant of our collective ecological nightmares, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives becomes a textual exemplar of perhaps the most terrible of our eco-fears. By looking at the horror film as a form of social history, we can see how Jason Lives embodies the escalating environmental anxieties of its time through the positioning of and commentary on the tumultuous relationship between the human and the non-human worlds. Despite broader global efforts, our contemporary relationship with nature appears to be even more strained than it was over three decades ago. Thus, deeply buried fears of an agential natural world metamorphosing into an apocalyptic force of active evil have not abandoned us and as long as horror films project our eco-nightmares, these fears will conceivably reside not far from the surface.
Notes:
[1] Carroll, 186.
[2] Nowell, 28.
[3] Deckard, 174.
[4] Wood, 14.
[5] Parker and Poland, 11.
[6] Estok, 41.
[7] Botting, 2.
Works Cited
Botting, Fred. “Introduction.” Gothic, Routledge, 1996.
Carpenter, John, director. Halloween. Compass International Pictures, 1978.
Carroll Noël. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart, Routledge, 1989.
Cunningham, Sean S., director. Friday the 13th. Paramount Pictures, 1980.
Deckard, Sharae. “Ecogothic.” Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 174-88.
Estok, Simon C. “Theorising the Gothic.” Gothic Nature, vol. 1, no. 1, 2019.
McLoughlin, Tom, director. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. Paramount Pictures, 1986.
Nowell, Richard. “‘The Ambitions of Most Independent Filmmakers’: Indie Production, the Majors, and Friday the 13th (1980).” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 63, no. 2, 2011.
Parker, Elizabeth, and Michelle Poland. “Gothic Nature: An Introduction.” Gothic Nature, vol. 1, no. 1, 2019.
Whale, James, director. Frankenstein. Universal Pictures, 1930.
Wood, Robin. “Return of the Repressed.” American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, by Andrew Britton, Festival of Festivals, 1979.
