Friday the 13th Jason Goes to Hell Demon Friday the 13th Hell Baby

Every Form Jason Has Taken In The Friday The 13th Franchise

Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees may be an instantly recognizable slasher villain, but few viewers know about his robotic upgrade or hellbaby form.

Jason Voorhees may not seem like the most versatile slasher in horror cinema, but the character has actually taken on many forms over the course of  Friday the 13th . Released in 1980, Friday the 13th was a Giallo-style whodunit that saw a stream of interchangeable teens killed off by an unseen killer as they revamped an abandoned summer camp. Cheap, fast-paced, and featuring a deliriously silly killer reveal, the movie was intended to be a quick cash-in on the huge success of John Carpenter'sHalloween.

Then came the last-second jump scare. After the ending battle between final girl Alice and middle-aged murderess Mrs. Voorhees ended in the decapitation of the latter, Alice went for a victory boat ride on Camp Crystal Lake. It was then that wordless monster Jason Voorhees leaped out of the water for one last nonsensical jump scare, and began one of horror's biggest franchises in the process. The ending of the originalFriday the 13th has never made much sense (why was Mrs. Voorhees avenging Jason's death if he's not dead?), and even in the context of the story, it is revealed to be a dream sequence.

However, something about Jason stuck with audiences like a machete in a skull, and the character soon became the star of the series. Instantly recognizable thanks to his trademark hockey mask and machete combo, Jason not only starred in a string of sequels but also became one of the sub-genre's most spoofed figures. However, despite Jason's hockey mask being one of his best-known attributes, the killer has actually been through numerous new looks over the many outings of the Friday the 13th franchise. Not including the nigh-unkillable, "human" Jason seen in Friday the 13th Part 2, 3, 4, he's had a lot of makeovers.

Part 5: Hallucination Jason

Introduced in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, Hallucination Jason is what viewers got when the creators of the franchise tried to make a sequel without actually relying on its most famous character. Although the hulking masked madman Jason Voorhees can be seen haunting a disturbed (and recast) Tommy Jarvis throughout the entirety of A New Beginning's runtime, in the end, he is revealed to be a hallucination and viewers discover the movie's killings are actually being committed by a copycat. However, despite his imaginary status, this Friday the 13th villain never stages any Freddy Krueger-style dreams or trippy visions, instead just cropping up often enough that annoyed fans feel like they're getting a Jason Voorhees-starring movie despite the slasher villain's absence from the plot.

Part 6 - 8: Zombie Jason (Or, Post-Resurrection Jason)

In the appropriately named Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, the slasher is resurrected by the same Tommy Jarvis (now played by another new actor) and becomes an immortal revenant. The circumstances of his revival see his former victim dig up Jason's corpse to prove to himself he is actually dead, only for a well-timed lightning strike to bring the killer back to life. The blackly comic moment sets the tone for the rest of the movie and the next few sequels, which abandoned the ambiguity around Jason's apparent immortality in favor of clarifying he was a definitively supernatural being who could only be killed by paranormal magic means. The Friday the 13th franchise got less scary and more fun around this installment, and the choice to make Jason a canonically immortal revenant solidified his status as the true hero who viewers wanted to see, allowing more humor and over-the-top gore as a result.

Part 9: Hellbaby Jason

All good things come to an end, and after a few sequels where the Friday the 13th franchise offered a more self-aware take on the franchise lore, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday brought the original saga to a close in 1993. By now, slashers like Jason and Micheal Myers had fallen out of favor with audiences, and even more inventive supernatural villains like Chucky and Freddy Krueger were dying out. With Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare offering a flat end to the Nightmare On Elm Street saga, the early '90s were also time for the Friday the 13th series to finally put an end to the immortality of Freddy's famous slasher rival, Jason. Unfortunately for the stars of this outing, that end came in the form of Hellbaby Jason.

First seen in the form of the killer's disembodied heart, Hellbaby Jason is the worm-like creature that carries Jason's soul and can hop from body to body, allowing his spirit to possess a string of characters, just like in the underrated sci-fi horror The Hidden. Before becoming a gigantic, grotesque demon baby, the writhing soul of Jason enters and possesses numerous victims in one of the franchise's rare forays into Cronenberg-style body horror. These include the coroner Phil, who is enticed to eat Jason's heart, the Sheriff's short-lived Deputy Josh, sleazy news reporter Robert Campbell, a second lawman in Deputy Randy, and - most disturbingly - the dead body of Jason's sister Diana Kimble, who is possessed Evil Dead-style in a scene that manages to be stomach-twistingly gross despite the movie's over-the-top tone.

Jason X: Uber Jason

Jason Goes To Hell threatened to be the final Friday the 13th, but as any horror fan knows, there is no keeping a profitable horror icon down for long. Like any slasher franchise worth its salt, Jason eventually went to space before receiving a remake in 2009 (though that outing stuck to his standard Friday the 13thPart 2-4 portrayal). Jason X sees the slasher villain cut a bloody swathe through the inhabitants of a space station in the far future, but his Terminator-style slasher transformation doesn't come until the movie's climax. When Jason is finally destroyed, the ship's nanobots repair him via cybernetics to create a half-man, half-android super-Jason. Sadly for followers of the series, this much-anticipated Uber Jason only appears in Jason X 's closing scenes, but he is as lethal as the Friday the 13th  killer has ever been.

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About The Author

Cathal Gunning (1169 Articles Published)

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

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Friday the 13th Jason Goes to Hell Demon Friday the 13th Hell Baby

Source: https://screenrant.com/friday-13th-movie-jason-every-form/

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