FILM / Finding the Sacred Among the Profane: Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday / Sean Woodard
Image © New Line Cinema
I’m back everybody! I apologize for being absent for months and not posting regular monthly columns. But COVID-19 has affected everyone differently. With this being the last issue of the year, I thought I should throw something together and end on an even note (publishing an equal number of “Once Upon a Time in Film Scoring” and “Finding the Sacred Among the Profane” columns this year).
For this month’s column, I thought we’d have a bit of fun. While it’s firmly planted in the horror genre, there are enough sci-fi/fantasy elements in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) to thematically fit in with this special issue of Drunk Monkeys.
Often considered the worst entry of the Friday the 13th franchise—I liked Jason X as a kid, alright?—Jason Goes to Hell marks the transition of the property from Paramount Pictures to New Line Cinema. During the scripting process, the new rights owners realized that the Friday the 13th name or any other the characters other than Jason were not part of the negotiated deal, so the screenwriters had to be creative with “resurrecting” the horror icon for a new decade. The result is an epic failure. However, its Uncut version has retained a strong cult following. For example, the new Scream Factory! Blu-Ray boxset contains both theatrical and unrated cuts of the film. The film’s popularity merited a new 2K scan of the Interpositive with HD inserts of the cut footage.
In this outing, Jason finds himself jumping bodies in order to kill his descendants. This soul body-swapping narrative trick is not new to the genre (see Wes Craven’s Shocker and the Sean S. Cunningham-produced The Horror Show). But Jason Goes to Hell creates an absurd resurrection technique for Jason. In past entries of the series, Jason never seems to die. Here, it’s as if the writers had to create a reason why he keeps ticking. This notion of the allegedly immortal killing machine was also explored in the abysmal Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers.
At the beginning of the film, Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) is riddled with bullets and blown to bits by FBI and SWAT agents. His remains are carted to the morgue to be examined. However, the coroner on duty discovers Jason’s enlarged heart still beating. In a weird trance-like stupor, the coroner eats Jason’s heart, black viscous liquid dripping down his chin. This act transfer’s Jason’s consciousness into the person’s body. From there he keeps hopping bodies through a deformed parasitic form of himself orally entering another person. Talk about blatant phallic imagery . . . He must enter one of his three descendants—his half-sister Diana, her daughter Jessica, or Jessica’s infant child Stephanie—to be reborn. Of course there’s a magical dagger that only they can wield to send him to Hell.
For all you Evil Dead fans, director Adam Marcus revealed in 2017 that Pamela Voorhees brought back her son by reading from the Necronomicon. Even if we take this element as canon, it still doesn’t save an otherwise flaccid film. Sure, it’s gory. But the moment Jason’s demonic self crawls up (dead) Diana’s vagina, I’m done. Don’t believe me? See the clip below.
When Jessica finally defeats Jason, demons erupt from the ground to drag him to Hell. But they’re hardly terrifying because they look like rejected sinister tree designs for Fantasia that had gathered dust over the years after being put in storage. The end result is a gory, unintentionally funny supernatural slasher film that fails to do justice to Jason’s legacy.
At least you can wash your disappoint down with Jason X before enjoying the guilty pleasure that is Freddy Vs. Jason, which is hinted at the end of Jason Goes to Hell but took 10 more years to make its way to theaters. At least the little screen time Kane Hodder had in Jason Goes to Hell didn’t diminish his ranking as the best Jason Voorhees in the franchise’s history.
Sean Woodard serves as the Film Editor for Drunk Monkeys, a staff writer for Horrorbuzz, and a Co-Producer of the faith and spirituality podcast, Ordinary Grace. Focusing on a wide variety of interests, Sean’s fiction, film criticism, and other writings have been featured in Los Angeles Review of Books, NonBinary Review, Cultured Vultures, and Los Angeles Magazine, among other publications. He is currently a doctoral student at University of Texas at Arlington.
