By David L. Dickey

Today marks a special Holiday for us “spooky kids” of the 1980’s. Not only are we in the middle of October, with most of us elbow deep in the process of transforming our homes and yards (and workplaces and cars and whatever else we can afford to) into tombs, graveyards, haunted mansions, and horror movie sets in anticipation of Halloween; but the calendar has aligned, and we have been gifted with a Friday the Thirteenth in October! Of course, for those of you who may be more superstitious than us spooky kids or—even “a little stitious,” to quote Michael Scott—it probably means the levels of dread and anxiety are kicked up a notch. Rest assured, I won’t send any black cats your way or set up any ladders in your path, promise.

As someone who is fascinated with the intersections of Horror and Theology, especially with the ways in which our fears and fascinations reveal the deepest thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and truths of our collective subconscious; this Friday the Thirteenth presents a convergence of so many of the trains of thought that often dominate my mind. I cannot let it pass without extending them, especially in connection with what is currently going on in the world.

Of course, to do this there is no better place to start than with the namesake horror franchise of this day, Friday the 13th. The mythos developed over the course of its twelve films, put as succinctly as is possible given the… creative liberties… taken by its various directors and writers over the years, is well known but worth repeating:

In the late 1950’s at Camp Crystal Lake, the picturesque New England summer camp of mid-20th century America’s collective nostalgic imagination, a local woman named Pamela Voorhees worked in the kitchen while her son, Jason, attended the camp. Jason was different from the other kids, being portrayed with unspecified disabilities. He was thus an outcast subjected to bullying and isolation. One day, in a horrible accident, Jason drowned in the lake. The counselors and adults who should have been watching the children and could have saved him from the water failed to do so; being too distracted by their own hormones and typical teenage vice to protect the vulnerable children. Pamela, devastated by the loss of her son, experienced some kind of psychotic break and launched a years-long crusade to prevent the camp from ever reopening, beginning with the sabotage of each attempt and culminating in the mass murder of a group of teenagers and their leader on Friday the 13th, 1980 (or 1979 if we go with the in-universe dating). Pamela was killed by the final survivor of that group, decapitated on the shore of the lake. Five years later, an unexplainably adult Jason emerged to continue his mother’s crusade, seeking his own vengeance on anyone who entered his woods for her death, which he presumably witnessed. Jason has been killed numerous times yet returns from his grave with regularity to continue exacting his murderous revenge.

The Friday the 13th films are the height of slasher camp and exploitation. The first film’s creator, Sean Cunningham, got his start with adult films—so many early slasher pioneers did. The franchise has become the measuring tape by which all other slasher films are judged and Jason Voorhees has become the killer all other slasher film killers are compared to. He also is my personal favorite slasher, and his movies are my favorite horror movies. They have been since I was a child when, whether appropriately or not, I watched them almost daily from about three years old onward. My grandparents tell stories of me sitting outside in my sandbox wearing a hockey mask and playing with a toy knife, to the consternation and concern of our neighbors. Obviously, I am an Uber fan of this franchise (though, not necessarily of Jason X’s Uber Jason, but that’s a topic for a different day). 

For Horror and Theology, however, the question remains whether there is anything deeper that can be minded from Pamela and Jason’s story than a campy good time. We know that the original film was heavily inspired by the notion of making an inversion of Psycho and that the date of Friday the 13th was chosen to play on the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas before that. Looking mostly for a quick payday, not much other thought was put into their creation, or into character of Jason—hence why it takes three whole films for him to become the fully fleshed out slasher icon we know and love today and a good seven for the mythology to really be honed into a coherent story that can be told around a campfire. This also speaks to why the disabilities Jason is portrayed with are never elaborated on, nor do they match many real-world disabilities that people live with. They were the result of a quick decision by Tom Savini while designing Jason for the first film, nothing more, nothing less.

However, in many ways, the lack of intentionality and forethought reinforces the truths of the themes that are present. This is firmly “death of the author” territory, but often any attempt at this this type of critical analysis of art is. So be it. All of us carry around basic assumptions and beliefs that spill into our creative output whether we intend for them to or not. In truth, the fact they rather show up in these films by happenstance or accident due to the rush of getting low budget movies made as quickly as possible means they must have come from the creators’ embedded assumptions about the world. The things we imbue our creations with when we are on autopilot often come from an even more foundational place within ourselves than the meanings we try to force into them.

When I watch the Friday the 13th films as an adult searching for meaning, I am struck first and foremost by the plight of Jason. The child Jason is such an innocent victim. His life did not matter, and Pamela was left completely alone in her grief. With no mention of a father at home, the picture painted is that of a single mother with a special-needs son whose only job is as the cook at a summer camp. Thus, it is safe to infer that they are poor and that the counselors and other campers are probably from higher economic classes, imbued with social privileges that the Voorheeses could never dream of. To them, Jason is the weird kid whose equally weird mom works at the camp. He is a non-person whose presence is at best an annoyance and at worst an uncomfortable reminder that all of life is not as their privileged upbringing would have them think. Like so much social othering of those who are different or differently abled, his existence is disruptive to their perceived social coherence and thus something they wish were gone. If we apply the work of Rene Girard to this scenario, he is a scapegoat in their midst. This is a theme I have written and talked about extensively before, and one that so many of our stories bear the marks of.

In truth, the child Jason and his poor mother are textbook examples of ready-made scapegoats for their community. They are outcasts who live on the fringe of their social hierarchy, perhaps they are even radically, dangerously different from the in-group if we take the hint of occult practice and beliefs offered by Jason Goes to Hell seriously. Furthermore, because of his disability, Jason himself bears the marks of the monstrous that Girard finds in nearly all scapegoats. He is marked out as an “Other” to be feared and ultimately to be cast aside so that stable social cohesion of the in-group can be maintained at the camp. His accidental drowning merely facilitated what was always going to happen with his life. Jason’s life was utterly disposable and when he died, the authorities never even find his body. Long before returning as a murderous undead creature of vengeance, Jason existed in a limbo between life and death and Pamela was offered no closure. It is no wonder this foundational victimhood leads so many horror fans to have a soft spot for Jason. In many ways, he is almost a sympathetic creature akin to Frankenstein’s monster or Quasimodo.

Jason was murdered by the neglect of those who were supposed to be watching him. Subsequently, enraged at the loss of her child, Pamela became the monster and extracted her vengeance through monstrous acts of violence, all the while feeling justified in her righteous anger over her son. After witnessing, in whatever way he witnessed it, his mother’s demise, Jason then became the scapegoat who won’t stay buried, the monster created out of his community’s secret sins who they can no longer hide from. The risen Jason is an incarnate spirit of vengeance for all the oppression, ostracization, humiliation, dehumanization, and victimization he and his mother experienced at the hands of the “more civilized” people around them. His murderous violence knows no bounds and is fueled by a righteous anger that has escalated into unspeakable evil. His life was made to mean nothing and thus he treats every person as a non-human, worthy of only death, to be cast aside as if their lives also mean nothing. It is an ultimate example of what happens when “righteous anger” over real victimization is left unchecked and allowed to exact its terribly vengeance in ever increasingly violent ways. 

This motif runs throughout the horror genre, especially in the franchises built in the 80’s. Think about Friday the 13th’s eternal counterpart, A Nightmare on Elm Street: the man Fred Kruger is himself a monster who victimizes children and so the parents of Springwood take it upon themselves to exact extrajudicial vengeance on him and commit criminal collective violence with their righteous anger in burning him alive- and in doing so he becomes their victim. Post-death, Freddy sees himself as the victim and exacts monstrous, violent vengeance out of what he believes to be his own sense of righteous anger. As the franchises continue, Jason and Feddy both prove over and over again that the sins of the past will not stay buried. A society’s secret sins and victims cry out from beyond the grave. What is done in the darkness will be brought to the light. Such cycles of victimization and vengeance, and the monstrosities that righteous anger can turn us into, and the persistence of our deepest, darkest, most secret sins that will not stay buried are also present throughout the Candyman and Pumpkinhead films.

The motif exists because it rings true. The world we live in, and the collective histories we have endured, present us with real-life examples of such things. Whenever we feel what we presume to be righteous anger, the threat of escalation and justified violence is always there. If you want to see it alive and well in the real hearts and minds of real people, ask your peers what they believe should be done to pedophiles—I’d wager that you won’t have to ask too many of them before you hear someone spew unchecked murderous venom as they think about what they’d do. Or ask supporters of capital punishment to talk about the criminals they believe deserve to be executed for their crimes and listen for the dehumanizing language around what they think is acceptable treatment of “evil” people. Ask yourself what you would do to an intruder in your home threatening harm to your loved ones, or what you’d feel justified doing in retaliation for someone already having harmed your loved ones and see if the impulse towards unspeakable violence out of that righteous anger is not present.

Or, as a timely example, look at the commentary around the conflict between Israel and Palestine that has erupted in just the past week. Look at the violent, dehumanizing language so many feel justified in tapping into in response to the heinous actions of Hamas. Make no mistake, the actions of Hamas are just that—criminal and vile. Their tactics are unacceptable, and their existence is unhelpful in the peace process. However, calling them “vermin,” or “human animals,” saying that Israel is justified in the collective punishment of all Palestinians and calling for Gaza “to be paved over” or “turned into a parking lot” exposes the same exact evil and rot inside as is inside of Hamas. Both sides feel justified in committing monstrous atrocities out of a sense of righteous anger and thus, both sides have allowed their victimizations to turn them into monsters akin to the worst vengeance demons from the worst horror films.

Perhaps the truth of the matter is that authentic righteous anger is not a stance available to real people in the real world. Reality is too complex for that, our propensities for disproportionate vengeance too ever-present. There is a reason that the most revolutionary laws for society from Hammurabi and the Torah involved limiting how much vengeance could be exacted when people are wronged, the tax talionis, or “eye for an eye” principle. Before those laws, unchecked retaliation based on righteous anger over victimization threatened to destroy every attempt at civilization. By decreeing only retaliation that was proportionate to what was lost as acceptable, such laws served as one of the greatest stabilizing forces in human history. Without such limits, we could all-too easily justify ourselves in committing genocide over minor slights.

Of course, Christian Theology based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth eliminates even the possibility for proportionate response when seeking vengeance. We are taught to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, to give to the one who asks and go the extra mile when we are forced to march. Jesus explicitly casts aside the tax talionis as a lesser way of being. Admittedly, this is and always has been hard teaching, it disarms our righteous anger takes away our justifications for even proportional retaliation. Of course, Western societies that like to perceive of themselves as Christan have utterly failed to even attempt to live up to this standard and have rather invented “Just War” alternatives to soften the teaching of Jesus and defend their own empires with. Likewise, for those of us concerned with justice and tend to feel burning, righteous anger over oppression, it becomes even harder to follow when real injustice stares us in the face. As a result, we are often tempted look the other way when long oppressed peoples fight back through heinous violence. How often are the hardest paths to follow the closest to the truth? How often do “easy ways out” lead only to further failure? Maybe that’s why the road to life is narrow and there are few who find it.

In the end, this is not really an essay about Israel and Palestine, or about Jason and Pamela Voorhees even. Rather, as both Theology and Horror tend to be, it is about you and me. It is about what is there when we look in the mirror, the secret sins we have committed and the righteous anger we may feel over the ways we have been wronged. Most importantly, it is about what we do with that righteous anger we feel over our own victimization or that of others. Because if we aren’t mindful about what we do with it, or what it does to us, the results can be horrifying, monstrous even—and can rise from their graves with terrifying regularity to continue their murderous rampages. 

Consider all of this as you set up your graveyards and hang your cobwebs with care. Hold the frivolity and the seriousness of the world around us in constant tension. Throw on a Friday the 13th movie— I think Part 4 is the best slasher of the lot, but Part 7 has always been my favorite— and enjoy this Friday the 13^th in October.

David L. Dickey (MDiv/MTS, Christian Theological Seminary, 2016) is a Lecturer in Theology at Marian University, Indianapolis. A lifelong fan of nearly all things horror, science fiction, and comic book related; he is fascinated by the persistent theological themes that permeate and undergird popular culture. He is the host of the theology and horror themed Renegade Disciple Podcast and contributed to Pop Culture and Theology’s Theology and Wes Craven volume. David is a lifelong resident of Indianapolis, Indiana, where he resides with his wife, Abigail and their five children.