I didn’t realize how many Easter eggs there were in this movie.
Can you still call them “Easter eggs” if they’re in a horror movie?
…
Xenomorph eggs?
This past Friday was Friday the 13th. And what better way to celebrate? I mean, I guess the only way better is to watch more than one Friday the 13th movie. But this time around, I picked my favorite.
Jason Goes to Hell came out in 1993 and while I wasn’t allowed to go see it in the theaters (I would have been 11 at the time), I rented it from my local Blockbuster for a sleepover with my grade school best friend so I was probably 12.
It was my first Friday the 13th movie that I actually saw. We had an Adam West Batman movie we’d taped off of TV, commercials and all, and there was a commercial for Part 8 Jason Takes Manhattan that used to scare the crap out of me as a little kid. It was the music that affected me the most.
I love the Friday the 13th movies. Great cinema they are not, but they are great examples of where horror was at that time. I spent 2013’s run of From the Chimerical Dark, my recurring column in “Dark Moon Digest” examining how the mythos of Jason is built over the course of his 12 (so close!) movie franchise. I won’t rehash that here at this time.
But I will gush a little about the Easter eggs I noticed in the movie this time around.
Jason’s motivation has always been simple to understand: he is taking revenge for the murder of his mother and protecting his territory where he has a shrine built to her: Camp Crystal Lake. This motivation is somewhat retconned in Jason Goes to Hell because his body is destroyed, though his spirit lives on. He can only be reborn through the body of another Voorhees. It’s revealed that he has a sister and niece and even grandniece. This felt like a passing nod to Michael Myers, whose motivation against Laurie Strode is that she is his sister.
When our hero, Steven, breaks into the Voorhees house, he finds a copy of the Necronomicon as it appears in the Evil Dead movies. This also potentially ties up a loose end left by the first and second movies, which is that Jason was believed to have drowned, which drove his mother crazy, however shows up in the second movie, having been driven to homicidal psychosis by witnessing his mother murdered in front of him. What if both are true and Jason is alive because he was resurrected with the Necronomicon. That could explain why, even before being resurrected by lightning in Part 6, he couldn’t be killed.
Definitely missed by me was the nod to The Thing, with the decapitation scene. Unable to fully manifest as Jason unless inhabiting a Voorhees body, the spirit of Jason nonetheless perseveres as a tiny demon being passed from body to body. When a body Jason is using gets decapitated, a tiny demon thing crawls from the neck on spidery limbs. This looked familiar and was confirmed for me by a crate in the scene which read “Arctic Expedition.”
And, of course, the final Easter egg, which literally reaches out of the ground at you.
It’s not great cinema, but I enjoyed the nostalgia of my first Friday the 13th movie and found joy in discovering something new about a movie and series that I have studied with some depth.
The Chimerical Dark 