Ecological Film

Jason Voorhees is the most popular of all backwoods slasher killers. Very few masked killers have achieved the same iconic status and popularity as Jason, whose identity can be evoked simply via the image of the hockey mask he wears from Friday the 13th Part 3 onward. Fans masquerading as Jason simply need a hockey mask and a machete, his preferred weapon. Imitating Jason’s stalking motif (ch-ch-ch) has become shorthand for evoking a slasher movie menace.

Jason’s enduring popularity and iconic status are a result of his framing as a rural backwoodsman protagonist. Symbolically born from Crystal Lake, from which we see him rise numerous times, he haunts the woods of a northeastern summer camp, killing anyone who trespasses. In his early film appearances, particularly Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), his backwoods skills, including stalking prey and laying snares, are emphasized. However, Jason Voorhees, while celebrating whiteness as a hillbilly, can also signify as a berserker in light of the rise in interest in things European, Viking, and/or Medieval. There has been a recent spike in crusader and Viking imagery as signifiers of masculinity in red state US culture in particular. In recent news, Donald Trump Jr. posed with his custom assault rifle which has a Jerusalem Cross on a crusader’s helmet embossed on it. Jason’s last name, Voorhees, is Dutch, and his iconic hockey mask aligns him with northern winter sports associated with violence and fighting -- and whiteness. As Richard Dyer notes, the symbolic home of the mythical white race is northern Europe, especially its mountainous regions (White 21). Jason’s signification as a backwoods hillbilly and viking berserker, two idealized white masculine types, connect him to the primal and the rural, which justify his superhuman powers and allow him to render his suburban and urban victims as ineffectual and impotent.

The shift toward seeing Jason as the protagonist / fan favorite coincides with reading him as some form of unkillable warrior / berserker as a well as representative of white hillbilly strength and backwoods toughness. Ongoing sequelization / franchising plays a role in this too, breeding familiarity and increasingly non-serious / “camp” readings that allow viewers to side with Jason as slasher protagonist while disavowing or downplaying his retrograde politics (e.g., the later films are too silly to be taken seriously).

Jason has an oscillating significance that meets cultural moments. In Friday the 13th Part 2,  he is established as a Natty Bumppo type wild man of the woods. In subsequent films he dons the hockey mask and more frequently ventures into non-wilderness (e.g., Manhattan) and fantastical (Outer Space, Hell) locales. Nevertheless, he exemplifies how white hillbillies serve to authenticate whiteness in popular culture.

We support our case by first analyzing Jason's depiction in Friday the 13th Part 2, the first film in which he appears in adult guise as a backwoods slasher killer, as well as select moments from later franchise entries including Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) and Freddy vs. Jason (2003).