The Friday the 13th franchise has built itself on one key tenet: no matter what, Jason Voorhees always comes back. There was never really an explanation in the series' canon as to why this was a reality that the folks near Camp Crystal Lake continued to face through the events of nine films and a match up with Freddy Kruger. At least until now, as the director of Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday, Adam Marcus, explained something that most folks never picked up on in his "final" entry in the series: Jason is part of The Evil Dead franchise. Marcus explained as follows:
She [Pamela Voorhees] makes a deal with the devil by reading from the Necronomicon to bring back her son. This is why Jason isn't Jason. He's Jason plus The Evil Dead, and now I can believe that he can go from a little boy that lives in a lake, to a full grown man in a couple of months, to Zombie Jason, to never being able to kill this guy. That, to me, is way more interesting as a mashup, and [Sam] Raimi loved it!
If you're an '80s horror fan, you're probably freaking out about now, and why wouldn't you? For all of the years that folks have hoped and wished that a crossover between The Evil Dead and its various genre contemporaries would be possible, the link was sitting right in front of everyone's eyes. All that was there to really tip anyone off was a shot of the Voorhees family basement, in which the Necronomicon is seen among some possessions that Pamela had squirreled away in her house.
So why would such an awesome horror continuity note be buried in a movie like Jason Goes To Hell? Well, as Adam Marcus explained to Horror Geek Life, while it was visually obvious, he had to leave it extremely vague due to this specific reason:
It's not like I could tell New Line my plan to include The Evil Dead, because they don't own The Evil Dead. So it had to be an Easter egg, and I did focus on it...there's a whole scene that includes the book, and I hoped people would get it and could figure out that's what I'm up to. So yes, in my opinion, Jason Voorhees is a Deadite. He's one of The Evil Dead.
While the intent of Jason Goes To Hell was, in fact, to bridge the Friday the 13th and Evil Dead worlds, New Line would have never let Marcus go on to explain this chain of events in the film. However, it was eventually explored in another form: the comic book series / proposed movie Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash. Though rights issues would still be present, considering Sony has been playing around with the Evil Dead universe, this would still be an interesting way to try and revive the Voorhees legacy after several stalled attempts at a solo franchise. Maybe Max Landis can help by squeezing it into his proposed horror free-for-all.
If you're hungry for more Deadite action, you can watch the first two seasons of Ash vs. The Evil Dead available now on Starz Play.
