When it comes to ’80s slashers, none were better than the first four Friday the 13th films. Sure, the fifth film has its backwoods-dirt-covered charms, the meta sixth film was far ahead of its time, the seventh film has the ultimate Jason design, and the eighth is a guilty pleasure, but the first four were definitive Friday the 13th. There’s a reason the 2009 reboot emulated all four of them. Yet, the original holiday slasher film was never supposed to give birth to a franchise. It ends with Alice Hardy surviving the night of terror, beheading Mrs. Voorhees, and getting on a canoe, only to wake up to a nightmare. And that was just it, Jason was solely a product of her imagination. Yet given how he was established and how the first film ended with her hazy-eyed delivery of, “Then he’s still there,” it was clear that Jason was the path forward for the franchise.
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Enter 1981’s Friday the 13th Part 2, which didn’t do nearly as well at the box office as the first film. But it still turned a nice profit for Paramount, more than enough to ensure we’d get Friday the 13th Part III, which, in spite of being the weakest of the initial quadrilogy, is without a doubt the most iconic. Go figure. But, while Part III is the weak link in the solid four-part chain, Part 2 is the least logical. It comes down to a few factors and, yes, one of them is Jason’s pulse.
So How Did Jason Find Alice?
Jason isn’t the type of guy to give up on what he does, but he’s no sleuth. Much of Friday the 13th Part 2 takes place five years after the events of Friday the 13th, but not the opening scene.
In the opening scene, we pick up with the lone survivor of Mrs. Voorhees’s massacre, Alice Hardy, now two months removed from that night and living alone in an apartment. It’s not entirely clear if she’s remained in Crystal Lake, but it’s likely. However, even if she had, how would Jason know where to find her? How would he even know what name to look for? It’s not as if, when she swung that machete at his mother (which he apparently saw), she yelled out, “I’m Alice Hardy! I grew up around here and would prefer the comfort of familiarity, even if it means being super close to the location of my trauma!”
Either way, Jason finds her, places a phone call (the one time we’ve ever seen him do this), then enters her apartment. How did he even know how to use a phone? It’s a really solid opening scene, but Jason isn’t one to stray from Camp Crystal Lake’s general vicinity, much less go into town looking for a particular individual.
“You Can’t Be Alive!”
As mentioned, Friday the 13th wasn’t made with a franchise in mind. It was made to cash in on the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween and did a marvelous job, at that. Friday the 13th Part III was supposed to be the final installment. That’s why Chris Higgins hits him in the head with an axe — it was supposed to be the final blow.
And, of course, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was intended to be, well, the final chapter. But Friday the 13th Part 2 was always supposed to lead to more, just as it was building off the events of the first film. Hence Ginny Field only whacking him in the shoulder with a machete; that’s no fatal wound.
But that in and of itself also indicates something — while constructing Part 2, the idea was that Jason was a mortal being. So where was he between the time he supposedly drowned in 1957 and his mother’s rampage in 1979 (that’s when Friday the 13th takes place: Friday, June 13th of 1979)?
This is not something that’s ever explained. In Part 2 (which takes place five years after the first film), he’s 38 years old, which sounds right judging by his appearance. Then again, how he dragged himself out of a lake at age 11 and survived on twigs and raw rabbits in the woods for 27 years is a mystery. Not as big of a mystery as why he didn’t go visit his mother between the years of 1958 and 1979, but a mystery.
You Didn’t See Him? He Was Right There.
There are multiple points in Friday the 13th Part 2 where characters look directly into the camera. It’s not the only film in the franchise to do this, but it certainly does it the most frequently.
Like with the first film, we’re intermittently placed in the shoes of the killer as he watches someone walking by him from close proximity. They weren’t the only entries of the franchise to do this, but for the most part, after the first two films, we were looking over Jason’s back, not seeing things through his eyes (or Mrs. Voorhees’s, in the case of the first film).
In Part 2, though, the characters sometimes look directly at the man. For instance, there’s Terry (pictured above), who goes looking for her dog, Muffin. While she’s calling for the dog, Jason is standing behind one of the cabins. Terry walks right up to the cabin and looks directly at him (and the camera and us), holds her focus there, then walks away. The camera doesn’t move at all. She definitely saw him. She would have had to.
Kind of like how, in the third act, when Ginny is avoiding Jason, her head is poking up from in front of her car, to the point it casts a small shadow. Though, in this case, it was more a case of where director Steve Miner should have called for another take and told Amy Steel to dip down a bit lower. In the case of Terry looking right at Jason, it’s less a gaffe and more a gap in logic.
The Paul of It All
The ending of Friday the 13th Part 2 is a real head-scratcher. It’s best to start with what happens. Basically, Ginny avoids Jason, gets a few blows in, then stumbles upon the shack where he’s apparently been holed up for decades and which now is the home of his mother’s decapitated head (with Terry, a decayed Alice, and Deputy Winslow’s bodies on the ground). Jason enters the shack, and Ginny puts on Mrs. Voorhees’s sweater, which is able to fool Jason for a few moments. Ginny’s boyfriend (and the head of Packanack Lodge, the counselor training camp where the film spends most of its time), Paul, enters and tussles with Jason. This goes on long enough for Ginny to slam a machete into Jason’s shoulder.
That’s all fine. In fact, it’s possibly the best finale of the franchise. It’s also exactly where Friday the 13th Part III picks up. But it’s not where Friday the 13th Part 2 ends.
Friday the 13th Part 2 ends with Paul escorting Ginny away from the cabin, where they take a few breaths in one of the cabins. There’s some scratching on the door, and, thinking it’s Jason, Paul holds the handle of a pitchfork as a club while Ginny holds the rest of the pitchfork (it was broken when Jason tried to use it on Ginny, but the chair he was standing on broke).
In a jump scare reminiscent of Jason leaping from the lake in the first film, Jason bursts through the window, howling, and grabs Ginny, yanking her from the cabin. Cut to daylight, and Ginny is now being carted off in an ambulance. She’s asking for Paul, and neither the missing Paul nor the paramedics answer.
This is probably the biggest logic leap of Friday the 13th Part 2 for most people, because it genuinely doesn’t make any sense. According to Part III, Jason never left his shack after getting the machete to the shoulder. So, everything that came afterwards could be chalked up to a figment of Ginny’s imagination. The issue is that it was Paul’s intervention that allowed Ginny the opportunity to slam that machete into Jason’s shoulder, so Paul was there.
Friday the 13th Part III‘s recap does not show Part 2‘s final jump scare. That’s another reason to believe it never happened. So what did? Did Paul ever make it to that shack, or did he die when Jason first snuck up on him when he and Ginny returned to Packanack Lodge (when Ginny yells “Paul, there’s someone in this f-cking room!”)? Did he survive that scene and genuinely make his way to the shack? And, if so, did Jason kill him in that shack while they were tussling, giving Ginny enough time to strike the seemingly fatal blow? Did Paul just bail on Ginny once Jason was on the ground? None seem likely.
Perhaps Friday the 13th Part 2 is just like any other rollercoaster. You don’t worry about the mechanics; you just pull the Gs.
Stream Friday the 13th Part 2 for free on Hoopla or rent it on Prime Video.
