Characters / Friday the 13th: Jason Voorhees

Friday the 13th main character index
Jason Voorhees
Main Film Series: Friday the 13th (1980) | Friday the 13th Part 2 | Friday the 13th Part III | Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter | Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning | Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives | Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood | Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan | Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday | Jason X | Freddy vs. Jason
Other Continuities: Friday the 13th (2009) | Friday the 13th: The Game

Jason Voorhees

KILL FOR MOTHER.

Played by: Ari Lehman (first film), Warrington Gillette, Steve "Dash" Daskawisz, Ellen Lutter, Jerry Wallace (Part 2), Richard Brooker (Part III), Ted White (The Final Chapter), Tom Morga (Part V), Dan Bradley, C.J. Graham (Part VI), Kane Hodder (Part VII, Part VIII, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and Jason X)

"Mommy, don't let me drown! Mommy?"

The one and only man behind the mask himself. Jason Voorhees was a deformed and mentally challenged boy who was thought to have been drowned in the Crystal Lake in the 50s. He re-emerged over two decades later ^note (either by surviving his drowning, and going into hiding for reasons unknown, or revived as an undead right there and then) after his mother Pamela died, her death triggering unrelenting hate within him. In current times, Jason is a nigh-unstoppable juggernaut of a monster who roams about the confines of Crystal Lake, indiscriminately slaughtering those on his turf and racking up one of, if not the largest body counts of all horror icons.

This version of him in Mortal Kombat X can be found here, while the version of him in Friday the 13th: The Game can be found here.

---

A-F

• Abusive Parents: It's heavily suggested or outright shown in several tie-in materials that Jason's father, Elias Voorhees, had a tendency to horribly beat Jason over the smallest infractions and cruelly insult him over his deformities. In the original concept for Part IX they briefly considered revealing Jason was sexually abused by his mom, but they scrapped the idea because even they thought that was too much for poor Jason.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Some of his more somber defeats are this, as in the end of the day, Jason ultimately is just an angry, hurt child who seeks revenge for his mother's death.
• Alien Blood: In part 9, while his heart is being examined, a "black, viscous fluid" is found in it. The person doing the examination refuses to believe it is blood, but it actually would make sense, considering blood actually can turn black in real life if it remains deoxygenated long enough, and Jason has been undead for many years by that point.
• All of the Other Reindeer: He was bullied by the children in Camp Crystal Lake because of his deformed appearance.
• Ambiguous Situation: Hand in hand with his ambiguous humanity; did Jason really drown as a boy and come back from the dead (something he would make a habit of as an adult), or did he survive the incident? His mother (admittedly not an entirely stable or reliable source of information) was sure that he died, but it's also said that his body was never recovered.
• Ambiguously Human: Though he later became a Revenant Zombie, he was apparently still living and breathing in the first four movies. Despite this, he survived a few injuries that would seriously threaten a normal human being's life (note, to further potential confusion, that he was brought to a morgue after Part 3 but was not officially undead in the 4th film) before Tommy hacked him apart with his own machete.
• And I Must Scream: On top of being both seemingly immortal and likely incapable of speech, he's been chained to the bottom of Crystal Lake, twice. And if the last shot of part 6 is any indication, he was still conscious at times.
• Anti-Villain: He kills because he believes he's making his mother proud and out of vengeance for the wrongdoings people have done to him with a probably fixed mindset that anyone is therefore bound to be the enemy (at least if they enter the woods and are associated with the blame). It should be noted that, in spite of the brutal murders he commits, Jason is perfectly content with staying in Camp Crystal Lake and not killing anybody, provided that as they leave him alone and stay out of his turf.
• Avenging the Villain: The death of Pamela Voorhees set many a massacre to come.
• Ax-Crazy: Jason is definitely past the point of reasoning. Despite being a sympathetic version of this and having a childlike mind, Jason throughout the remainder of his life has mentally snapped to the point of no return once he found out his mother had been killed thus becoming very murderous with his extreme brutality being prominently shown as he kills about anyone in the most gruesome fashion possible that makes their way to Camp Crystal Lake as a way to bring upon his rampage. Though, unless compelled to by someone interfering with the targets, he will not bother anyone that doesn't enter his home or mess with his territory.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Jason has (unknowingly) prevented at least two rape attempts throughout the series. He killed the would-be victim in one of them, though.
• Bald of Evil: He started out with hair (in a potential dream sequence at Part 2's end and a few strands in the 4th film), but the films with him undead turned him bald until Jason Goes to Hell: the Final Friday.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: In Jason X, helped by his cyborg modifications and, well, due to (probably) not needing to breathe since at least the sixth movie.
• Beard of Evil: He had a messy and unkempt beard in Part 2. Like his hair, the beard disappears in subsequent installments, though he remains the franchise's most recurring villain.
• Berserk Button:
  • He mainly wants to be left alone, and a majority of his massacres happen because people happen to trespass Camp Crystal Lake.
  • He's not a fan of people doing the horizontal tango, and seems to view sex as a morally wrong act. Most people who have sex in the series tend to be killed shortly after, or in some cases, during the act. A signature scene in Part 2 has him skewer a couple with a spear during sex, and Jason X has him stir and awaken from cryogenic stasis implicitly due to hearing or sensing a couple having sex nearby.
  • His mother being used against him. When it was revealed that Freddy manipulated him that way in FvJ, Jason's eyes lit up with rage.
  • On top of that, the lady who removes his mask in Jason X suffers perhaps one of the cruelest kills in the history of the franchise - arguable since he woke up after it was placed back on.
  • Though he is perpetually silent as an adult, sans a single line in Part III ^note "ow!", Jason also clearly does not react well to being bullied or insulted. This likely stems from his former life as an ostracized child.
  • He cares for the animals around Camp Crystal Lake, and butchered two hunters who killed a deer in non-film mateerial.
• Big Bad: Part 2 onwards have him as the main antagonist. Averted in Part V and in vs. Jason.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Later movies establish that he has black blood, an impossibly large heart, and a tiny brain. The black blood can be justified by him being undead since the sixth movie and his blood darkening from oxygen depravation, but why his brain and heart are so impossibly missized are a mystery (besides some evil magic shenanigans, and the small brain possibly being an effect of the disability he had as a child).
• Body Horror: In addition to his deformed face, from Part VI onwards, he's a rotting zombie, with Part VI explicitly showing him to be swarming with maggots. In Part VII, he's decayed even further, with his ribs and spine exposed. And if that wasn't enough, it’s s said that in Jason Goes to Hell and maybe in Jason X, his mask has fused to his face because he never takes it off.
• Body Surf: When his body is destroyed in Jason Goes to Hell, his heart evolves into a small creature that hops from body to body to get the proper one (of his own blood, that is) that'll return him to his normal state.
• Boring, but Practical: His killings, some might say. Most of the time is with a machete, but he finds ways to kill his victims very practically, be it from an axe or using his own hands.
• Born Unlucky: His birthday was on a Friday the 13th, and Jason's life reflects that; he was born with learning difficulties and physical deformities, making him a target for merciless bullying, which eventually led to him presumably drowning while fleeing from it, and after a life as a half-feral backwoodsman he sees his mother, the only person to show him any affection, beheaded (after she'd been driven mad by his presumed death and went on a murderous rampage). For the most part, though, it's everyone around him who's unlucky.
• Breakout Villain: In the original film, he was just a Red Herring, especially for those who knew him as the killer from the sequels; a legend of a dead child whose ultimate role was to motivate his mother to avenge his death by killing anyone who dared to try to re-open Camp Crystal Lake. Later films turned him into one of the most iconic characters of horrordom.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Whether or not they include the aforementioned Berserk Buttons, some of the murders seem to indicate that they don't really mean that much to him. One such notable example is Part III - after killing Vera with the speargun, Jason simply drops the now-useless weapon and turns and walks away without a second glance, as he is always ready to march on and claim (yet) more victims. In fact, the only people who truly seem to avert this are Tommy Jarvis, Freddy Krueger, and arguably Chris Higgins.
• Cain and Abel: Jason Goes to Hell reveals that he has a half-sister, Diana Kimble. Unsurprisingly, he's the Cain to her Abel.
• Came Back Strong: He was already abnormally tough and strong as a "living" human. Then he gets struck by lightning and becomes The Juggernaut.
• Chained by Fashion: He wears the chain that dragged him to the bottom of the Crystal Lake from Part VI around his neck in Part VII.
• Characterization Marches On: In the first few movies, he's already shown to be ruthless, also being one to hunt animals if need be and a likely cause of a couple animals being doomed. Every portrayal since his resurrection, however, has avoided doing anything more than killing people who happens to be trespassing on his land, unless he's dragged outside of it and, according to Kane Hodder, is content to leave animals and children alone.
• Clothes Make the Legend: The hockey mask, which he took/found from Shelly in Part III.
• The Comically Serious: Jason himself has no discernible sense of humor, but the later, more comedic films have some fun with his stoic response to humorous goings-on, such as his confused reaction to accidentally tearing off a man's arm while tossing him aside, his obvious bafflement at seeing a billboard depicting a hockey mask just like his, or him stoically murdering holographic victims designed to distract him.
• Continuity Snarl: Freddy vs. Jason reveals that he's terrified of water, a fear that Freddy exploits to nearly kill him, seemingly forgetting that Jason has been shown freely wading into and emerging from water in the previous films (multiple times in a row), and has even used water to his advantage in order to drown a few victims. Likewise with Part III, the flashback that shows Jason attacking Chris has him looking more along the lines of Savini's interpretation of the character from the first movie rather than what he had looked like in the previous movie. This is most likely chalked up as another instance of Early-Installment Weirdness as they were still figuring out Jason's character, though Part 2's ending may have been a dream, some fans say. Furthermore, save the hair, his face was somewhat consistent until the 7th installment, from where the filmmakers had different ideas each time according to Kane Hodder.
• Cool Mask: His iconic hockey mask, which he picks up in the third movie. In the 2009 reboot he outright abandons his makeshift sack-mask when he finds a hockey mask in Donnie's barn.
• Corpse Land: In Freddy vs. Jason, his dreamscape is filled with the corpses of his victims.
• Covered with Scars: In Part VII, the director deliberately had it so that all of the injuries Jason had endured in his previous appearances showed in his design. He bears the axe and machete wounds from Part III and The Final Chapter, and the motorboat propeller damage from Jason Lives.
• Crazy Survivalist: Jason starts out as a mortal (albeit very insanely driven and quite tough) guy living in the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake and having no tolerance to those he perceives as intruders. Even in his resurrected form he is usually shown to prefer staying in isolation at the Camp.
• Crosscast Role: Jason's legs in the beginning of Part II is the only time in the franchise Jason was played by a woman. It was a wardrobe test that ended up going so well they decided to use the footage instead of re-filming it.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Dishes out plenty of these over the course of the franchise (though they are usually quick - not always, though, until the MPAA cut some down), and sometimes suffers them himself given his resurrective nature.
  • His death in Part IV has his hand sliced open with his own machete by Trish, and later Tommy lodges the thing through his right eye. You get a loving shot of the blade sliding into his skull as he sinks to the floor. Even then, he's still twitching in agony, and Tommy rips the machete out and furiously bludgeons Jason over and over with his own weapon until his head is reduced to apparent mush.
• Cyborg: Becomes one in Jason X due to malfunctioning nanomachines using metal and other replacements to fix his lost tissue.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Jason's rise to becoming an unstoppable-enough Serial Killer stems from his traumatic childhood. As a child Jason was bullied very harshly by the fellow campers from Crystal Lake who often teased and abused him due to his appearance by tossing him into lake which is supposedly where he drowned. Then to top it all off it turns out he survived but the downside is that he witnessed his mother being decapitated which caused Jason to mentally snap and become the sympathetic killer he is today.
• The Dead Have Eyes: Jason has one perfectly normal eye in Part VI after he resurrects (the other was destroyed by Tommy Jarvis in the same blow that killed Jason), despite having been dead and rotting for years.
• Depending on the Writer:
  • Jason varies between "a killer who doesn't know any better for the sake of his mommy" and "a sadistic butcher who revels in terror and slaughter" depending on not so much the film, but writers of other material, namely in whether or not he will attack animals.
  • This also goes for Jason's "territorialism"; sometimes he is content in staying within the Camp Crystal Lake area, and sometimes he ventures into other places around Crystal Lake to strike terror and mayhem.
  • These days Jason's known for his "code of ethics" where he would never harm a child or an animal, according to Kane Hodder when playing him. In spite of this, the counselors in Part II come across the butchered corpse of a dog in the woods, which may or may not (depending on whether the ending was a dream) be the cute little pooch that walked up to Jason earlier.
• Determinator: As Freddy said, "Why won't you die?!" To be fair, when damaged enough, he'd stop and effectively shut down, until something revived him enough.
• Demon of Human Origin: In Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, Jason is turned into a demonic worm that takes over host bodies.
• Disappeared Dad: His father is never mentioned in the movies truer continuity, and is presumed to be dead.
• Disproportionate Retribution: His entire drive is this. It doesn't matter if you're a counselor, here to party, or just driving by, he catches you on Crystal Lake grounds, it's a high chance you're dead. It's safe to say he's lost any and all ability to tell people apart from his tormentors.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Downplayed. In his debut movie as the main villain, Jason starts out as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute of his mother as he is a serial killer avenging his relative; the only real difference between Pamela and Jason at this point is that he wears a mask and has better durability. Part 6 and beyond turn him into a Revenant Zombie with supernatural abilities like a Healing Factor and Demonic Possession.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: He's even stronger than before when he becomes a zombie in Jason Lives. One scene has him accidentally rip a man's arm off, sending him flying into a tree, and then stare at the arm in comical confusion.
• Dragged Off to Hell: What happens to him at the end of Jason Goes to Hell. Curiously, his mask is dragged down by a certain glove.
• Dramatic Unmask: Always to reveal a deformed or rotting face, which is never quite consistent movie to movie, more so starting in the 7th installment. Inverted in Part VI, where he starts unmasked in his grave and dramatically masks at the end of the opening scene.
• The Dreaded: To the extent that Jason Goes to Hell opens with the FBI setting up a sting operation to take him down.
• Driven to Villainy: His mother's death worked as a catalyst for all the massacres to come; as far as we can tell there's no indication Jason ever killed anyone prior to that event. (Although he certainly scared the daylights out of Chris when she got lost in the woods according to a flashback.)
• Empowered Badass Normal: As a mortal human, he was strong enough to crush a man's skull with his bare hands and tough enough to survive being hanged, stabbed in the shoulder, and an axe to the face. After being revived as a Revenant Zombie, he's even stronger, and Nigh-Invulnerable to boot. After being rebuilt as the Cyborg Uber-Jason in Jason X, he's even more powerful, Immune to Bullets and even stronger than he already was.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Even if he is a bloodthirsty killer, Jason still cares for his mother. So much so that he built an altar for her and presented his victims to her severed head. He (and his mom) are the page picture. It is often shown that the only reason (or at least the main reason) he kills isn't due to enjoyment or hatred of his victims, but simply believing he is making momma proud.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • It is stated by Kane Hodder that Jason doesn't strive for killing children or animals, though the character averted this early in the series, at least using a pre-teen Tommy Jarvis as a hostage, if not trying to potentially kill him (which, given that Tommy was the same age as the bullying campers were when Jason was 11, would make sense).
    • Sure enough, though, Jason has never laid a finger on any of the animals around the camp (except for food or survival). In fact, killing them, in some non-film material, is even one of his Berserk Buttons.
  • In some of the sequels, Jason appears quite content to stay within the camp borders and not bother anyone. In these examples, he would only go on a killing spree if someone invaded his "territory" first.
  • He even spares a group of thugs in New York after they threaten him. All he does is lift up his mask, and the thugs promptly beat it and he leaves them alone. This may, however, have been simply because, for once, Jason just didn't feel like killing someone; at the time, Jason was hunting down the two main characters of the film and might have not wanted to waste his time on the bozos who were pissed about their radio (there's really nothing about them that would make Jason a bad, or worse, guy for offing them, compared to his normal victims).
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: In Part VI, he is resurrected as a zombie (specifically, a revenant: an often very pissed off undead person not quite properly revived, but retaining his or her mentality, unlike the true zombie) and stays like this onwards through the movies until the 2009 reboot.
• Eviler than Thou: Anytime a Friday the 13th story has another antagonist, Jason will ultimately prove to be the greater threat and waste the occasional asshole trying to bully or exploit someone without batting an eye. The sole exception is Freddy Vs Jason where Freddy pulls this on him, being a reality-warping sadist who nearly destroys Jason by mentally torturing him. Fortunately with a little help from some seemingly hapless teens, Jason soon turns the tables and clobbers Fred.
• Evil Is Bigger: The shortest actor to play Jason - in adult form, anyway - was 6' 1" (1.85 m). Most guys were about 6'3 or 6'4. It's even more apparent in Freddy vs. Jason (for reference, Robert Englund is 5' 9¾" / 1.77 m).
• Evil Makes You Monstrous: Being the Big Bad of the franchise tends to do that. Indeed, one can say that Jason becomes more demonic in design as the movies go on, at least until the 8th film.
• Evil Uncle: Fits the role when it was revealed that he has more relatives, who he apparently must kill to survive, in Jason Goes to Hell.
• Eye Scream: Tommy killed him in The Final Chapter by slicing halfway into his head with his machete, destroying his left eye in the process. In The New Blood, his left eye is clearly missing. Near the end of Freddy vs. Jason, Freddy stabs him in both eyes.
• Facial Horror: Beyond the fact that his face is affected by a condition from birth that the idiom "a face only a mother could love" is often seen as spot-on, Jason continually gets grievous injuries on his face which leave scars that further makes him horribly disfigured to behold without a mask, including axe and machete wounds to the face, a propeller to the face, and ever-increasing levels of decomposition after becoming undead.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Wrath, after he drowned as a child, creating more of the problem; Jason's refusal to leave people who encroach on his territory in peace has, with no exaggeration, repeatedly gotten him killed or worse.
  • Also fear of water, which Freddy exploits to nearly kill him. Granted this is buried extremely deep in his psyche and Freddy could only weaponize it because the fight was in Jason's mind. Outside of that, his main thoughts about water involve "Good place to hide" and "Great for drowning people."
  • His extreme devotion to his mother. Ginny used this to her advantage to distract and wound him with a machete in Part 2, and Freddy did the same to trick him into going to Springwood in vs. Jason. His fascination, apparently, with his own appearance, could bring a similar effect.
• Fate Worse than Death: His entire existence. He is doomed to endlessly return from the dead, more decayed and monstrous than before, in a never ending quest to kill those he thinks are hurting him or at least wrong, given his bad experiences when he ended up around the other kids as they hit the "mean age". Even worse, Manhattan and Freddy Vs Jason imply that on the inside, he's still the same scared and confused kid he was years ago.
• Fearless Undead:
  • He was somewhat cautious when alive, but prone to damage and hurt. As a zombie, Jason shows no hesitation or fear since he feels neither - save for how he still uses stealth to his advantage consistently.
  • Subverted only twice, both instances in Freddy vs. Jason; when confronted with water, he's like a Deer in the Headlights. He also has a fairly memorable Oh, Crap! moment when he chops off Freddy's arm in the dream world, only to see Freddy grow it back and laugh at him.
• Fingore: During the final showdown in Freddy vs. Jason, Freddy slices his fingers off. Since he retains them in the chronologically-later Jason X, it can be assumed they eventually grew back.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: In Jason X, Jason spends 400 years frozen before being revived aboard a spaceship. Jason isn't especially thrown by what's happened, simply resuming his usual pattern of murder, though he is a bit confused by holographic technology (something the protagonists use to distract Jason for a while as they come up with a plan to get away from him).
• Freudian Excuse: He was bullied by other children for his deformed head before drowning at a summer camp. Witnessing his mom's death shattered what little sanity he had left, turning him into a ruthless killer.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Jason went from being an ordinary child with a skull deformity (said to be hydrocephalus, sometimes known as "water on the brain") to a giant zombie Serial Killer with a body count approaching 200 in the films alone.

G-L

• Genius Bruiser: Downplayed. Although he may not have such smarts to earn himself a diploma or two, he makes up for it in being clever and resourceful, using traps early on and stealth all the time.
• Gone Horribly Right: In Freddy vs. Jason, Freddy personally manipulates Jason into coming Back from the Dead and terrorizing Springwood, knowing that the fear and panic Jason causes will give Freddy enough power to escape Hell and haunt the town again. The plan worked, but Freddy didn't anticipate that Jason would continue to intrude on his territory and steal his potential victims.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Of both the original movie and A New Beginning; in the former, Pamela seeks to avenge his apparent death, and in the latter, Roy Burns uses his persona to become a copycat to avenge his son's death - some fans say Roy was even possessed by a malevolent Voorhees curse.
• The Grotesque: He was shunned in life due to his hydrocephalus. The effects of decomposition and accumulated injuries haven't done his appearance any favors.
• Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: He has hair and a beard in Part 2, but Part III, which takes place immediately after, renders him completely bald. If you look closely, it returns in The Final Chapter, but is pretty much gone until the 9th film.
• Handicapped Badass: Jason has apparent physical and severe developmental disabilities, but he is nonetheless a level of abnormally strong and tough, as well as surprisingly cunning when it comes to trapping his prey.
• Healing Factor: Jason X gave this reason for his resilience. It is unknown if he had it from the start (though it would explain why he can still use his left arm after Ginny Field buried a machete in his shoulder, and how he recovered from Chris Higgins stabbing his knee), or developed it during his resurrection via lightning strike.
• Hero Killer: Kills Alice Hardy in Part 2, Rob Dier in Part 4, Sheriff Garris in Part 6 and Creighton Duke (except not really) in Jason Goes to Hell.
• Hidden Depths:
  • When he comes across a fully occupied Camp Crystal Lake/Forest Green, Jason not only doesn't harm any children but pauses a moment to observe a terrified little girl huddled in bed before moving on. It almost seems he's trying to remember that he was once like them.
  • It didn't make it to the final film but a set shot from Freddy Vs Jason shows Jason still keeps his childhood teddy bear in his shack.
• Home Field Advantage: He knows the area around Camp Crystal Lake quite well, though he adapts pretty well when he gets away from it (though in Jason X, a VR Crystal Lake is quite the distraction to him). In Freddy vs. Jason, Lori and her friends even move both Freddy and Jason to Camp Crystal Lake for their showdown with the intent to exploit this trope.
• Human Popsicle: In Jason X, Rowan manages to trap Jason in a cryogenic chamber to freeze him (having concluded that, every execution method having failed, this was the only way to put him out of commission for good), leaving the slasher in stasis for the next 400 years, where he is awakened by the crew of the Grendel and promptly gets back to his usual tricks.
• Humanoid Abomination: In Jason Goes to Hell; after being blown to pieces at the start of the movie, Jason's remains compel a coroner to eat his heart and become possessed by him, with Jason's demonic spirit (manifested as a vile, worm-like creature) hopping from body to body until he can reach another Voorhees and fully resurrect himself.
• Idiot Savant: Jason is described In-Universe as being mentally handicapped, yet he has a natural instinct for not only turning anything he can get his hands on into a killing implement, but also for stalking his quarry, avoiding detection and setting up traps, ambushes and diversions. Arguably becomes more basic Dumb Muscle after his resurrection, as being undead means he is less vulnerable to being attacked and so he can simply wade directly into attacks and tank the damage. He loses most traps but keeps the stealth approach.
• Immortality:
  • Jason combines Resurrective Immortality, The Undead, Immortality Inducer from Jason Goes to Hell, Legacy Immortality from Part V, and especially Joker Immunity.
  • As stated of the franchise creator, Jason isn't technically immortal. He can somewhat die, but is simply strong enough and regenerates fast enough to stay alive. Explosives as in Jason X, can kill him, and something as powerful as atmospheric heat and/or intense pressure from falling from orbit, also in Jason X, too can incinerate and kill him. Possibly for good, until someone needs to write a direct sequel to Jason X (as has happened in comics).
• Immune to Bullets: As a 'zombie', bullets range from passing through not-quite-vital organs to making him flinch around, though some may think he's weak to the classic headshot. As a cyborg, the bullets don't even faze him.
• Implacable Man: Before his first death, he survived being hanged with a pulley slightly slowing his fall down, taking an axe to the forehead (though the hockey mask helped slow it down), a machete through the collarbone where large blood vessels are, and was still moving - though likely posthumously twitching or dying - after Tommy sliced half-way into his head. After returning as a revenant, he soaks up gunfire like a zombie Superman, isn't at all bothered by being set on fire (though in the 6th film, he was near water and in the 7th film, was reacting to it at least somewhat), he did, having the porch of a house dropped on him, being impaled, and more, all while racking up a body count of over 150, with his victims including normal people, cops, and soldiers, as well as surviving TWO final chapters. When he has set his sights on someone, he does everything he can to get them. Somehow this trait gets reset when he is defeated.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: He is an adept marksman and knife thrower.
• Improbable Weapon User: Jason has used a lot of weapons, and he once killed one of his victims with a party horn. He's also used impromptu objects like tent pegs, garbage cans full of water, and a guitar.
• Improvised Weapon: Jason alternates between using his trusty machete or a wide array of sharp or blunt things he finds along the way... and that does not complete the list.
• Iron Butt Monkey: Out of the plethora of horror villains and/or monsters, Jason gets the most abused, which says something.
• It's Personal: It's heavily implied that since she was the one who killed his mother in the first movie, Jason deliberately hunted Alice down first in Part II, particularly evident from him bringing her mutilated corpse — with the ice pick still embedded in her skull — to his shrine for Pamela.
• Joker Immunity: The entire reason he was brought back for Jason Lives onwards after being Killed Off for Real in The Final Chapter; he's just too damn popular.
• The Juggernaut: He started out as a definitely tough^note (Machete through blood vessels in the collarbone? Not too much of a problem!) backwoods killer. By Jason X he is a cyborg and almost indestructible.
• Kick the Dog: Dips into this from time to time. He's at his most villainous in Part III, where none of his victims were anywhere near his home at Camp Crystal Lake, but still in his territory, as he was attacking people in Part VII near a sign stating it was 5 miles to the lake - still, he deliberately wandered into their homes to kill practically everyone he meets.
• Killed Off for Real: Eventually happened, believe it or not, and Jason is one of the few well-known slashers who stuck to it. Jason X involves Jason being cryogenically frozen and later awakened in the far future where he goes on another rampage. While initially blown to bits by a combat android, his remains are then reconstructed by nanotechnology as the cyborg "Uber-Jason" and he keeps going until he's shot into space and tackled into the atmosphere of Earth-2, incinerating both him and his attacker and leaving nothing left of either. While there has been follow-up media since then, it's largely deemed non-canon as they go into wildly different directions, so as far as the "main" canon is concerned, Jason officially died.
• Kill It with Water: Parts VI and VII have him defeated by restraining him and leaving him at the bottom of the lake, Manhattan has him washed away in a flood of raw sewage water with some toxic waste, and Freddy Krueger deduces that water is the only thing Jason's actually afraid of. The sewage seemed to cause him great damage, but nothing else used can even bother him for more than a few minutes.
• Knight Templar: As Freddy vs. Jason shows, he kills because he believes he's making the world a better place by only killing those he finds immoral and unworthy of life. All to please his mother.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: He's a giant zombie Serial Killer, and a Nigh-Invulnerable killing machine who does what he does because he thinks he's pleasing his mother and just wants teenagers to keep their booze and premarital sex out of Camp Crystal Lake. Freddy vs. Jason pits him against Freddy Krueger a sadistic child murderer who can hunt people anywhere in the world so long as they're asleep , and freely admits he kills people for fun. Lori and her friends even pit the two against one another and decide to root for Jason on the grounds that he's the Lesser of Two Evils despite Jason's higher body count.
• Lightning Bruiser: It mostly depends as when he was alive in the first few movies, Jason is both surprisingly fast enough to chase down multiple victims, being able to withstand if not tank alot of damage, and strong enough to crush a man's skull. However once he becomes a zombie he becomes a Mighty Glacier that only moves in very short bursts to grab ahold of someone.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: In Part VI, it was two lightning strikes that brought Jason back to life.

M-Y

• Machete Mayhem: Trope Codifier for it.
• Made of Iron: Even while alive, he survived getting hanged, being hacked in the shoulder with a machete, and taking an axe to the face. Though, he was admitted to a morgue after the 3rd film, despite not necessarily being undead...
• Major Injury Underreaction: Even while (possibly) alive in the 4th film, he hardly ever reacts to wounds or pain, to the extent that he barely reacted at all to Trish Jarvis splitting his hand down the middle with his own Machete in The Final Chapter. This was not the case in the second movie, or Part III, where he groans in pain and reacts quite negatively to Chris stabbing him in the hand and then the leg, and in Jason Takes Manhattan, where as an undead one, he screams in agony after Rennie throws a barrel of toxic waste in his face.
• The Man They Couldn't Hang:
  • Chris in Part III tries off him by putting him on a noose and dropping him, but Jason climbs down from it after more likely Playing Possum for a moment.
  • In Jason X it's mentioned that he survived multiple execution attempts while imprisoned at the Crystal Lake Research Facility. Electrocution, gas, firing squad, hanging... not one of them succeeded. Eventually, Rowan gave up and decided the only way to stop Jason for good was by freezing him.
• Masking the Deformity:
  • Ever since Part 2, Jason has worn a mask over his deformed face; the masks in question are a sack in Part 2, and his iconic hockey mask from Part III onwards. It's common in each film for the mask to be removed during the climax, although he first appears without it in Part VI.
  • Jason actually weaponizes the trope in Part VIII. When a biker gang confronts him, he turns to them and takes his mask off, showing them his face. The shot's angle prevents us from seeing it before the later Dramatic Unmasking, but the gang are so horrified by it that they flee in terror.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The circumstances of how he survived his childhood drowning. Part 2 presents it as a case of Never Found the Body, but Jason Lives goes with the theory that Jason did drown and was already a supernatural force from the beginning.
• Megaton Punch: Jason decapitates Julius in part VIII with a single punch. As well as punching through someone's heart in part six. He also does this multiple times when fighting Freddy where he manages to launch him several feet in the air with only one hit.
• Mighty Glacier: In Freddy vs. Jason, he walks slowly and hits heavily. In contrast, his opponent Freddy Krueger (after he is pulled out of the dream world) is more of a Fragile Speedster who gets in plenty of hits but is in big trouble if Jason manages to get one hit in. However it should be noted that Jason himself moves only in very short bursts of speed when he manages to get his hands on someone rather than being totally agile.
• The Mirror Shows Your True Self: Mirrors reveal Jason's true form inside the people he has possessed in Jason Goes to Hell.
• Mobile Menace: Started out like this, popping out of seemingly nowhere to be where he needed to get a possible victim, and gradually turned into a blatant teleporter across Part VIII.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Jason's rotting appearance in parts VII and VIII shows that he has a slightly wider mouth than normally possible - some appearances show somewhat overgrown teeth.
• Mysterious Past: Nothing is known about the time between his "drowning" in Crystal Lake in 1957 and murder of Alice at the turn of the 80s.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Gets ridiculous by the last third of the original series as he gains undead status, in one film at least, teleportation, in the next, body switching, regeneration and a cyborg body, in that order.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: As a zombie. In fact to the point that not even Freddy Krueger can kill him... until finding out about his fear, at least. Still, even Krueger has a tough time with it.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Taking into account all his appearances throughout the original series, he is by the end a cyborg zombie demon spree killer.
• No-Sell: Most attempts to attack Jason wind up as this due to his being Made of Iron. One instance, Jason takes a shovel to the face, and the shovel broke off.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Jason is basically a young boy inside the body of a monster and doesn't kill for any malicious reasons - at least, he can be summed as thinking he's doing the right thing.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: Jason isn't a killer out of malice; he's just an abused child lashing out at the world after the death of his mother. After he gains his vengeance he simply wants to be left alone, but highly threatens to kill about anyone who enters his home as he believes it will make his mother proud of him, even hearing her voice ordering him to murder and make people suffer for the atrocities committed towards them (i.e. being the kids that nearly drowned Jason and the counselors failing to protect him). There are a couple of scenes where he remains somewhat neutral, right in front of people, not attacking and giving a sort of warning until they bother him further.
• Not Quite Dead: Has pulled this off in all the films, except in The Final Chapter where he attempts this 'til Tommy makes sure he ain't coming back.
• Obliviously Evil: It's pretty clear that, despite creating fear and loss, he doesn't understand what he's doing is wrong.
• Offscreen Teleportation: He pulls this off quite a bit in the later installments- notably, he is explicitly supernatural by this point so he might well have this power for all we know, but he never does it onscreen regardless:
  • In Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, this was intentionally accentuated in the script in order to make the killer seem more terrifying, because you couldn't know where he would turn up next. At one point, a teacher who'd been running away from Jason runs into a building that only has one entrance... as Jason is watching him in one place ...and is promptly tossed out of the second story window by Jason, who'd suddenly been waiting for him.
  • In the same film, a character scrambles up the mast of a ship. It is explicitly shown that Jason is just staring at the man climbing the ladder, not even bothering to move. Next cut is the man (who is climbing extremely fast), near about to reach the top a 30 foot mast in seconds, being ripped off mid-climb and being thrown to his death as though Jason was underneath the man the entire time.
  • Jason X used it extensively, but not much as an apparent power. Jason almost never walked into a room. He was just there. Or worse, sometimes he appears outside the (one-exit) room when the victim walked in. Taken to ridiculous heights in the first major gun battle, where three soldiers with full-auto rifles unload on him, never turning away. In the split second of darkness which comes with them accidentally shooting out the lights, Jason is gone.
  • Both Friday the 13th: The Game and Mortal Kombat X make this an explicit power of his, though by his nature as a playable character in those games the teleportation is indeed seen by the player.
• One-Man Army: By himself, Jason has managed to kill over 200 by the time he was finally apprehended, and even when his victims are armed, pursuing him, and on their territory rather than his, Jason has no problem picking them off one by one.
• Our Zombies Are Different: He's a Revenant Zombie, driven by a need to kill, retaining his original personality, as this was his main reaction towards anyone before becoming an undead.
• Possession Burnout: In Jason Goes to Hell. Whenever he Body Surfs into another body, his previous host gruesomely melts away.
• Powers via Possession: Those possessed by him in Jason Goes to Hell also gain his trademark Frankenstein creature's level of Super-Strength and Nigh-Invulnerability with nearly-black blood as a further sign.
• The Power of Hate: One of Jason's main motivating factors is his hatred and rage for those who enter the camp as he was bullied by multiple children back in his day and no one would save him because of their obliviousness towards him drowning as well as for murdering his mother.
• The Power of Love: Jason loves his mother very much and takes vengeance on anybody who enters the camp where she died. His entire devotion to her is why he brutally murders people because he believes it will make her proud of him.
• Present Absence: In both the original film and Part V, Jason is either dead or presumed dead, but either way, he's absent from the main story of either film despite still having a heavy influence on the plot; in the first film, Jason's supposed death forms his mother's motive to prevent Camp Crystal Lake from reopening, with Pamela even developing delusions that Jason is telling her to kill, and in Part V, Jason, although dead, is heavy on the mind of his killer, Tommy Jarvis, and the film's villain, Roy Burns, driven by a tragedy much like Pamela Voorhees', poses as Jason to go on a murderous rampage. Jason's appearances in dreams and hallucinations in both films helps to drive home the point that, even in death, Jason always has a heavy influence on any Friday the 13th movie.
• Progressively Prettier: Inverted for the most part; with each installment after Part 3-D, Jason (already not a looker by any standard) gets uglier and uglier: in Part 3-D, he gets a bloody ax wound from Chris Higgins, followed by the fatal machete strike from Tommy Jarvis in The Final Chapter that destroys his left eye. Once he's resurrected in Jason Lives, Jason is a walking, decayed corpse, but even after that, his appearance degrades, with long stretches of time underwater after Jason Lives and The New Blood further rotting him until he's a gruesome, slimy zombie in Jason Takes Manhattan. After that, however, his appearance does improve somewhat in subsequent films; while never pretty (in fact, he's ugly as sin), Jason's appearances in Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X have brought back some measure of humanity to his looks, to the point that he looks more like a living man than a zombie, implicitly the result of his Healing Factor.
• Psychopathic Manchild: A subtle one. Jason's body is that of a huge, powerful adult, which he puts to use killing, statistically, almost everyone with whom he comes in contact, but his mindset, even prior to zombification, is that of a child, who kills out of a mixture of loneliness, a need to protect his home, a desire to please his mother, a hope that his killings will bring his mother back, which could be a sheer lack of understanding what death means. This is even noted In-Universe, as early as his first "real" film.
• Quizzical Tilt: His usual reaction to interesting things is to tilt his head.
• Rasputinian Death: Before the first movie, he nearly drowned at Camp Crystal Lake. He managed to survive and take shelter in the woods nearby in the following years. Come the second movie, he's impaled with a machete. In the third, he is strung up with a chain and axed in the head. He somehow manages to survive that, but is skewered in the head — once again with a machete — in the fourth film. When his corpse starts twitching, Tommy hacks away at him until he actually remains dead. At least until he's reanimated by lightning.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: When he becomes a cyborg in Jason X, he has red eyes with two yellow irises.
• Red Right Hand: His deformed features, which change film to film.
• Resurrected Murderer: Jason Voorhees spends the first part of the series as a living but savage murderer. After he's killed in the fourth film, he's brought back as a zombie by lightning in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.
• Revenge: Basically the whole point of the franchise. The only reason Jason goes on a mass murdering spree is due to his childhood back in Camp Crystal Lake as he was bullied harshly by the kids and neglected by the counselors which ultimately caused him to drown in the lake or so it seems. After being revealed to be alive and witnessing his mother's death he grows up into a massive Serial Killer Juggernaut who will exact his bloodthirsty revenge on those who he believes (are probably just like the ones who) caused him so much despair in the past. Although he won't actively hunt others and is perfectly fine with being left alone unless someone trespasses on his territory which will make him very upset.
• Sackhead Slasher: Part 2 has him wearing a sack with a single eyehole tied around his neck with a bit of rope to hide his face, which he replaces with his trademark hockey mask in Part III.
• Scars Are Forever: Had his other eye missing for a long time after his resurrection, as originally he died when Tommy Jarvis lodged a machete into his skull, destroying it in the process. This also applies to the axe-wound in his head from Chris Higgins in Part III (He's often shown retaining the axe gouge in the Hockey Mask as well, even when he's gone through multiple ones).
• The Scourge of God: Jason kills those first who are shown to be more promiscuous and so on.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • The New Blood and Jason Takes Manhattan have him imprisoned under Crystal Lake in some way. Naturally it doesn't last; Tina accidentally revives him while trying to resurrect her father in The New Blood, and an accidental electrocution brings him back to live at the start of Jason Takes Manhattan.
  • Jason X has him cryogenically frozen at the beginning of the film. A group of students, not knowing who Jason is, thaw him out in the distant future. Big mistake.
• Serial Killer: He's a serial spree killer, or alternatively a serial mass murderer.
• Shrine to the Fallen: In Part 2, he keeps a shrine to his mother's severed head.
• Silent Antagonist: For most of the time, but there are exceptions;
  • In Part III he responds to getting stabbed in the hand by saying "ow!"
  • He's also capable of speech when possessing bodies in Jason Goes to Hell, but even then he opens his mouth only once in attempt to trick the protagonists.
  • Then there's that one really bizarre moment in Part VIII where he calls out "Mommy, don't let me drown!" in a child's voice before getting submerged in toxic waste. Although, this was likely happening in his head.
• Significant Birth Date: It was the June 13th, 1946. Which was a Friday the 13th.
• Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: While he is insanely tough, Jason doesn't seem to have any form of regeneration, and conspicuously retains the various injuries he suffers from film to film. Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X show that he can be brought down and kept down with sufficient gunfire, it just takes a lot of bullets to do the job. Oddly enough, Jason X does state that he has a Healing Factor.
  • Some of the comic stories also show him have a healing factor, with one showing him able to completely regenerate in seconds from taking the explosion of a grenade head-on, which blew half of his torso away and severed his right arm.
• Super-Strength: Jason was a very strong individual before he became an undead, though his apparent anger was sure to contribute, being able to crush heads like melons, hardly able to be slowed down. However once he becomes an undead, his strength is now increased to monstrous proportions, able to throw a man with enough force to rip off his arm (much to Jason's own surprise) and, at least while giving his "best shot", punch someone's head clean off.
• Superior Successor: Pamela Voorhees only managed to go on one major killing spree before being killed herself. Her son, on the other hand, has slaughtered his way through numerous more victims than she ever did, and Death itself cannot hold him.
• Time Abyss: While he was already immortal after being accidentally resurrected by Tommy Jarvis in the sixth film, being cryogenically frozen by Rowan Fontaine made in centuries old, and he would've been much older had he not been discovered by future scientists.
• This Was His True Form: He gets blown up at the beginning of Jason Goes to Hell and spends almost the entire movie afterward as a little sludgy black eel monster, which Creighton Duke implies is his true form.
• Tranquil Fury: His ground state of being when he's not visibly enraged. As he's pretty much in a constant state of fury he will coldly murder nigh-anyone who comes across his path.
• Trauma Button: Being reminded of his old life as a child, and usually pressing any of these are able to leave him stunned for a certain amount of time.
  • In Part 2, he's temporarily stopped in his tracks when Ginny impersonates his mother with her old sweater.
  • Something similar happens in part 4, when Tommy shaves his head to look like him as a boy. It freezes him up long enough for Trish to knock his mask off, and Tommy to impale his head with his own machete.
  • In Manhattan he froze up when saw the toxic waste covered water flooding the sewer. Not only that, he remembers his last thoughts as a child calling to his mother as he drowned, and pukes up water before getting submerged in the toxic waste.
  • This gets exploited by Freddy Krueger, who notices he's shocked by the presence of water in his boiler room, and then plunges Jason into a nightmare where he relives his original drowning. It backfires when Jason wakes up and proceeds to punt Freddy all over Crystal Lake.
• Undead Child: He appears in this form at the end of Part 1. It largely depends on whether you think he really did drown as a child, and then somehow grew into an adult body.
• Unexplained Recovery:
  • It's established in the first film that he drowned as a child before the film took place. Come Part 2, however, Jason shows up alive and well as an adult, with no explanation as to how he survived the drowning, with the idea that he was a case of Never Found the Body being presented by Paul. However, Jason Lives and Jason Takes Manhattan go with the idea that Jason did indeed drown as a child and came Back from the Dead.
  • Jason Goes to Hell makes no effort to explain how he survived his toxic waste dip at the end of Jason Takes Manhattan - though in that film, it messed up his coordination and to a point, that seems to be happening in JGTH. Jason X similarly leaves it open how he came back after being Dragged Off to Hell at the end of Jason Goes to Hell, though Freddy vs. Jason reveals that Freddy brought him back.
• Unskilled, but Strong: He's got Franken-creature level Super-Strength and Nigh-Invulnerability, but he's not really much of a fighter and relies on sheer brute force to kill for the most part. Prior to becoming Über-Jason in Jason X, Kay-Em 14, programmed with knowledge of martial arts and gunplay, utterly curb-stomps him and blows off An Arm and a Leg, along with his head, and when he takes on Freddy in the real world in Freddy vs. Jason, Freddy jumps around him and lands far more hits than Jason manages to land. To quote Freddy in a Deleted Scene:
  Freddy: You're slow. You're stupid. And you got no style!
• Unstoppable Rage: What drives Jason to kill and butcher almost anyone he comes across due to all of the pain he went through and even thinking about it fuels his anger. By the time of Part VI when he becomes a zombie he has become the incarnation of almost totally unreasonable rage itself and so forth.
• Victory by Endurance: In Jason Takes Manhattan, he faces off against Julius, a boxer, in Good Old Fisticuffs. He never even throws a punch, and stands there soaking up hits until Julius wears himself out, after which Jason punches his head clean off.
• Villainous Mother-Son Duo: Played with. In the first movie, after Pamela fails to kill Alice, Jason ambushes Alice for one last scare although the second movie verifies Jason's attack was All Just a Dream.
• Villains Act, Heroes React: Mostly inverted, surprisingly. Jason seldom leaves his home turf, and almost every Friday plot is kicked off by outside intruders taking their business to Crystal Lake. He never pursues any survivors of his previous rampages either, unlike Freddy or Michael Myers. He also stays dead after Part IV until Tommy Jarvis revives him trying to destroy his corpse. Part VII? He's freed from his underwater chains by Tina's powers being misdirected. Part VIII? A cruiser fries his chains and lets him hitch a ride. Jason Goes to Hell? FBI agents destroyed his body forcing him to find another. Once again, he stays dead afterwards until Mr. Krueger summons him back to the world of the living.
• Walking Spoiler: At least in the first film, to a point, since any info about him gives away the killer's motivation.
• Weaksauce Weakness:
  • Parts VI and VII go with the theory that if Jason is trapped beneath the waters of Crystal Lake, the area where he originally drowned, he will be immobilized for a long period of time.
  • Anything that brings out memories of his childhood, such as someone impersonating his mother, a young Tommy Jarvis shaving his head to match Jason's younger appearance, or Freddy Kreuger forcing him to relive his childhood drowning memories, will at the very least stun him or cause him to pause, leaving him vulnerable briefly. Of course, in many cases, if others don't make this opportunity count it turns into a pretty nasty Berserk Button instead.
  • Of all the things that affected him, a tidal wave of raw sewage and toxic waste severely harmed him.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Freddy vs. Jason reveals that he had a fear of water when he was a child. Even as a zombie he's not especially fond of it; being bound to the waters from Camp Crystal Lake is one of very, very, very few things that can subdue him. However, if in control, water won't stop him from willingly entering it, as he was able to pull off a few kills in water, possibly able to float or (in the 8th film) teleport across.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Jason is one of the best known slashers in horror history, but somewhere deep (very deep) inside is a Momma's Boy that deeply misses her and feels he has to please her. Also, as a dream sequence in Freddy vs. Jason showed, the campers were pretty relentless in picking on him when he was just a small, deformed boy.
• Would Hurt a Child: When he was alive, he at least held Tommy Jarvis as a hostage while his sister was trying to strike him down. After his death, he's shown being intrigued by children but ultimately leaving them alone.
  • Subverted in the spin-off novel Hate-Kill-Repeat, where Jason is all-but-explicitly shown to have killed a family including a toddler and a baby during his pursuit of another target.
• You Can't Kill What's Already Dead: While already pretty tough as a human, he becomes almost unstoppable after he's resurrected as a so-called zombie.

Freddy vs. Jason

"..."

Played by: Ken Kirzinger, Spencer Stump and Douglas Tait

Jason. My special, special boy.

In Freddy vs. Jason, Jason, awakened by Freddy pretending to be his mother, follows her order and go back to his regular routine. Freddy of course, doesn't know who he is playing with.

---

• Back from the Dead: Nothing unusual for Jason, who is resurrected by Freddy and crawls out of his own grave to go on the latest in a long line of killing sprees.
• Balls of Steel: Freddy tries to kick him in the groin, and he ends up seeing a No-Sell and having Jason hurting his leg by grabbing it.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Downplayed; Freddy is the root of the movie's conflict, but, despite resurrecting Jason to get the ball rolling on his own return to power, Freddy has next to no control over him, and by the movie's halfway point, they're both independently a threat to the protagonists.
• Bully Magnet: During the dream sequence, young Jason is shown being chased, teased, and mercilessly tormented by a group of campers who push him into the lake and leave him to drown.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Ironically, it's a much worse villain who discovers this; Freddy resurrected Jason to slaughter a few people in Springwood and get the residents fearing their old boogeyman again, allowing Freddy to regain his power. Freddy didn't count on Jason not stopping even after the plan had worked; Jason steals one of Freddy's kills, and when they're set against each other, Jason gives Freddy the beating of a lifetime.
• Evil vs. Evil: As the premise and title of the movie note, it comes down to Jason, an implacable engine of death, versus Freddy, a soul-eating dream demon with a penchant for murdering children.
• Eye Scream: He gets Freddy's claws shoved into his eyes, causing intense bleeding. Still doesn't stop him from fighting back.
• Fingore: He gets his fingers cut off. He doesn't feel the pain but this actually incapacitates him as he can't hold his machete.
• Foil: To Freddy Krueger himself, fittingly enough. They're both creatively violent spree killers with facial disfigurements and a penchant for slaughtering teenagers, but they're total opposites in every other way. Freddy is a chatty sadist who became a killer for his own sick enjoyment, while Jason is a silent killing machine who doesn't drag out his victims' suffering for too long and became what he is through tragedy. Freddy dons a colorful attire, shows his hideous face, and wields impressive supernatural powers, while Jason dresses in drab black and gray, wears a mask to hide his disfigurement, and relies on physical strength rather than otherworldly power. Freddy is a ghost who attacks his victims in their dreams, while Jason is a physical presence who attacks his victims in the real world. Jason is a Mighty Glacier, while Freddy is more of a Fragile Speedster. Finally, at the end of the day, Jason is very much the lesser of two evils; left alone, he'll leave others alone, whereas Freddy will always look for a way to continue his reign of terror and collect souls.
• The Heavy: Freddy is running the show for the most part, but since he has no power over the material world until people start remembering and fearing him again, it's Jason who does the heavy lifting for the first half of the movie.
• Implacable Man: He stops for nothing, because practically nothing can kill him.
• Ironic Fear: In Freddy vs. Jason, it's revealed he's deathly afraid of water due to his childhood drowning. A fair enough reason in-and-of itself, if not for the fact that his murders often involves him having to wade through/being thrown in large bodies of water. It's implied this fear was long buried deep within his psyche, and it takes Freddy some prodding to bring it out of him.
• Lesser of Two Evils: The teenagers choose to fight against Freddy first because Jason is comparatively less of a threat. The spectator can agree with this.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: While he is still a mass murdering maniac, he is more sympathetic than Freddy in many ways:
  • While Freddy deliberately seeks victims to kill wherever he goes, Jason mostly sticks to Camp Crystal Lake and only hunts those who he sees as trespassers.
  • Jason was a bullied child who lost his mother, the only person who cared for him. He never had much hope for a normal life, due to his physical deformities and mental disabilities, and in fact was callously drowned as a child, so his psychopathic rage against the world is understandable, even if he's still a villain. Freddy, by contrast, also has a tragic childhood, but has no loved ones and was perfectly able to blend in with society, making his crimes less excusable.
  • Jason is content to simply kill his victims, however brutally. He doesn't get off on torture or Mind Rape or eating your soul, as Freddy does.
• Made of Iron: Despite the many, many injuries Jason takes while fighting Freddy, including (but not limited to) multiple stabbings and blunt force trauma, he keeps on coming. Even when he collapses at the end of the fight, he's right as rain after some rest, rising out of Crystal Lake no worse for wear.
• Malevolent Masked Man: His face is hidden by an eerie hockey mask.
• Man on Fire: One brave soul at a rave tries soaking Jason in Everclear and setting him on fire. Jason scarcely seems to notice, continuing to rampage as though nothing were amiss.
• No-Sell: He barely reacts to being set on fire, shot, hit, thrown in the air, or squashed. Making him bleed is already a challenge, and even then, it doesn't do much.
• Psychopathic Manchild: He only kills people because he sees them as the teens who bullied and neglected him when he was a child. To add the fact that he is a complete Mama's Boy. Justified since he lacked any education and social interactions for most of his life and is basically a walking corpse.
• Silent Antagonist: Being a decomposed corpse, he can't utter a word, contrasting him against Freddy, who seldom stops talking. During a dream sequence, he is seen as the human child he used to be, but even then he doesn't talk and is only heard crying.
• Sympathy for the Devil: The teenagers seem to feel some pity for Jason, even after he murdered several of their classmates, when Freddy is torturing him in the dream world.
• Unstoppable Rage: After all that Freddy put him through over the course of the movie, Jason is NOT HAPPY to see him once he's forced into the real world, and spends the rest of the movie expressing just how displeased he has been made. Painfully.
• Unwitting Pawn: As far as Jason knew, it was his beloved mother who motivated him to crawl out of his grave and go to Springwood. In reality, it was Freddy in disguise, and Jason is not happy to realize this.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: As his dreams show, he used to be a shy kid whom only needed love and had no harmful intents.
• White Mask of Doom: He wears his signature hockey mask, although it becomes yellow-greyish due to being covered in dirt.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: He is revealed to be afraid of water since it brings back bad memories of his childhood. Freddy exploits it for his bad deeds.

Rebooted continuity

Played by: Caleb Guss (as a child) and Derek Mears (as an adult)

Development Hell says: "To Be Continued".

In Friday the 13th (2009), Jason has now returned to his roots of the first films: He is once again a territorial survivalist who lives in the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake and slays anyone who dares to disturb its peace.

---

• 13 Is Unlucky: Claims 13 victims over the course of the film.
• Adaptational Badass: Jason is more agile this time around, while his other counterpart could run pretty fast when he was alive but wasn't as agile, and eventually became slower due to his resurrection. He's also smarter and uses traps and tactics to snare several victims.
• Adaptational Intelligence: Jason acts like a cunning predator and is said by the filmmakers to be smarter than his victims this time (though is still fooled by Whitney's act).
• Adaptational Villainy: Unlike classic Jason who kills his victims quickly without making them suffer and has more sympathetic qualities, this Jason is more malicious and violent; he's actually more prone to prolonging and slowly killing victims, including hanging a girl in her sleeping bag over a fire to cook her to death and throwing an axe into a victim's back to use as bait before finishing him off.
• Adaptational Wimp: Due to the reboot never getting any sequels, Jason never becomes supernatural or has superhuman strength, durability or a healing factor like his classic counterpart. Here he's just a cunning and well built but ordinary man.
• Ax-Crazy: He's still Jason, which means blood will be spilt. Along with being more vicious and bloodthirsty as he is more willing to ferociously murder his victims in cruel fashion rather than practically killing them quickly.
• Badass Longcoat: This more agile and cunning version of Jason wears a fairly short and surprisingly stylish coat.
• Bald of Evil: This time from the very start, though there are a few scraggly strands of hair remaining.
• Berserk Button:
  • Just as in the original he really hates being insulted or bullied. As shown where he is unmasked and the sorry fool who said his face "wasn't right" had a machete cleaved into him.
  • Staying true to the original as well is that he also severely dislikes people entering Camp Crystal Lake as he mainly wants to be left alone.
• Big Bad: Of the reboot.
• Cool Mask: Even he thinks that hockey masks are cool, as he outright abandons his makeshift sack-mask when he finds one in Donnie's warehouse. He even takes a moment to admire his new look in a mirror after he puts the mask on.
• Crazy Survivalist: More so than in the original series.
• The Dreaded: It's implied that the authorities and locals in Crystal Lake discourage people from looking into Jason's killings to make sure that no one else dies from crossing his path. One resident even directly warns Clay that Jason just wants to be left alone and warns him that anyone who goes missing around Crystal Lake is pretty much guaranteed to be dead by his hands.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: As per the original.
• Freudian Excuse: In this continuity, Jason witnessed his mother's beheading as a child, something that clearly scarred him for life and contributed to his violent behavior.
• Genius Bruiser: This Jason acts more of a cunning predator and uses far more of his advantages within the camp.
• Hearing Voices: After his mother's death, a young Jason starts hearing her voice in his head saying "kill for Mother".
• Hero Killer: Kills fake final girl Jenna near the end. It's also implied that he killed Whitney at the end of the movie after jumping out of the lake to drag her down with him.
• Idiot Savant: This version of Jason is far more like a predator than the quite intelligent juggernaut of the original. He digs out an extensive tunnel network, and deliberately uses hunting tactics to winnow out or kill his victims. He is, however, still a mentally deficient child grown up into a Psychopathic Manchild.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Whitney seemingly kills Jason by burying his machete deep into his chest.
• Lean and Mean: Not so tall as in Freddy vs. Jason, but he is now thinner than in the original series.
• Lightning Bruiser: Jason is very strong but also incredibly fast and agile.
• Machete Mayhem: As expected.
• Not So Above It All: Jason is explicitly seen choosing the hockey mask over his default sack-mask once the latter is removed, framed as if he is a schoolgoer deliberating on what to wear that day. Complete with examining himself in a cracked mirror upon putting the mask on.
• Red Right Hand: His deformed features, caused by hydrocephalus.
• Sadist: Jason is way more of a tactical hunter in this version, which means it gives him more options to toy with his prey and is prone to making his victims suffer as he gives gives them a much slower and more painful deaths.
• Silent Antagonist: He never got a chance to say anything.
• Tunnel King: The first real differentiation from the past, as he has dug a tunnel network under the Camp Crystal Lake and around the residing areas prior to events in the reboot. It also works as a justification for his Mobile Menace tendencies.
• Uncertain Doom: Jason is left seemingly dead at the end of the film, but bursts out of the dock after Clay and Whitney drop his body into Crystal Lake. The movie ends without clarifying if Jason truly survived his injuries or if it's a dream/hallucinatory fakeout, like the endings of the first three original films.
• Unexplained Recovery: Just like in the original films, though this time without the ambiguously supernatural element; Jason supposedly drowned as a child, but somehow survived.
• The Voiceless: He gets hanged by a metal chain and doesn't make a sound.

---

"Oh, but he's back. He's the man behind the mask."