As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- If Pamela Voorhees' ultimate goal was to stop the camp's re-opening... Why didn't she just kill Steve and be done with it (other than the obvious "She's insane" handwave)? No yuppie funding, no camp revival.
- It's probably not just about closing the camp, it's also about sending a gruesome message to neglectful councilors everywhere. Also,keep in mind Pamela's a vengeful sociopath who blames the entire camp for her son's death. Just listen to the speech she gives Alice. In her twisted mind, everyone associated with Camp Crystal lake is guilty.
- It's mentioned in the first film that she initially does just try scaring people away. Attempts before Steve were stopped with various fires.
- Killing Steve alone wouldn't just stop someone else from opening it. Even long after the fire incidents mentioned above, Steve still tried to reopen the camp. By causing a massive bloodbath at the camp, it would be enough to make anyone else who was going to attempt a reopen think twice.
- And yet, straightforward options like razing the camp facilities to the ground, making it far too costly for any would-be future camp operators to bother with, never enter her mind. Face it: the woman simply enjoyed killing people; being pissed at the counselors was more excuse than motive.
- It's also possible that she's reluctant to do so much damage to the area that she'd be destroying whatever few locations there still remind her of any positive experiences (however few) she might've had there, back when Jason was an infant and hadn't yet been subjected to bullying for his mental and physical abnormalities. After all, if she'd really wanted to render Crystal Lake unsuitable for a summer camp, she could've swiped a few truckloads of toxic waste and dumped them in the water, turning the whole lake into a Superfund site and causing the whole area to be abandoned.
- And re: Betsy Palmer's motivation she gave the character - Jason was the result of a Teen Pregnancy that Pamela's parents disowned her for, so she has a hatred of premarital sex. Thus her main targets are young people who are more likely to do it before marriage. Pamela doesn't seem to have anything against Steve, and she only kills him because he stumbled upon her rampage in the middle of the night. She just wants to punish young people and do it herself. Sure she could have burned the whole place to the ground, but that doesn't allow her to pick off the counsellors one by one and enjoy it as much as she appeared to.
- Is there any explanation of why Jason's body was never recovered from the lake in order to be given a proper autopsy and funeral? Also, if he was Not Quite Dead to begin with, why didn't he just came back to his mother?
- Presumably his body was never found. It's said in part 2 that he saw his mother decapitated. He probably got lost and just had to survive alone and somehow managed to all those years. Why wasn't he crying out for help or anything? It's pretty much established that young Jason was mentally disabled so it can be chalked up to that. He survived on instinct, but didn't have the brains to do the logical thing to be found.
- Its because Jason was indeed dead according to the filmmakers. It was just an Ass Pull to crash in on the first film’ss success. Jason being disable doesn’t hold water either since he shown to be more intelligent than that by founding Alice and sneaking into her house unnoticed. The later sequel said that he just came back from the dead.
- Just how did a sixty year old woman manage to lift Bill long enough to shove an arrow through his eye and into a wooden door to pin him to it? For that matter, how did she even accomplish the arrow shove? That would take some serious amount of force.
- Crazy old lady strength?
- Presumably with the same logic of how Jason was able to walk off drowning, a machete to the shoulder, a hanging, and an axe to the head in the first few movies when he was supposedly an ordinary human at the time. Maybe whatever curse that seems to have afflicted Jason, his mom, and Roy Burns seems to give them unreasonable strength.
- She probably lured him onto the archery range and shot him full of Annoying Arrows, then cut his throat when he staggered back to the building to try to escape and/or warn Alice. Then she propped the body against the door and drove one more arrow into it, probably with a hammer.
- Around seventeen minutes into the movie, there is a shaky camera shot from behind some trees that initially appears to be a Murderer P.O.V. accompanied by a scary musical cue, which on first glance seems to imply that Pamela Voorhees is stalking Alice when she goes to talk to Bill. However, taking the narrative directly at chronological face-value and considering the fact that Mrs. Voorhees is driving her Jeep toward rather than away from the camp when she appears in the following scene to pick up Annie makes it appear as though Pamela is driving from the opposite direction (making it extremely unlikely that she was just at Camp Crystal Lake in the previous scene). Of course, this seems like it could be an easy potential Retcon of the Epileptic Trees scenario that it was actually Jason rather than Pamela spying on Alice in that moment (be it in his undead child form from Alice's "dream" or as a fully-grown adult, depending upon which explanation a fan chooses to accept), which would in turn possibly explain how he knew what Alice looked like to target her in the opening sequence of he second film. However, that was almost certainly not the intended implication of the filmmakers at the time. Was this actually supposed to be Mrs. Voorhees's POV (which might explain how Pamela deduces where to target Annie in the upcoming scene, since Alice does mention to Bill that she has not arrived at the camp yet)? Was it simply intended to be an initial false POV shot to establish a suspenseful atmosphere, and make viewers question when the killer's POV was or was not actually stalking victims later in the film? Some third possibility?
- How did Brenda die? The last shot we see where she's alive, she is standing directly in front of the archery range. Yet, the next time we see her dead body, no arrows. In fact, there are no visible injuries. Just blood smears across her skin and nightgown. Was she arrowed to death, or what?
- Arrows are the most likely culprit, but Pamela could have killed her any number of ways. In the script, Marcie was supposed to be shot to death at the archery range, but obviously they changed it to her getting an axe to the face in the outhouse. Maybe Pamela just approached her as she did Alice, pretending to be a helpful figure (she could claim that she was following the same crying child Brenda was) and strangled her or something while she was distracted.
- There's also Ralph hiding in the pantry; you have to wonder how long he was in there before Alice found him.
