I’m going to focus on the first two films of the franchise, since I’m primarily concerned with the relationship between Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) and her son, Jason, as well as the implications I see in it. Also, by the third film, the format for all of them has been established, and has thus become too redundant to go over the storyline of every movie.

We all know the format: either Jason or his mother (or copycat killer Roy Burns), violently kills off a number of young adults at or near Camp Crystal Lake, or at Chris Higgins‘s local homestead, or in a halfway house where Tommy Jarvis is, or in Manhattan, or in a spacecraft in the future, or in the Springwood, Ohio setting of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Where the killings happen doesn’t really matter, as it’s all just an indulgent blood-fest, typically with the final girl trope.

Let’s be frank: the films are good mindless fun and entertainment (emphasis on mindless), but the critics are right to deride them. They’re schlocky slasher films, intended only to capitalize on the success of far superior slasher films like Halloween, Black Christmas, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or Psycho, the sequels even more so meant to capitalize on the success of the first Friday the 13th.

Still, however, there must be a way to explain how popular these films are with the masses so that one doesn’t insult the intelligence of Friday‘s fans. I’d like to attempt such an explanation, with an understanding that the basic elements are there, if so unconsciously, to make a good premise…if only the execution, as well as the development of the themes I’m about to discuss, was done better, without such an emphasis on just kill, kill, kill…ma, ma, ma.

I’m a strong believer in the power of the unconscious mind, and while I’m sure the screenwriters of these movies only consciously meant to create simple stories of a killer on a bloody rampage, with the intent of gaining maximum box office success, I believe there are archetypal elements deep inside the collective psyche that got put into these films (especially the first few, before things got too self-indulgent) regardless of conscious intent.

To uncover what these elements are, we first need to examine the motives behind Pamela’s and Jason’s bloodlust. In dialectical contrast to their murderous hatred of anyone they meet, they have the deepest, most intense mother/son love you could imagine…and mother/son love has already been traditionally idealized as the greatest love of all.

The evil comes in, however, when we consider how the love of this mother/son dyad is a narcissistic one, based on a feeling that each of them is just an extension and mirror-reflection of the other. The two are trapped in Lacan‘s Imaginary, incapable of and unwilling to go out into the healthier social and cultural world of the Symbolic. Hence, anybody else out there, the Other rather than the other, is just to be killed.

Other rationalizations for the killings include a moral abomination of the ‘sinfulness’ of the camp counsellors–enjoying premarital sex, smoking weed, the public indecency of playing strip Monopoly or wandering around outside in one’s panties. Tied to this sinfulness is a belief that the children at summer camp won’t be adequately watched–hence, Jason’s drowning.

Thus, Camp Crystal Lake must never be reopened, and any attempt to do so by these sinful camp counsellors will necessitate their deaths. OK, apart from the Lacanian stuff I mentioned above, we all know this–I’m just reviewing the basics here…but what does it all mean?

Here’s where my interpretation comes in. Now, since art, properly understood, is a dialogue between the artist and the audience–not just an artist saying his or her ‘only meaning’ for the creation, but a meaning evolved and developed between the artist and audience through a back-and-forth of creation and interpretation–I feel free to interpret the meaning of these movies in my way. (I also hope my interpretation can elevate the movies a bit…if at all possible.) Here goes…

Ever notice how Jason could be heard as a pun on Jesu (as in “Joy of Man’s Desiring”)? You should see where I’m going with this, Dear Reader.

Note how the superstition behind Friday the 13th is associated with the Last Supper, in which Judas Iscariot is often considered the 13th guest, and the day after was Good Friday, when Christ was killed. Judas betrayed Jesus, as the camp counsellors betrayed Jason (in his mother’s opinion, at least).

Camp Crystal Lake (the name being a pun on Christ) can be associated with the Garden of Eden, where sin lost us paradise. Naked Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit has been seen as symbolic of sex, just like the camp counsellors taking off their clothes and going about publicly in their underwear (think of Genesis 2:25), or having sex. If Adam and Eve eat of that fruit, on that day they shall surely die (Genesis 2:17); they die metaphorically on that day, losing their innocence; the counsellors die literally on that day for publicly undressing, having sex, and smoking pot. Steven Christy (Peter Brouwer), who would suffer the little children to come unto him (Mark 10:14), that is, to come to his summer camp, has a surname that is another pun on Christ.

The point I’m trying to make here, which should be obvious to you by now, Dear Reader, is that Mrs. Voorhees and her son are a perverse Madonna and Child. That deep love between a mother and her son is epitomized in all of that old Christian iconography.

By seeing Jason as an evil Jesus, I’m not calling him the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation (Go to this horror movie for that.). I mean instead that Jason and his mother, in murdering sinners rather than preaching repentance and forgiving them, represent the oppressive, authoritarian aspects of the Church. Jesus saves, but Jason slays. Some call Mary the Co-redeemer, but Pamela Voorhees is, if you will, the Co-reddener.

If Camp Crystal Lake is the Garden of Eden, then she and her son also represent the cherubim, their knives, axes, and machetes representing the flaming sword to keep the sinners out of paradise (Genesis 3:24). The purity and innocence of the place must be protected from fornicators and pot-heads, for the sake of children like Jason.

The rationalization for the Voorhees terror, therefore, is to protect children from danger and death, yet this ‘protection’ hypocritically involves danger and death. The Voorhees’s ‘Church’ is really just a front for the most reactionary of conservative thinking. The camp counsellors aren’t even moderate leftists: they’re just liberals who want to be able to relax and have a good time every now and then. Pamela, like any far right-winger, expects the staff of Camp Crystal Lake to be working non-stop to ensure the safety of the kids. If the staff slacks off at all, then like Amon Göth, she’ll pick them off one by one, but with a knife or axe instead of a rifle.

When I speak of a ‘perverse Madonna and Child,” I don’t mean it as a comment on religion and spirituality per se, but as representative of reactionary, conservative authoritarian thinking, how religion is used (if only symbolically in these movies) to justify power and control over others. The year the first film came out, in 1980, as well that of as its first sequel, 1981, is fitting given these were the first of the reactionary Reagan/Thatcher years.

Going into the mid-1980s, there was a debate on CNN’s Crossfire about whether or not PMRC censorship of popular music’s racier lyrics was valid; opposed to it, Frank Zappa also warned of the US moving in the direction of what he called a “fascist theocracy.” The two conservatives he was debating scoffed at him, but he didn’t say the US was already a fascist theocracy at the time: he said that “the Reagan administration…[was] steering us right down that pipe.” (Reagan, incidentally, had fundamentalist Christian beliefs and supported the religious right.)

Well, look at the US today, under Trump, with Roe vs Wade overturned (to protect the unborn child, ostensibly, but actually to curb ‘fornication’ and to control women’s reproductive systems), and with masked ICE men violently removing people from the ‘Camp Crystal Lake,’ if you will, of the US, and shooting in the face anyone who resists. How like Jason’s violence, with his goalie mask and murder weapons.

The notion of the deep love and connection between Mary and the Christ child is not, of course, limited to Christianity. Pagan notions of a mother-goddess and her son/consort abounded in the ancient world, in such forms as Isis and Horus. The relationship is archetypal…and narcissistic. Robert Graves dealt with the idea in The White Goddess when he said, “Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of her deity, of man’s dependence on her for life.” Pamela’s undying love for Jason, which involved an unending quest to find new victims in whom to avenge his death, is an extension of her own narcissism.

Similarly, Jason in the sequels saw in his mother a metaphorical mirror of himself. He endlessly avenges her death, with new victims, as she did his. She and he are spiritually inseparable, just as the authoritarian leader and his mindless, jackbooted soldiers are, as ICE are for the US government. Properly understood, the son is virtually indistinguishable from the mother (at least in terms of will and motivation, if not in terms of other things, which I’ll go into soon enough), just as the mindless ICE agents do only the will of their fascist government, with no individual will of their own, obeying orders uncritically.

So indistinguishable is Mrs. Voorhees from Jason that at the beginning of Scream, Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) confuses mother with son, incorrectly naming Jason as the killer in the first Friday movie and forgetting that he didn’t show up until the sequels. The same “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” echoed, reverberated whispering is heard in most of the films, regardless of whether mother or son is the killer.

That whispering–so often misheard as “chi, chi, chi, ha, ha, ha” because of the heavy echo, reverb, and distortion resulting from the whispering of “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” by film composer Harry Manfredini into a microphone, then running it through an Echoplex machine–is short for “Kill her, Mommy.” Pamela hears Jason saying this over and over in her head, her imitating the child’s high-pitched voice as she chases Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) during the climax of the first film. There are variations on the whispering in the sequels: in Part Two, for example, one usually hears only “ki, ki, ki,” and only occasionally “ma, ma, ma.”

The sameness or variation in the whispering doesn’t ultimately matter: the continuity underlines how Jason and his mother are spiritually, if not materially, one and the same person. The same is true of the ruling class and their thuggish soldiers (as I see them represented by the murderous mother and son), who often use religion and its priggish morality to justify their authoritarian grip on power.

So, when Mrs. Voorhees dies, Jason is to take over the killing duties. Accordingly, two months after her decapitation by Alice, Jason kills her in her kitchen with an ice pick in her temple after she sees the severed head of his mother in her fridge. Just as his mother avenged his death, he avenges hers.

Here’s the problem, though: if Jason never drowned, but she only thought he did (as the story was ret-conned), wouldn’t she have learned he never died soon enough? She had over twenty years to learn. If she knew the whole time, or much of or most of the time, wouldn’t that have deflated her rage enough not to kill (so many)? Also, how was adult Jason able to find where Alice was living?

I propose a different explanation, one that takes into account the Mary/Jesus symbolism discussed above, and which allows for the unavoidable supernatural element in these movies. He was resurrected, given an adult body, and had the clairvoyance to find where Alice was.

Why not resurrected? He was certainly resurrected in a number of the other sequels, and his ability to keep on living after other injuries, ones that should have been fatal, strongly implies supernatural abilities. I’d say Mom raised Jason from the dead, just as God raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 10:9). Similarly, just as the resurrected Christ had a spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:42-44), one “imperishable” and “raised in power,” not weakness, so does Jason have an imperishable, powerful body, one whose growth to adulthood seems even to have been accelerated.

To get back to “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma…”, who is saying it, really? Does Jason’s ghost say it to his mother in the first film, her imitating his voice as I described it above? In the sequels, does her ghost chant it in Jason’s mind, implying not only a psychic link between the two killers, but also that her chanting “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” in his mind’s ear means she’s calling him “Mommy,” thus further cementing my idea that the identity of the two is of only one spiritual presence?

In any case, as we know, Jason doesn’t talk at all: his voice is in his murder weapons (recall that amusing guest appearance he made on the Arsenio Hall Show to promote Jason Takes Manhattan).

His muteness, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, is linked to his social isolation. Recall what I said above about his dyadic relationship with his mother, as a reflection of his being stuck in the narcissism of the Imaginary Order. To enter the social and cultural world of the Symbolic, one must use language. The Symbolic is the healthy world of human relationships.

That a deformed, mentally disabled child would have extreme difficulties being a part of the Symbolic and joining normal society would be an understatement. His drowning in the lake complicates matters further: it’s representative of not only never leaving the Imaginary, but also of being trapped in the traumatic, undifferentiated, inexpressible Chaos of Lacan’s Real Order.

The non-differentiated, formlessness of the lake is symbolic of the cosmic ocean, where all begins and ends (i.e., the Great Flood; consider also the rain storm in the first film as associated with the Deluge, after which the ‘sons of God’ lay with the ‘daughters of men’…that is, fornicated). Jason died in the lake, and Alice’s Carrie-like nightmare of him coming up at her in the boat and pulling her down in the water is also to be associated with the cosmic ocean as bringing us all back to death at the end of the world.

Just as Jason has supernatural abilities as I described above, and just as his mother is intolerant of sexual indulgence, so were Carrie and her religious fanatic mother respectively, hence how fitting it was to add Alice’s Carrie-like nightmare to the end of the first movie. As for Part III‘s ending, it’s fitting for Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell) to have a similar nightmare of Mrs. Voorhees coming up from the water and dragging her from her boat into it, even though Chris doesn’t seem to know (oddly, considering how close she is to Camp Crystal Lake) who Jason or his mother are. The point is that it further reinforces how Jason and his mother are one, especially in the undifferentiated, traumatizing Chaos-Real of the water.

At the climax of Part II, Ginny Field (Amy Steel) discovers Jason’s shrine of his mother (how like one of these, if you will!), with her severed head. Knowing the ‘legend’ of him seeing Alice decapitate his mother and him seeking revenge (as she had for him), Ginny stands before Pamela’s head to block its view from Jason, her wearing Pamela’s old sweater. Using her wits and knowledge of child psychology, Ginny takes a gamble impersonating Mrs. Voorhees, appealing to his sense of filial duty and obedience to his mother (“Jason, Mother is talking to you!”). The only human relationship he can understand is one of power and authority. The only reason he’ll listen to her, and not kill her, is that she, as his mother (and also as a reflection/extension of himself), has absolute power over him.

Mindless killers like him (police, the military, ICE, etc.) similarly see human relationships only in this hierarchical sense. If you’re ‘beneath’ me, I can beat and kill you; if you’re ‘above’ me, you can beat and kill me. There is no sense of reciprocity, no mutuality, no connection, no communication.

Within my framework of Jason and his mother as a perverse version of Jesus and Mary, it’s ironic that ‘the Word made flesh’ speaks no words in these movies. (“Ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” would just be the voice of a ghost ringing in his head, not him talking.) Instead, Jason, in his Oedipal relationship with Mrs. Voorhees, speaks only in the primitive, pre-verbal form of communication–as Wilfred Bion conceptualized it–of projective identification and negative containment (as symbolized by all the stabbings and slashing).

Normally, a mother contains her baby’s agitations and distress through a soothing process Bion called maternal reverie. The container, ♀︎, is yonic in symbolism; the contained, ♂︎, is phallic. This is a calming, positive containment. In pathological parent/child relationships, though, as in the case with Pamela and Jason, the containment of the child’s agitations and distress is the opposite of soothing and calming. Traumas aren’t processed–they’re aggravated, intensified, leading to what Bion called a nameless dread…negative containment.

Jason, thus, unable to develop a normal ability to think, to process external stimuli, and to grow in K (knowledge), he cannot speak and express himself verbally. He can only communicate in that primitive, non-verbal way, which involves projecting onto other people. And since all he can communicate is projections of pain, he does so through negative containment, in which the phallic contained is a knife, machete, axe, or pitchfork, and the yonic container is a stab or slash wound.

This kind of mindless, violent communication is also typical of the hired thugs of a fascist state. The bloody, brutal way in which we see the victims killed in these movies (as demonstrated by the special makeup effects of people like Tom Savini) also leads, disturbingly, to a desensitization to violence. As I said above, it’s an interesting coincidence how this franchise began in the 1980s, with the rise of Reagan/Thatcher neoliberalism and Zappa’s fears of a movement in the direction of a fascist theocracy, and yet here we are, with at best minimal outrage from politicians at the ongoing Gaza genocide, the murder of Renee Good, the state of perpetual war around the world ever since 9/11, and the kidnapping (on baseless charges) of the president of Venezuela and his wife. Atrocities in the real world have been reduced to mere entertainment.

As the sequels of the franchise go on, we notice that the setting shifts farther and farther away from the Eden of Camp Crystal Lake: first, to places nearby (in the novelization of Part II, Alice has returned to the town of Crystal Lake, where Jason kills her–page 6), then to Tommy Jarvis’s halfway home, then to Manhattan, to a spaceship in the future, to Freddy Krueger’s Springwood…and like Jesus, Jason even harrows hell! By analogy, the American settler-colonial state massacred the Native Americans, then engaged in imperialist war and plunder…often, and to a significant extent at least, killing in the name of Christ.

And just as Jason’s mindless, pointless killings seem to go on and on forever, in all their perpetual brutality, so do those of the US empire, to this day, both locally and internationally.

As I said at the beginning of this analysis, I’m not saying that the writers of the films of this franchise intended the allegory that I’m formulating here; that’s all my invention. They were just dragging out a gore-fest to make a maximum amount of money, which by the way is what capitalism and imperialism by extension are all about. The associations I’m making reflect unconscious ideas we all have floating around in our minds, for such is the heritage of our collective unconscious: religious iconography representing our lofty moral ideals, lashing out violently when those ideals aren’t lived up to, violence as a form of control, self-righteous narcissism, parental authoritarianism expanding into state authoritarianism.

As a result, every day feels like an unlucky day.