Mute masked murderer Jason Voorhees is the most iconic figure from the long-running Friday the 13th franchise, so why is he missing from some installments of the series? As far as gnarled faces of the slasher pantheon go, Jason Voorhees is one of the sub-genre's most instantly recognizable villains. The waterlogged madman has come a long way since he first debuted, sans his trademark hockey mask, in 1981's Friday the 13th Part II. Butchered by the MPAA or otherwise, Part 2 established Jason as one of the horror's genre most iconic villains.
Since then the hulking monster has become synonymous with the Friday the 13th franchise, having so far survived 11 films—including trips to Hell and space—and an inevitable gloomy, misjudged late 2000s remake. But despite Jason's ubiquity and iconic status, the character doesn't show up in every Friday the 13th property. It's strange to see an installment missing its most famous ingredient, so why is the villain absent from not one, not two, but three Friday the 13th projects?
Jason's absence from the first film was infamous enough to crop up as a bit of life-or-death trivia in Scream's opening sequence. But there's a reasonable explanation for the first film's lack of Jason, as it's more of a Giallo-inspired whodunit murder mystery than the later sequels. As for the rest of Jason's absences from the franchise, they can be explained by a producer's doomed attempt to reboot the series and an unrelated TV show cashing in on the popular title.
As anyone who screamed in frustration at Drew Barrymore's Casey Becker in Scream can tell you, Jason's mother Pamela Voorhees is the killer in 1980's Friday the 13th. Played by Betsy Palmer, who took the part to pay for car repairs, the character's existence is an egregious twist, as the film implies one of the cast will be behind the murders, making her appearance in the film's closing stretch very convenient. Jason does indeed appear in this first installment, but Pamela Voorhees does all of Friday the 13th's killing; technically, her son is only seen in Alice's jump scare dream. Dream Jason also looks nothing like the killer who viewers soon came to know and love, and didn't really come into his own as the franchise's iconic killer until Part 2.
The name Roy Burns is very familiar to most fans of Friday the 13th, though often not for good reasons. Released in 1985 to both critical and fan disgust, the fifth franchise installment, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, saw Jason replaced by Roy Burns, a copycat killer who was inspired by Jason. The character was intended to inspire a pair of further Jason-less sequels. Fans hated this outing and despite plentiful gore, nudity, and drug use, this flick flopped with audiences, too. Luckily, this prompted producers to create the campier, sillier Jason that Friday the 13th's later installments are famous for with 1986's return to form, Jason Lives.
For anyone wondering why the Friday the 13th series didn't feature Jason, it's actually not because he'd make a terrible anthology host, unlike his wisecracking arch-nemesis, Freddy Krueger, who hosted a show of his own called Freddy's Nightmares. Jason never cropped up in the Friday the 13th TV series because the show wasn't an anthology, but rather a misleadingly-titled fantasy horror which followed the proprietors of an antique shop as they retrieved cursed trinkets. Therefore, the show had nothing to do with Crystal Lake's finest killer despite using the same title, logo, and producers as the movie franchise.
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