The original Friday The 13th proved a big hit at the box office in 1980. Only Airplane drew in more cinemagoers than Pamela Voorhees’ killing spree that year, which is no doubt why Paramount fast-tracked a sequel featuring her son, Jason, regardless of the plotholes this created.
As the fans will know, the catalyst for Pamela’s murderous mayhem was her son drowning due to camp counsellor negligence, which was as good a motivation as any until Friday the 13th Part II came along to reveal that Jason was, in fact, very much alive. The sequel placed him on a mission to avenge the death of his mother, suggesting he merely sat there in the bushes as a passive observer while she was decapitated.
This begs a host of questions, not least why someone with the lethal set of skills he shows off in the sequel would neglect to intervene. Furthermore, the original Friday the 13th‘s final jump-scare, in which a childlike, zombified Jason attacks the rowing boat, only further muddies the waters of Crystal Lake.
These plotholes have dangled over the franchise for decades, but a recent fan theory that’s doing the rounds online has attempted to explain them away. As reported by Screen Rant, the theory claims that Jason’s mother knew he was alive all along and the drowning incident was merely a near-death experience that left him brain-damaged and mute. She hid him away in the woods to protect him, and we can only assume he went along with this and chose not to break cover when his mum was in jeopardy.
If you buy into this explanation, it suddenly makes sense how a fully-grown Jason is able to inherit the torch from Pamela in Friday The 13th‘s first of many sequels, as long as you discount that rowing boat attack scene as a nightmarish hallucination.