Jason Goes To Hell, the ninth installment in the iconic Friday the 13th movie series, shares some DNA with the Evil Dead franchise.
Mr. Voorhees isn’t opposed to a film crossover, given he’s previously shared the screen with Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm Street. But the connective tissue between Jason Goes to Hell and those Deadites is much more subtle in nature, as it involves a reference to the famous Necronomicon.
Adam Marcus, director of Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday, has previously elaborated on his choice to make Voorhees a Deadite, but thanks to a new interview with Syfy Wire (h/t ComicBook.com), the creator dives that little bit deeper into what it was like bringing two horror franchises together, despite the fact that they hail from two different studios.
If I just take that prop and put [the Necronomicon] in the Voorhees house, and use the Kandarian dagger as the thing that kills Jason, what I’m doing is setting up a mythology that Jason’s mom wanted her son back so badly that she made a deal with the darkness. So she reads from the Necronomicon and brings about the resurrection of her son, so now the fact he lived at the bottom of the lake and grows two feet makes sense.
For horror fans, it was the finale of Jason Goes to Hell that still lives long in the memory, as it showed the hapless Voorhees being dragged to hell by the outstretched hand – claw, really – of Freddy Krueger, ultimately leading to their unforgettable union some years later.
As for The Final Friday, Marcus spoke more about making what he describes as a referential horror movie:
Jason Goes To Hell is one of the most referential horror movies ever made. We see the Necronomicon and Kandarian dagger from Evil Dead, The Crate from Creepshow in the basement of the Voorhees house, and you’ve got Cunningham County. The jungle gym at the end is from The Birds. Universal packed it up and gave it to me and I put a bird at the top of it.
I asked if New Line owned the rights to Freddy so I called up my two executives, Mike De Luca, and Mark Ordesky, the guy who brought Lord of the Rings to New Line. I told them I wanted the glove and his laugh for the movie and I gave them the ending I wanted. Freddy just died in Freddy’s Dead and he’s in Hell.
Interesting, eh? And if it’s more of the masked killer that you’re after, look no further than the upcoming documentary entitled The Dark Heart of Jason Voorhees.