Friday the 13th Part 6: How Jason Became a Zombie | Screen Rant – Screen Rant

After being killed off in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Jason Voorhees was resurrected as a zombie in Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives. While Jason proved extremely hard to stop in Friday the 13th Parts 2, 3, and 4, he was still canonically a man. A very strong, fast, and imposing man to be sure, but a man nonetheless. Fueled by rage over the death of his mother Pamela in the original Friday the 13th film, Jason claimed a pile of victims over the course of those three sequels.

At the end of The Final Chapter, Jason gets hacked to death by Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman), who would become his nemesis for a few movies. It looked like Jason had returned in Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning, but that turned out to be a copycat killer using the Jason legend to hide his identity. After that film tanked at the box office, Paramount producers wanted the real Jason brought back.

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Since Jason had been pretty definitively killed in The Final Chapter, it was up to writer/director Tom McLoughlin to figure out a way of resurrecting Jason from the dead in Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives that wouldn't cause too many fans' eyes to roll back into their heads. While not perfect, he did the best he could.

Friday the 13th Part 6 sees Tommy Jarvis once again return, this time played by Return of the Living Dead star Thom Matthews. The tease at the end of Part 5 that Tommy would turn evil is abandoned, but Tommy is still damaged by his encounter with Jason. In an effort to make sure Jason was in fact dead, Tommy and his friend Allen head to Crystal Lake cemetery to dig up his grave. Then, upon finding Jason's rotting corpse, Tommy commits an act of epic idiocy by attacking and stabbing the body with a metal fence post. Lightning then strikes the post, reviving Jason as a nearly unstoppable zombie.

The method used to revive Jason in Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives is obviously a nod to Universal's 1931 horror classic Frankenstein, in which the monster is famously brought to life via lightning. While there was no way of undoing Jason's death that would've satisfied everyone, Tom McLoughlin took a smart route by looking to horror's past. Turning Jason into a zombie also ended up being a positive for the franchise going forward, as it gave the following Paramount films a distinctly different feel to the older ones, in which Jason sometimes outright runs after his prey and is generally a lot more physical. Zombie Jason, if anything, just seems constantly pissed off, and moves in a slow, sometimes robotic manner. Zombie Jason knows he'll eventually capture his targets, so he's fine being methodical. Of course, he can also inexplicably teleport by Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan, but that's a story for another time.

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Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero