Abbott and Costello Meet the ’80s in ‘Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives’
Jason Lives does exactly what it says on the tin. This was still a point in time in which the Friday the 13th films were being made in rapid succession, which meant that any kind of pivoting based on audience reaction needed to be made in rapid succession as well. This franchise went from killing Jason Voorhees off in The Final Chapter to moving on with a completely different killer in A New Beginning to bringing back Jason when that didn’t work in Jason Lives in a total span of just two years. That is absolutely unreal to think about. The Final Chapter had been in many ways the quintessential Friday the 13th, the distilled essence of what the franchise was when the formula was perfected and it was operating at its best.
A New Beginning was different not only for the Scooby Doo style mystery plot revealing a new surprise killer under Jason’s mask, but also for going to extremes. That is the thing that always sets that entry apart from me. It’s not killer paramedic Roy, it’s the fact that it pushes the envelope much further on the body count, nudity and unhinged characterization than any of the films before it. A New Beginning pushes the Friday the 13th franchise from feeling like exploitation by way of studio distribution, shocking but sanitized, to simply feeling like true purebred exploitation.
Comparatively, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, could not be more different. This is known for being, to this day, the only film in the franchise not to feature nudity, as well as the one that contains the least amount of blood. Part of that comes down to censorship, granted, as the MPAA was gunning for the franchise pretty hard by this time, but much of it was intentional as well.
Tom McLoughlin, the first person to serve as writer/director on a Friday the 13th movie had a very different approach when he came onboard for Part VI. McLoughlin intentionally injected a shot of classic horror into the series. Whereas Part V had been intensely focused on keeping up with slasher trends and pushing the envelope, Jason Lives goes in the other direction, wearing its classic influences on its sleeve, for an entry that is both the comedic and the most gothic out of the entire franchise.
These two things are not at odds with one another, either. They date right back to McLoughlin’s primary inspirations: the Universal Monsters. Those films boomed in popularity beginning in 1931 with the release of both Dracula and Frankenstein, and dominated the decade with further releases like The Mummy, Bride of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. But those aren’t specifically what Jason Lives seems to pull from as its inspiration. Instead, this film feels inspired by the Universal classics of the 1940s, in particular.
By that point, the franchises had been established, and they were all regularly churning out sequels. Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, all series that swiftly became several entries deep. By the mid-‘40s, audiences had become familiar with all the tropes and scares, not to mention the monsters themselves, and so the respective franchises lightened in tone and eventually took to outright comedy. The most famous of these examples were the Abbott and Costello movies, who encountered both the Mummy and the Invisible Man but whose greatest hit was without a doubt Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, in which they faced off against Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Frankenstein Monster.
These influences on Jason Lives are clear from its opening moments. The movie opens in a cemetery with Final Chapter and A New Beginning survivor Tommy Jarvis still haunted by the memory of Jason, returning to the killer’s grave to make sure he’s really dead, hoping that seeing Jason’s dead body with his own eyes will finally make the nightmares stop. Of course, the exact opposite happens as Tommy winds up accidentally bringing Jason back to life by stabbing the corpse with a long metal fence post that is then struck by lightning.
Everything about this sequence is perfectly in line with a 1940s Universal Monsters film. The bolt of lightning in and of itself is an obvious homage to Frankenstein but the wild and exaggerated method of resurrection feels so in line with a late-era sequel like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, in which the Monster is found frozen in ice and unthawed. It’s also a scene, particularly in Jason’s hauntingly rotting image, that admittedly brings to mind the E.C. Comics of the 1950s. But that opening scene sets the tone for the entire film.
From there, we’re truly treated to a Friday the 13th movie in the tone of an Abbott and Costello movie. The jokes are so driven by banter and wit, with the help of the occasional sight gag. Megan, the spunky sheriff’s daughter heroine, embodies this best, a fast-talking and no nonsense character who almost feels plucked from a bygone era in the most interesting way possible. The two-man team of Sheriff Garris and Deputy Rick both sound and even vaguely look a little like Abbott and Costello, where one is the no-nonsense straight man and the other is, well, the other one, mostly by default. But the key here, as it was the key to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is in the depiction of the titular monster, who is treated with the upmost respect.
That is important to point out. That is, frankly, why Jason Lives works. As much as the humor is amped up and the movie is heightened, Jason himself is treated seriously. He’s still scary. In fact, I’m tempted to argue that this movie is actually the scariest he’s ever been. Part of this is due to being the only film out of the entire franchise to actually feature kids at the camp, adding an extra sense of danger. As soon as we hit those lingering shots depicting Jason stalking across the darkened camp, all the jokes have been forgotten. There’s a moment in which little camper Nancy wakes up to see Jason carrying Sissy’s headless body past her window that is easily one of the scariest shots of the entire series. That single shot is the perfect distilled essence of a nightmare a kid might have after hearing a particularly brutal campfire story, and as such, that shot is the essence of Friday the 13th.
There’s a similar, particularly impressive shot when Paula leaves Nancy’s cabin and Jason follows in time with her, standing just outside the window without her noticing. On one hand, you can be like “How would she not notice that?” But that’s an obvious style choice, in the same way we accepted that blue-gray color tones used to be a great way to showcase night sequences that we actually would not be able to see. It is dark out there, to Paula. The full visibility of Jason is simply for our benefit, and I’ll take that any day over a current rising trend of night sequences so dark you can’t tell what’s happening, defended because “realistically, people wouldn’t be able to see.”
The absurd humor — and it is absurd — is something you’ll either be on board with or you won’t, and the James Bond parody opening titles will honestly let you know whether or not this is your thing right away. The gravedigger filling in Jason’s empty grave and looking directly into the camera as he says, “Why’d they have to go and dig up Jason? Some folks got a strange idea of entertainment” is not for everyone, but it is for me. Jason getting hit square in the chest with paintball, or ripping a man’s arm off just to stare at the limb in his hand like “What am I supposed to do with this?” These moments are just pure fun, but that sense of fun paired with the genuine sense of menace and dread are what make this not only one of the best of the franchise, but one of the best horror comedies of the 1980s, in general.
All of this is not to say Jason Lives is not of its own era, because it absolutely is. Even if the gore and nudity are toned down, the generational aesthetics are definitely not. The hair, the attitude and especially the music — this time heavily provided by none other than Alice Cooper — are exactly what you would want and expect from a Friday the 13th film in the middle of the decade. We still have idiots sneaking off to have sex in an RV, teenage counselors treating a summer job like a genuine burden, and a corporate game of paintball that somehow seems to embody the decade more than anything the teenagers wind up doing. The combination of these things, the injection of classic ’40s Universal style into a film so overwhelmingly ’80s, is the sweet spot. That’s a huge part of what makes Jason Lives so memorable.
It was a genius move on the part of Tom McLoughlin to take such a specific influence from the Universal Monster films of the ’40s because he found the Friday the 13th franchise in the exact same place Universal had been at the time in which Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was made, even if it had played out in much more rapid succession. People had become familiar with Jason by 1986, as they had become familiar with Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man. People knew what to expect from the formula.
Response to A New Beginning suggested the Friday the 13th series was waning — hence the decision to bring Jason back in the first place — and the slasher cycle was slowing down right along with it. The decision to pivot to a more comedic tone was just as smart and timely as it had been for Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in 1948. The result is a gem of a Friday the 13h movie. It’s the best entry to show a group of new people, to start off people who are culturally familiar with Jason with a film that’s in on the joke but is a pure and earnest slasher at the same time. It is, in short, the ultimate Friday the 13th party movie. It’s a film that pays heavy respect to the classics and has, over time, become a classic in its own right.
