‘Jason Goes to Hell’ is a Wild and Wonderful Haunted Hayride of a Movie

Jason Goes to Hell will always be a distinct entry in the franchise for several reasons. It was the first Friday the 13th film not to be distributed by Paramount, and was the first to be released by New Line Cinema. It was the only Friday the 13th of the 1990s, a stark contrast to the previous decade, which had seen eight movies in a ten year period. It was the first to bring back a Jason actor for the third time, as Kane Hodder once again reprised the role after The New Blood and Jason Takes Manhattan — and even appeared out of makeup this time, as a SWAT officer. It was the first to not revolve around a group of college age young adults. And it was the first and — to date — only entry to depict Jason Voorhees as a body-hopping parasite.

Jason Goes to Hell was also the second Friday the 13th movie that I ever saw, after the original. My friends had built up Jason in my mind so much that when I actually watched the first movie and Mrs. Voorhees turned out to be the killer, I was livid. So mad, in fact, that I jumped right to the most recent movie at the time, Jason Goes to Hell, simply because his name was above the title. And for the first three minutes, I was ecstatic, getting everything I wanted, and then Jason as I knew him was blown up and out of the movie. I was eight years old, it must be stressed, but I genuinely began to think that maybe this entire series was somehow one long con against me, that maybe there really wasn’t a Jason and everyone was playing a very expensive, elaborate joke.

It took me years to warm to Jason Goes to Hell, although I always, always loved the visual design for Jason from the beginning. Because that was our only Friday the 13th growing up in the ’90s, that was the Jason slapped on everything, and I thought he was a perfect, mutated mascot. I love that the legend of Jason has evolved so much that by this point he is a genuine monster. The best thing about the franchise has always been the fact that it is a campfire story and evolves like one, each new movie bringing another storyteller to the campfire to evolve that game of telephone. Inevitably, you eventually get that one kid at the fire in an Anthrax T-shirt, with a flannel shirt around his waist, who smells like Fritos and pounds down Surge, and the version he tells is the single most insane thing you’ve ever heard. That’s Jason Goes to Hell.

By definition, that’s not for everybody. But it absolutely is for me. As I said, I didn’t love it for many years. Then, about a decade ago now, I was doing the whole franchise marathon and it simply clicked. Everything about it clicked. It went from being one of my least favorite entries to one of my favorite entries literally overnight. Watching it in a marathon breaks up the movies so well with a dose of “And now for something completely different.” All the things I’d never liked became my favorite things about it. I adore the gall to even think of blowing Jason up in the first five minutes of the movie, so that nobody knows what’s going to happen next, and then bringing him back triumphantly at the end.

I also really love that this is the only film in the franchise to deal with the larger Crystal Lake community, to get to know the townspeople and how it has affected them. We’d glimpsed the diner the original, we’d gotten the taste that people in town knew the lake was bad, and that it had a reputation. We’d been given tastes of it with local cops and Crazy Ralphs telling everybody to stay away from the lake. But Jason Goes to Hell absolutely wallows in it. One of my favorite things about this movie and the way it depicts the community is that it brings Jason back amidst a celebration of his own death.

There’s something very meta about this, too, an early taste for a decade in horror that would prove to be defined by the term. Let’s not forget that this was planned as The Final Friday and heavily marketed as such. It’s not just the town celebrating Jason’s death with brilliantly stupid gimmicks like the Voorhees Burger and the Jason Fingers, it’s the studio and, most of all, it’s the audience. To some extent, given the film’s reputation, the audience and the townspeople are both destroyed by their own expectations.

It is fascinating to follow an older cast this time, and also illuminating. For a movie about the legacy of Jason, about putting him to rest for all time, it really should center around weary adults. These are people who have grown up hearing about Jason, being afraid of Jason and for some even denying their own connection to Jason, all their lives. They’re right to breathe a sigh of relief when he’s blown to smithereens, and they’re even right to make a quick buck off of it, too. Steven and Jessica are such a terrific response to the misconception about the franchise that persists to this day, that everyone who has sex dies and only the virgins survive. The heroes of this entry are literally parents with a newborn baby.

But my single favorite thing about Jason Goes to Hell is that it’s a Halloween party of a movie. It’s a haunted hayride, taking you on a trip and showing you ghoulish set piece after ghoulish set piece, things you’ve never seen nor expected in this franchise before. You’ve not only got Jason as a hulking monster, you’ve got people melting into goop, you’ve got tent impalements, police station massacres, diner massacres, possession, tongue worms, demon parasites, demon hands reaching up from Hell to grab you, not to mention cameos of the Necronomicon, the Crate from Creepshow and even Freddy Krueger popping out of the dirt for one last jolt. This is a haunt. It is structured like one, it gives you the entire experience of one, and even somehow encapsulates the exact mood of a haunted hayride, partially because this is the only Friday the 13th that actually looks cold. This is a movie that takes you on a path through the woods, to the diner, the Voorhees house and back again, where all manner of goopy monsters might pop out of the dark and you cannot even predict what you’ll see next. Because of that, and because of its blue/orange color palette, I think this is the single best movie in the series to watch around October.

I absolutely get why this movie is not for everyone. Absolutely. But I don’t think I’ll ever understand people who don’t at the very least appreciate the effects, because I think KNB delivered the best of the entire series on that count. Jason’s appearance is not only great and imaginative, it’s also the film’s only bit of continuity. Part of the reason he looks so melty is to take into account that he was melted by toxic waste at the end of the previous movie. This goes so far beyond the usual gore gags, but delivers on that too, and then some. The infamous tent kill is probably the single grisliest kill of the entire series. But then there’s the demons, many of which were cut. The scrapped Hell Baby probably wouldn’t have worked on screen, but the pictures do look very cool. And there’s that fantastic, grueling melting sequence in which possessed Deputy Josh melts into a puddle, disintegrating as Jason’s evil is passed along to the next person.

This scene is so bizarre and underrated and possibly the scariest scene of the film. There’s a thing that happens at the onset of that melting sequence that is subtle but still obvious enough that it was clearly intentional. Just before the melting begins, Josh wakes up. He stops being possessed. He wakes up back into his own body just in time to watch it break down into nothing. The way his eyes widen and he starts screaming, but only gets a few seconds of screaming before his jaw falls off, that is genuinely haunting. Moments like that are what truly make this one of the most imaginative of the franchise as a whole. And like any good haunted hayride, you only see just enough of it. You do stop, you do linger, enough to pick up these unsettling details, but then you move right along to the next horrific sight.

I know damn well enough at this point that I can’t make anyone love this movie. It is truly one of those things that just is for you or it isn’t. But having said that, I didn’t think it was for me for a very long time and it turned out I was absolutely wrong about that. So if you feel like switching things up from the old favorites this Friday the 13th, give Jason Goes to Hell another shot. Let it take you on a ride that’s a little bit Jason Lives, a heap of The Hidden and a whole lot of Demon Knight, and see how it feels this time around. It might surprise you.

And if you’re sitting there like a stone-faced Creighton Duke saying, “I don’t think so,” well, that’s its own celebration too.