Friday 13th Explained

Some of you probably had some questions about yesterday. This endeavors to explain some of them.

1. Why "Friday the 13th" of all days?

• Friday has been considered unlucky for it's Norse goddess namesake Frigga's exile, and 13 is often considered unlucky for transgressing the "completeness" of 12, as well as being the total number of bodies seated at the Last Supper. "Friday the 13th" has been considered unlucky as a combination thereof since the 1900s, owing to the date of the Pope ordering the deaths of all remaining Knights Templar after the final crusade falling on a Friday 13.

2. What the hell is up with Jason Voorhees, anyway?

Okay. So … Jason Voorhees was a pathetic, sometimes deformed and/or developmentally challenged boy who once attended Camp Crystal lake, but drowned when some counselors decided to be inappropriate together instead of making sure the other boys didn't tease him during swim time.

10 years later the Camp was reopened by people who swore they wouldn't repeat the tragic mistakes that closed the camp in the first place, but all the counselors immediately being drinking and doing drugs and having sex, even before children attend camp. Something starts killing them with a large knife. It turns out it's really Jason's deranged, enraged mother, but they manage to kill her.

Except! Jason didn't actually die! He's been living in the woods this whole time without telling even his mom, but he's gigantic. Think Sloth from "The Goonies" on steroids. He just so happened to see her grisly impalement, so now he starts following kids back to town and murdering them for killing his mom. Finally, they manage to kill him in the fourth movie. Then someone adopts the crazy killing hockey mask deal for a fifth movie.

Then a misplaced lightning strike into his corpse reanimates Jason in a fifth movie. In six they trap him at the bottom of the lake. In eight a telekinetic girl accidentally lets him out, but she resurrects her dad whom she killed ten years earlier and he drags Jason back underwater.

In eight a boat chops an underwater power line in Crystal Lake and shocks Jason awake AGAIN, but this time he hitches a boat ride to New York City where he tears through town until he's killed by a flood of toxic waste in the sewers which melts his skin, fuses the mask to his face, and leaves only his child-self curled at the bottom of a grate.

Obviously still alive, Jason apparently recovered and then headed back to Camp Crystal Lake killing people along the way. The FBI gets pissed so they explode him. However he possesses several people until Jessica, his half-niece and only living, non-infant relative (the only people who can permanently kill him) kills him with the magic dagger from "The Evil Dead." Jason then gets dragged to Hell and Freddy Krueger takes his mask.

Then Freddy Krueger manipulates Jason into returning to Earth (since he has power in dreams and Jason's deaths are similar to sleep), but in ways reminiscent of Freddy's murders so those who remember him begin again to fear him, which gives him further power. The two eventually kill each other, but Jason brings Freddy's severed head into his death-y dream cabin, which gives Freddy back some power enough to wink menacingly.

Then in 2010 he was cryogenically frozen for 445 years, until he was accidentally revived by space-teens on a space-field-trip (to space-Earth). He kills them until they burn him up in the atmosphere, but of course he lands in Crystal Lake somehow.

Then They reboot him where he just saw a counselor behead his mom as a kid, then waited 30 years to murder anyone around the lake. They kill him and dump him in the lake, but he's not dead, so he grabs at them menacingly. AGAIN.


Man, at least Michael Meyers was just a vaguely incestuous demon-spawn pawn of a witches' coven.