In 1984, Jason Voorhees died. Again.
At the end of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, a kid named Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman, on the cusp of his '80s superfame) drove a machete through the monster's head, seemingly ending a reign of terror that had stretched across three films, and putting the drowned boy of Crystal Lake in the ground once more.
That was the plan, anyway.
In Peter M. Bracke's excellent history of the franchise, Crystal Lake Memories, then-Paramount Pictures head Frank Mancuso Sr. noted that the fourth film in the slasher powerhouse really was meant to be the final installment, killing off Jason and allowing everyone involved to move on to other projects. Then the film made more than $32 million on a budget of less than $3 million, and the studio started to rethink things. People think the IP-farming, sequel-minded executives only came out in the 21st century, but that's certainly not the case in the horror world. If a monster kept working, a monster kept working. And so Friday the 13th Part V was set in motion for a 1985 release. There was just one problem: With Jason dead, how would the franchise continue?
The answer was Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. A direct sequel to The Final Chapter built on the idea that Jason wasn't just dead but cremated to ashes, it tried to do something different with a franchise helmed by one of the 1980s' greatest boogeymen. In that respect, it failed. But four decades later, we can look at the film not just as an interesting failure that made fans angry, but as a truly ambitious attempt to do something different with its slasher formula while still delivering the goods fans had come to expect. It's one of the most maligned slasher sequels of all time, but as someone who's seen more than his fair share of maligned slasher sequels, I can honestly tell you it doesn't have to be seen that way.
Jason is Dead, Long Live Jason!
Despite releasing just one year after The Final Chapter, A New Beginning is set five years in the future.
Do not attempt to map out Friday the 13th continuity, it'll just make your head hurt. The sequel follows a now teenaged Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd) as he leaves psychiatric care and heads to a woodland halfway house. There he meets a gaggle of misfit kids just like himself who are too busy goofing off to ever really get "better." These kids are weird, often lovable, and suffering from a variety of mismatched and sometimes nonsensical ailments (one kid stutters, another just seems to really like candy bars, and others just want to have sex all the time, which as far as I know is an illness called "Being A Teenager"). Tommy, however, doesn't fit in. He's too tormented by, you know, having driven a machete through the head of a hockey mask-wearing monster a few years ago, so he's not in the best mental shape.
Things get worse for Tommy when a hockey mask-wearing monster actually shows up again, first in his dreams and then in reality, as the kids of the halfway house, their redneck neighbors, and various local authority figures are picked off by the killer. It can't be Jason because Jason's dead, something numerous characters drill into the audience again and again. So, who is it? Tommy's frequent violent outbursts lead us to believe it could be him. Even Tommy's not sure he's off the hook, particularly as the body count builds and his mental state just keeps deteriorating.
This is, especially for those of us who grew up in the world of slasher whodunits like Scream, excellent story fodder. The script does a solid job of throwing lots of potential suspects our way. We meet everyone from a violent halfway house resident who literally ax murders another kid to a redneck woman (Carol Locatell) who promises to cut the kids into tiny pieces to a gore-obsessed EMT who's so slimy and camp that he remains one of my favorite Friday the 13th supporting characters. And one of them, somewhere in the suspect pool, has found a hockey mask and decided to do some Jason cosplay.
Here's where things really unravel for A New Beginning. To this day, it's known as the "Imposter Jason" movie, and it's often dismissed as an entry in the saga because it doesn't feature the "real" Jason. Stuntman Tom Morga, who was behind the Jason mask for most sequences, has frequently said in interviews that fans come up to him and tell him he "never played Jason," that his work essentially doesn't count because the film doesn't feature the "real" Jason. It's a distinction which meant that, after a good opening weekend, word-of-mouth started a precipitous box office drop for A New Beginning, and that legacy is still clinging to it 40 years later.
What Works About A New Beginning
Look, I am not here to climb on a soapbox and tell you that Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning is Good, Actually. The film has loads of pacing issues, story inconsistencies, and tonal sloppiness that robs it of any real personality outside of a sort of general mean-spiritedness that certain gore-happy slasher films possess.
What I am here to tell you is that A New Beginning's bad rap is built on a rather shoddy foundation. The idea that the film can't work because it doesn't feature "the real Jason" is rather funny in the context of this franchise — one that has its roots in a film that, very famously, reveals the real killer to be not Jason, but Jason's mother Pamela. The idea that no one else can be a slasher in a Friday film is a weird argument to make.
In any event, the problem with A New Beginning's killer reveal isn't that we're dealing with a Jason copycat, but that we're dealing with a character so peripheral to the story that audiences were left going "Who?!" as the credits rolled. If the whodunit of it all had been a bit smarter, a bit more dialed into the is he/isn't he dynamic with Tommy, they might have had something there. Instead, we've got years of grumbling about a lack of "real Jason" simply because that's the movie's reputation.
And all that grumbling masks things about the film that legitimately work well in the context of a slasher sequel trying to ride a wave of interest in a particular masked villain into one more installment. One of the great things about us horror fans is that we'll watch the sloppiest garbage you've ever seen just to say we saw it, then come away going, "Okay, it was terrible but that one kill was great!" A New Beginning has a few of those kills. At one point, "Jason" gets to cook the inside of a guy's head with a road flare. In another, he cleaves into a woman's brain with a pair of pruning shears, taking both of her eyes in the process. Plus, understanding its target demographics, it's one of the Most Nekkid of all the Nekkid '80s Slasher Movies, it's got humor, and it's genuinely trying to upset expectations for the franchise at a time when the slasher genre was more and more codified and reliant on expected patterns.
Imposter Jason or not, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning kept the franchise rolling, and it did it with a vicious sense of humor and a stab (pun intended) at actually providing what its title promised. Slasher devotees take note, because for all its blunders, this is a film that's earned a second look.
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