"Jason Goes To Hell" Was My Queer Awakening
How the divisive "Final Friday" (subconsciously?) Solidified My Sexuality
By: Toxicka Shock
Mostly because it was the first movie I saw that made me experience unmistakably queer feelings.
It’s a long story.
It was October 1994 and close to Halloween. At the time I was nine years old.
I was over at a friend’s house and he had the kind of parents that did not give a shit about what they allowed him to watch on TV. He had just got back from Blockbuster and lo and behold, what was his video rental for the weekend? You guessed it, “Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday” - the uncut, unedited, unrated version.
Despite only being a fourth grader I had already seen several of the “Friday the 13th” movies. Parts 8, 6 and 3, if you wanted the specifics. But those were the severely watered down versions they showed on television, with all of the nudity and foul language and excessively gory kill shots excised from the airwaves. It was the first time I watched a “real” Jason movie, they kind that hadn’t been censored to oblivion before being broadcast.
Of course, I knew what to expect out of “Jason Goes To Hell.” Surely, it couldn’t have been that much different from the preceding eight “Friday” movies, could it? Dumb, horny teens go into the woods, they disobey their elders and a guy in a hockey mask hacks them into pieces. It was a winning formula if there ever was one.
The Jason movies didn’t scare me, per se. But the idea of watching a completely unsanitized "F13" movie still made me nervous. I mean, what if it was really gross and I got sick in front of my friend? Surely, first thing on Monday morning he would have told everybody in school that “Jason Goes to Hell” made me barf, and for the rest of the semester that’s ALL anybody would talk about. So gutting it through “The Final Friday” became something of a challenge to my masculinity - and my goodness, how ironic THAT would turn out to be in short order.
The film begins in classical "F13" style, with some huge-breasted brunette chick taking a shower in a creepy, dimly lit house. Naturally, it isn’t long before Jason shows up and tries to eviscerate her with a machete. She manages to escape from his clutches, leading to a scene where Mr. Voorhees - now looking like a zombified pro wrestling janitor - gets ambushed by a SWAT team that quickly blows him to smithereens.
Within 10 minutes of the film, Jason has been reduced to nothing more than a large pile of exploded body parts. At that point I sort of subconsciously realized that THIS “Friday the 13th” wasn’t going to play out like all the others. My suspicions were doubly reaffirmed in the next scene, where the coroner tasked with doing Jason’s autopsy (like it was even necessary) is hypnotized by the infamous slasher’s still beating heart - naturally, leading to a sequence where he EATS Jason’s organ and suddenly turns into a murderous zombie himself.
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| in hindsight, culling my french kissing technique from this movie was probably a mistake. |
From there the movie seems like its going to follow the traditional "F13: formula. There is a particularly visceral scene early on in which the coroner (possessed by Jason’s evil) grabs a metal pole and practically bifurcates a young woman while she’s doing her boyfriend cowgirl style - a death sentence administered, presumably, due to her failure to convince her significant other to put on a condom beforehand.
But around the half-hour mark of the movie, “Jason Goes to Hell” undergoes a radical shift. At one point, the coroner kidnaps a dim-witted sheriff’s deputy, which is certainly not characteristic of Jason Voorhees’ kill-everything-that-moves-and-don’t-even-bother-asking-any questions style. Then the coroner basically traps the deputy in this weird S&M bondage situation, where he proceeds to shave all the hair off his body with a straight razor - which is something we’ve DEFINITELY never seen Jason do in any of the other "F13" films.
This plot twist confused me. Years later, even the director of the film itself has been unable to come up with a coherent or logical explanation for the scene. But what it sets into motion is an odd, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” type formula that is highlighted by some exceptionally queer subtext.
It’s not until a later scene where Jason’s hitherto unmentioned half-sister gets attacked by the possessed cop that I started to put two and two together. The villain assails her in her home, pushing his body on top of hers, grasping at her face so he can pry her lips open. Then this midnight black snake demon starts crawling out of his face, as he apparently tries to vomit the foul monster into her mouth. Not to bore you with the specifics, but there’s a major plot point in the movie about Jason being unable to resurrect himself until the demon enters the body of a Voorhees relative - a storyline virtually stolen from a delightfully campy 1988 B-horror movie called “The Kiss,” but that’s an aside for the time being.
It’s around the one-hour mark of the movie that we arrive at THE scene that, unbeknownst to me, would forever change the trajectory of my life. Ironically enough, it begins with the bespectacled hero of the film trapped in the closet of the Voorhees family home. He silently watches a scummy tabloid tv show producer talk about stealing a corpse from the morgue and planting it in the house to boost his ratings. Of course, before he can wrap up his cell phone conversation, he’s attacked by the demonically-possessed cop from earlier, who then proceeds to thrust him on a table, overpower him and essentially French kiss an evil, soul-possessing snake turd monster into his mouth.
And they show it all in gruesome detail. I vividly recall watching the black ooze leak out of the middle-aged cop’s mouth as he formed that tight seal around his victim’s lips. The turd snake extends out of the cop’s mouth and we can actually see it pushing down the news producer’s grotesquely swollen throat. To my elementary-school aged friend, it was one of the nastiest things he’d ever seen in a movie - that our demon-spewing policeman ends up melting in a puddle of liquified bones and pus immediately afterwards, I suppose, only added to the intrinsic ickiness of the situation.
I felt like I was supposed to be grossed out by the scene, but that wasn’t what I felt watching it. Instead, I felt this odd excitation from at all. Not like a rollercoaster or an adrenaline high, but something more sensual in nature. My reaction was meant to be one of disgust and horror, but instead, my developing adolescent brain found the whole episode to be oddly and inexplicably arousing. At the time I didn’t recall this being an obvious sexual thing, although with the gift of hindsight, it’s all painfully obvious - demonic snake turd monster plot device or not, the mere idea of two men open-mouth kissing was something I found instantly alluring and appetizing.
I am almost 1,000 percent sure that scene in “Jason Goes To Hell” was the first time I saw two guys making out (albeit, with the term very liberally defined considering the plot of the movie.) And even from such a young and naive age, I simply sensed that man-on-man smooching was something that appealed to me.
For whatever reason, that mental image was burned into my skull for weeks later. Sometimes I would just sit there on the bus or in my desk at school and all of a sudden the visual of the demonically-possessed zombie cop vomit-kissing pure, undiluted evil into the unscrupulous anchorman’s mouth would would just hurdle to the forefront of my mind. And for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why it kept coming back to me - or why every time I thought about it, I would get this warm, fuzzy, oddly pleasurable tickle in my belly.
I never told any of my friends about it. Even then I knew that whatever I was feeling wasn’t “normal” and that I would forever be labeled a freak of nature by everybody at school if anyone found it (remember, this WAS the mid-1990s we’re talking about, back when even the Democrats were hardliners against LGBT rights.) So I ended up burying it deep in my subconscious, sorta’ hoping that the peculiar sensations would just fade away if I kept myself from thinking about it.
Well, I suppose you can imagine how well THAT approach went. From then on, every time I heard someone talking about “Jason Goes To Hell” or I thought about the film in the abstract, the ONLY thing I could think about was that damn demonic French kissing scene. And when that visual arose, so did those “dormant” feelings about male-on-male smooching ... and my own verboten, horrifically repressed desires to taste the lips of another boy myself.
There’s a lot of memorable scenes in “Jason Goes To Hell,” to be sure. Who could forget the scene where the owner of the greasy spoon diner shows her employees how to make goalie mask-shaped hamburger patties - or the scene later on where that same character gets her teeth LITERALLY punched down her throat by the spirit of the J-man himself?
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| something tells me this guy was never very popular at make-out parties. |
Alas, in a movie that includes direct nods to both the “Evil Dead” and “Elm Street” mythos, for this hardcore horror hound “Jason Goes to Hell” is vastly more significant as a sub-genre offering for its almost brazen homoerotic overtones. Going back and watching it now, it seems as if director Adam Marcus went out of his way to include as much LGBT subtext in the film as the suits at New Line Cinema would let him get away with. How else do you explain the inordinately high volume of bare male asscheeks scattered throughout the film, or Steven Williams’ delightfully campy performance as bounty hunter hero Creighton Duke? Granted, the film may not be AS on-the-nose as something like “Elm Street 2,” but “JGTH” is still a movie that has its fair share of wonderfully queer moments.
Over the years there’s been a lot of headcanon fan postulations on the film and its heavily-suggested homoerotic subtext. One of my favorite readings is that the film - rather indirectly - implies that Jason Voorhees himself is gay, which would explain why he does so many uncharacteristic things with his mostly male victims throughout the movie while inside decidedly less monstrous and misshapen male bodies than he’s accustomed to.
Some have even theorized that there’s a bit of a trans theme going on with the film. Remember the scene where the reporter asks Duke what the first thing that comes to mind is when he hears Jason’s name? His response, at first, seems cryptic if not comically nonsensical - the image of a “little girl in a pink dress sticking a hot dog through a doughnut.” Rather, it might be that Duke is implying that Jason has always secretly WANTED to be female - keep in mind, Jason doesn’t reassume his “true” form until the very end of the film, where he possesses the body of (you guessed it) a female family member.
Almost 30 years later, fans on the internet have slowly started warming up to “JGTH,” and I’m far from the first person on the web to make note of its queer underpinnings. And while I still can’t consider it a “great” film - even by the rather unambitious standards of the overall “F13” series - I can at least appreciate and admire the movie on a significantly deeper level than most.
After all - if it wasn’t for “Jason Goes to Hell,” how would I have ever known how badly I wanted to make out with other guys?
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| XOXO, TOXICKA |
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