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Oh my god HELLO and welcome to Screen Time with Sarah Ruthless, a podcast about
my #1 favorite pastime ever: Screen Time. Thanks for joining me in our premiere season, as I
sink my teeth into a genre I have avoided all my life: horror. *spooky sound*
I actually went back and forth SO many times over which film to serve as a kind of
companion piece for last week’s episode on John Carpenter’s “Halloween.” The obvious choice
seemed to be Friday the 13th, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve actually seen ALL TEN of them.
It was a literal decade ago, and I don’t remember really enjoying them, I was a young and
impressionable 18 year old and was easily scared and I thought they were spooky but silly and I
really just didn’t get it. So then I toyed around with watching “The Invisible Man” starring
Elisabeth Moss, which came out earlier this year, since both that and “Halloween” center on the
story of a young woman being hunted by a “masked murderer” of sorts. But honestly the entire
time I was watching “Halloween,” ALL I could think of was how it compared to Friday the 13th,
what the differences and similarities were Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, and I decided if
nothing else, why not just check out Friday the 13th again for fun?
BUT like I said, it’s been a literal decade since I’ve seen these movies, and I TOTALLY
FORGOT that Jason is NOT EVEN IN the first movie! So then I obviously HAD to immediately
watch the second one, which means…
This is an unprecedented, never before seen, VERY EXTRA SPECIAL episode on
Friday the 13th parts ONE AND TWO!!! Plus we actually have a Friday the 13th coming up this
month, so that’s just an even extra-er bonus.

ICYMI! Quick plot review of Part One: The year is 1958 and two counselors at Camp
Crystal Lake sneak off to do the dirty when they are interrupted by an unseen character who
immediately MURDERS THEM TO DEATH! The camp is shut down… until the year 1980, when
an arrogant schmuck named Steve Christy decides to reopen it, and invite a bunch of hot young
coeds to come early and help set the place back up, despite the town drunk Ralph warning
them all that it’s CURSED.
(And I just have to interrupt myself here because it didn’t really hit me til I watched this
movie how common that trope is: the “heroes” in horror are always warned by somebody, and
it’s usually some old random, fairly creepy guy, someone who you’d rather ignore… I’m thinking
of the terrifying hillbilly at the gas station in “Cabin in the Woods,” or even the crusty old pirate
who famously scratches his fingernails on a chalkboard from “Jaws.” And, of course, Ralph: he’s
literally called “the town loon.” So why is this character important? Is it just emblematic of how
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adolescents ought to listen to their elders, even the weird ones who lack boundaries? Maybe…
but when I’m stuck on a question I can’t quite suss out, I like to think of it from all angles. What
would the alternative be? Without this crucial role, then what happens to the heroes isn’t hubris,
it’s a tragedy. There’s no fun in watching a bunch of innocent children get ambushed and
slaughtered, that’s horrifying. But there *is* something at least moderately more intriguing about
watching a group of people be gravely warned of the dangers ahead, ignore the call to
prudence, and with their youthful arrogance charge straight into the clutches of danger. Because
then it’s sort of a cautionary tale, not just senseless gore-nography.)
And hubris does indeed come for them, as one by one, the counselors are all plucked off
by a mysterious murderer, until only a young girl named Alice is left. She finally thinks someone
has come to her rescue when a woman named Mrs. Pamela Voorhees shows up, claiming to be
an old family friend of the Christys… but she’s NOT, is she? Mrs. Voorhees tells Alice about how
she used to be a cook at the original Camp Crystal Lake, until her 12 year old son DROWNED
on his BIRTHDAY due to the negligence of some HORNY CAMP COUNSELORS, which has
spawned her lifelong HATRED of camp counselors. Alice figures out it’s Mrs. Voorhees who has
been murdering everyone, they chase each other around the camp then finally end up on the
beach where they wrestle one another until Alice ends up FUCKING DECAPITATING Mrs.
Voorhees. Exhausted and traumatized, Alice takes her little canoe out to the middle of the lake
to hide until the police come… She wakes up in the morning just as they’re arriving, only to be
TOTALLY TACKLED by a fucking burn victim/swamp monster child? Zombie? Thing? It’s Jason,
and he drags her into the lake… Or does he??? Because then she wakes up in the hospital and
the doctors are like “But he’s been dead for years… we found you in the canoe…” and we are
led to believe that although everyone else thinks it was just a figment of Alice’s imagination,
Jason may or may not still be alive and swimming around in the lake.
Just some quick takeaways from this before I go into the sequel:
- It’s never clearly stated how old the camp counselors are in 1980, but they can’t be a
day over 16… So what kind of fucking parent is just letting their 15 year old hitchhike 20
miles to summer camp??
- Also not sure how old Steve the New Owner is, but he looks like he’s in his mid-30s,
and he is FULLY hitting on all the girls there in a pretty aggressive way. Even if by some
stretch of the imagination they are 18… Not cool, Steve.
- Can someone actually decapitate a human with a machete in a single stroke? Unclear.
It’s really hard to Google that.
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- To no one’s surprise, Jason is a Gemini!

And moving right along into the sequel, because I am going to treat Part 1 and 2 kind of
like one extra long movie:
Two months after the murders at Camp Crystal Lake, a traumatized Alice is living alone
in her new apartment just trying to live her life, when she opens her fridge to find the
decapitated head of Mrs. Voorhees and then gets immediately stabbed in the face with an ice
pick! Oh no!
Now flash forward 5 years, and some NEW idiot named Paul is trying to open the camp
AGAIN, but it’s not Camp Crystal Lake, it’s a different camp across the lake. Crazy Ralph
wanders over to warn the horny idiots AGAIN, but no one listens, and he is promptly murdered
by a NEW mysterious figure. Paul’s hot girlfriend Ginny shows up late to join the rest of the hot
young co-eds trying to get the camp set up and ready for the summer, they all party and talk
about the legend of Mrs. Voorhees. Once again, the counselors are picked off one by one, until
it appears to be just Paul and Ginny left - but we have learned earlier that Ginny is getting her
degree in Child Psychology and she believes that Jason is still alive and has been living in the
woods as a recluse all these years. She turns out to be correct! Jason chases her into the forest
where she stumbles upon the little shack he’s been living in, AND she finds the altar where he’s
been saving and worshipping (?) his mom’s decapitated head. Thank GOD Ginny is a child
psych major, because she gets the genius idea to put on his dead mom’s sweater and pretend
to be Mrs. Voorhees, and talk him down from murdering her… Thankfully Paul shows up just in
the nick of time, he surprises Jason, Ginny stabs him with the machete. They walk back to the
cabin to call the cops, thinking it’s all finally finished… When suddenly, Jason comes
BURSTING through the window and grabs Ginny! Then we harsh cut to the morning, Paul is
nowhere to be found, Ginny is being taken away in an ambulance, Jason is MIA, and we fade
out on the abandoned altar of Mrs. Voorhees’s decapitated head in the middle of the woods.

OH BOY do we ever have some shit to dive into! For starters, I just have a list of some
logistic questions that I’d like answered:
- I’m not even going to get into the questionably supernatural abilities that Jason
exhibits, because I’m actually fine with the very similar Michael-Myers pretense that he’s
just super fucking hard to kill and it’s never really explained why. HOWEVER…
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- At the beginning of Part 2, we are led to believe that it was Jason who murdered Alice
to avenge his mother’s death. But… how the fuck did he find her? Also where was she?
At some point in Part 1 Alice mentions that she’s moving to California, but then she talks
to her mom on the phone in her new apartment… So for the sake of argument, let’s
assume that she stayed in NJ for some stupid reason, and is working through her
trauma, alone, in an apartment, by herself, in the same state where her trauma occurred.
None of that makes ANY sense to me, but sure, let’s go with it. She would have to be
within WALKING distance of the forest surrounding Camp Crystal Lake, right? Because
Jason can’t take a bus, he can’t drive, I’m not even sure if he can read. And yet he
somehow finds where this bitch lives? And breaks into her apartment? And very sneakily
murders her? And then later it’s disclosed that her body was removed and never found?
Jason is a BIG BOY, and while I think his time in the wilderness would have made him
incredibly resilient and dexterous, I still find all of that very hard to wrap my mind around.
- Just to do some quick math for you: Jason was 12 when he died in 1958, and the camp
reopens in 1980, which means he’d be 34. And although the sequel came out in 1981,
it’s supposed to take place 5 years after Mrs. Voorhees died, which means in Part 2 he
is almost 40 years old.
- Based on this timeline - and someone please correct me if I’m wrong - in the sequel we
learn that Jason obviously did NOT drown, which then means that he was just living in
the forest, unattended, this WHOLE time - and presumably saw his mother get
decapitated. We know he had some physical and mental disabilities, which were no
doubt exacerbated by living alone in the woods, but, like… no one ever saw a teenager
living alone in there? This all takes place in New Jersey, and the winters get COLD
there! That shack was NOT insulated!
- We learn from Part 1 that the camp tried to reopen a few times in the past, but
something mysterious (and bad) always prevented it - I think it’s safe to assume that it
was Mrs. Voorhees stopping it every time. But that means that SHE’S been stomping
around the woods for the last 22 years too?! How have she and Jason never bumped
into each other??
- To be fair, the creators made the first one without knowing that there would ever be any
sequels, and the original writer Victor Miller actually said point blank that he was
disappointed with the decision to bring Jason back as a villain, because in his universe,
Jason was the vicim, and he died when he was 12. Him popping out of the lake at the
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end was always supposed to be a figment of her imagination, and was added just for the
cheap scare (which they admitted totally ripping it off from the ending of Carrie, btw).
Like, I realize that “narrative structure” wasn’t really a priority for the franchise… But
still…

OKAY SO: there are a FEW things I want to discuss here. The Friday the 13th Creators
have openly admitted that they were basically just riding on the coattails of Halloween, which is
why there is so much overlap: abstinence-as-propaganda (whether intentional or not), the Final
Girl trope, a mysteriously indestructible masked murderer… But there are a number of things
they did differently that really allowed me to dive into a whole new slew of internet rabbit holes:
1) The Mother as the villain
2) The use of a disfigured or disabled character as the villain
3) Notable Feral Children of the past and present, and…
4) A brief history on the origins and fears surrounding Friday and the number 13

That’s right, it’s time for some *info dumping, yeah*

First! Let’s look at Mrs. Voorhees! What a gal!! When Part 1 came out, Siskel and Ebert
famously HATED it, and actually spoiled the ending in their newspaper review. I generally tend
to be on Ebert’s side, but I definitely didn’t loathe this movie as much as he did. I mean, I think
you really need to know what you’re walking into, you know? Like I will fully out myself as one of
the few humans who didn’t hate Suicide Squad. You know why? Because I walked into that
movie 100% expecting it to be a silly, campy, over-the-top, dumb anti-hero movie with some
cheesy back stories, lame quips, a bomb ass soundtrack, and exceptional costumes. And I got
exactly what I paid for. But if you walked into that movie hoping to be moved and challenged
and have the incredibly over-wraught super hero franchise taken seriously, well, you’d be pretty
disappointed. So what I’m trying to say is, as always, context and expectations are crucial when
it comes to your Screen Time Experience.
But I digress: Ebert famously despised the movie (probably because he was going into it
hoping and anticipating the next Exorcist), and his central criticism was all the violence against
women. Which, like, generally I’m gonna agree with that, but what’s interesting about Part 1 is
that it’s a woman doing the violence the whole time! And that is inevitably gonna change the
dialogue a bit.
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So some fun facts about Betsy Palmer, who plays Mrs. Voorhees: she considered
herself a serious stage actor, and upon first reading the script, allegedly threw it across the room
into the trash can and called it “the worst piece of shit she’d ever read.” However, her car had
just broken down, and since she’d recently moved to LA, she decided to take the role just so
she could pay for a new one. She honestly believed the movie was such trash that no one
would ever remember her in it anyway - for better or for worse, her role as Mrs. Voorhees is now
the ONLY thing people recognize her as.
There is a great quote I’d like to read from an interview with her on her creation of the
character:
“Being an actress who uses the Stanislavsky method, I always try to find details about
my character. With Pamela ... I began with a class ring that I remember reading in the
script that she'd worn. Starting with that, I traced Pamela back to my own high school
days in the early 1940s. So it's 1944, a very conservative time, and Pamela has a steady
boyfriend. They have sex—which is very bad of course—and Pamela soon gets
pregnant with Jason. The father takes off and when Pamela tells her parents, they
disown her because having ... babies out of wedlock isn't something that good girls do. I
think she took Jason and raised him the best she could, but he turned out to be a very
strange boy. [She took] lots of odd jobs and one of those jobs was as a cook at a
summer camp. Then Jason drowns and her whole world collapses. What were the
counselors doing instead of watching Jason? They were having sex, which is the way
that she got into trouble. From that point on, Pamela became very psychotic and
puritanical in her attitudes as she was determined to kill all of the immoral camp
counselors.”
I mean, like, fuck Stanislavsky, but I really love her take on the character, and honestly I
wish we’d gotten some of that backstory in the movie! That would’ve given her so much more
depth and texture and motivation, and really just added a whole other level to the character and
the story… which, let’s be real, it definitely could’ve used. Also, I’ve mentioned previously that I
am still balls deep in re-watching Lost because it’s COVID and I’m a masochist, and I just
recently watched the episode where we see the backstory of Locke’s birth - and it’s low key
exactly what Betsy Palmer just described. Except Locke’s mom gave him up for adoption. But
it’s the same era, same vibe… just a funny thread connecting these two that I never would’ve
made otherwise.
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So you might remember from the Halloween episode how I mentioned that Carpenter
really coined the concept of the villain having their own score that played when they were on
screen. The composer for Friday the 13th, Manfredini, wanted to use the same trick, but was
kind of limited because you don’t actually see Mrs. Voorhees onscreen until the very end of the
movie. So he ended up using a lot of inspiration from another famous villain who spends a lot of
time wreaking havoc, but is only actually seen onscreen very briefly - that’s right, the 1975
classic Jaws. The director wanted to use a chorus for the theme, but they couldn’t afford it, so
Manfredini just came up with his own. I want to play you a clip of the score real quick and see if
you can guess what words he used as his inspiration… *Play score*
Manfredini came up with the famous “ki ki ki, ma ma ma” from the final scene when Mrs.
Voorhees keeps talking to herself in Jason’s voice and repeating: KILL HER MOMMY! The “ki”
coming from “kill,” and the “ma” obviously coming from “mommy.” He just recorded himself in a
basement saying the words as creepy and aggressively as possible, and that’s where the iconic
Jason music came from. And also where Lady Gaga got her inspiration for the chorus of “Bad
Romance” - Ra Ra Ah Ah Ah, Roma, Oh Ma Ma - I’m totally kidding, that’s not true at all. I mean
the chorus of Bad Romance does come from the word “Romance” broken up and repeated, but
to my knowledge, Friday the 13th was not a source of inspiration. That I know of… Gaga,
please correct me if I’m wrong.

So you better believe I’m gonna quote my new favorite book “Men Women and
Chainsaws” by my girl Carol J. Clover, who legit sites the revelation of Pamela Voorhees as the
killer as "the most dramatic case of pulling out the gender rug" in horror film history.
Commenting on the first-person point-of-view shots from the killer, Clover writes: "'We' [the
audience] stalk and kill a number of teenagers over the course of an hour of movie time without
even knowing who 'we' are; we are invited, by conventional expectation and by glimpses of 'our'
own bodily parts—a heavily booted foot, a roughly gloved hand—to suppose that 'we' are male,
but 'we' are revealed, at the film's end, as a woman."
And to connect this to Part 2, despite all the salacious tits & blood that are undeniable
features of the franchise, the Final Girls in both movies are actually pretty bad ass. Part of the
reason why I immediately had to watch Part 2 was because I mixed the movies up, and what I
remember the most distinctly from the entire series was Ginny finding that altar and putting on
Mrs. Voorhees’ sweater and talking to Jason! Like that was actually such a cool fucking move!
Because what’s really the definition of insanity? To do the same thing over and over again and
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expect different results. And that’s low key what happens throughout the first two movies: horny,
idiot teens keep wandering into the forest unaware, then trying to fight Jason with violence.
Ginny is the ONLY one who actually tries a different tactic on him: tenderness. I mean, it’s
sneaky tenderness, with the surprise of violence later, and he is a literal crazed killer on the
loose, but she at least recognizes and empathizes with the fact that Jason has endured an
incredible amount of trauma: he had a near-death experience, he was abandoned, he had to
fend for himself in the wilderness, and then after two decades he finally sees his sole guardian
again, the woman he thinks abandoned him, and then he has to witness her get beheaded! By a
teenager!!! THAT IS SO BRUTAL!!!
So, reflecting a little more on the Evil Mother trope, I do think there is substantial
evidence to support her motivations. Chronic stress impacts how the brain functions, and long-
term exposure to the stress hormone cortisol has been linked to the death of brain cells. And in
a cruel twist of neurobiology, the regions of the brain responsible for grief processing are also
involved in regulating appetite and sleep. So the idea that Mrs. Voorhees was suffering from this
trauma and then had a psychotic break which led to her murdering people actually totally adds
up for me.
Reflecting on a lot of the most infamous Evil Moms in literature and on screen, most of
them end up committing their worst acts of violence against their own children:
If you wanna go way, way back, one of the very First Evil Mom archetypes was Medea, who
killed her two children as a means of revenge against her husband, who had left her for another
woman… Do y’all remember reading this in your 8th grade English class? Do you remember
what her husband’s name was? It was JASON! Coincidence?? Probably. But still, it makes me
smile…
That isn’t exactly the case with Mrs. Voorhees, though. She was designed to be the
victim-turned-villain, a mother desperately seeking revenge for the child she lost. But if you
recall back to the Halloween episode, I discussed how at least in the masked-murderer/teen-
slasher sub genre, horror has often been a euphemism for adolescent autonomy: in a very
exaggerated sense, we kind of have to “kill our elders” to find our own way in the world. And this
often happens against the backdrop of very absent authority figures, ones who are sometimes
the actual cause of violence in the first place, indirectly or otherwise.
Which again just brings me back to how much I think we deserve a Friday the 13th
PREQUEL! I want to see Mrs. Voorhees as a knocked up teen in the 50’s who gets kicked out
on the street and turns into this angry, bitter, flawed, vulnerable single mother who is emotionally
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co-dependent on her special-needs child, and accidentally imbues him with all her own violent,
puritanical rhetoric that leads to his eventual legacy as a masked murderer seeking his own
revenge. I don’t know, I just think it would be neat.

However, the Evil Mom is only the villain in Part 1. In Part 2, we finally get to meet the
Real Jason Voorhees - he sadly doesn’t get his iconic hockey mask until Part 3, and instead is
stumbling around the woods in the saddest pillow case with eyeholes I’ve ever seen. Which
brings me to the second part of this discussion: the dark and actually super fucked up history of
using disfigured and disabled characters as villains.
Just to jog your memory, let’s run through a quick list of some of film’s most famous
scarred villains:
- Starting all the way back in 1928, Lon Chaney in “Phantom of the Opera”
- Every Single Bond Villain Ever
- In the world of Star Wars, we have: Darth Vader, Senator Palpatine, Kylo Ren, and
more!
- Freddy Kreuger
- The Joker
- The bad guy on “Boardwalk Empire”
- The bad guy in “Avatar”
- Dr. Poison in “Wonder Woman,” which I’ll talk about more in a minute here
- And by far the most imaginatively named, Scarface, and of course, Scar from “Lion
King!”

So upon researching this, I had one of those really uncomfortable moments where I
came face to face (pun intended) with my own ignorance and ableism. Like, obviously I’m aware
of the fact that Hollywood has used this trope before, but until now, I genuinely never thought
about how that might affect people in the audience who actually are scarred or disfigured. What
an absolute fucking bummer that must be. It must be hard enough already to get a job or date or
just walk down the street without feeling stared at and shunned, but what a fucking unnecessary
insult to then go to the movies, the one place where everyone should be able to experience the
same level of escapism and entertainment and comfort - and then see someone who finally
maybe looks kind of like you, but they’re the fucking bad guy, every time! And people scream
when the face is revealed, and cheer when the monster is killed. Jesus Christ, man. It is one of
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my many privileges that I have no visible scars or disfigurations, and have never had to
experience that. Because that - that would suck.
And I’m not the only one who feels this way, because as of 2018, the British Film
Institute said that it would not longer fund any more films which featured villains with facial scars
as part of the charity Changing Faces' #IAmNotYourVillain campaign, which aims to shift the
stigma which people with facial disfigurements have to deal with. …But, like, 2018. That was
two years ago, dude. We have got to do better.
And conversely, how many positive scarred role models are there? We really just have
Harry Potter, which, ugh, I’m not even gonna go there. A couple years ago a movie came out
called “Wonder” about a boy with facial disfigurement, but the kid was portrayed by a non-
disfigured actor, which really is kind of a bummer, because that would’ve been a beautiful
opportunity for an actual person with that condition.
And speaking of kids movies, when you think about it, a lot of these films (like the
superhero ones, for example) are geared towards family audiences. Younger viewers are still
being taught by what they see onscreen to distinguish good from evil based on physical
appearances, and continually making the bad guys disfigured or disabled is setting a really
strong precedent.
As of last year, in the top 50 grossing animated films rated PG, 76% had villain
characters with skin conditions, blemishes, wrinkles, or scars. Only 25% of the heroes had
anything like that.
If you think about it, the movies we watch as kids tend to stick with us. We can all pretty easily
recall the first bad guys that gave us nightmares - how many of them were disabled or
disfigured? I mean, for me, it’s gonna have to be the Evil Queen from Snow White when she
was a terrifying little wart-covered witch. Senator Palpatine is definitely up there too. I think they
both actually gave me more of, like, a fear of people wearing heavily hooded robes? But still.
There is a LOT of room for improvement.

And to actually connect this back to the very first Screen Time episode, Road Dahl’s
“The Witches” was recently remade and released just under a month ago, and BOY did they
disappoint! I had naively high expectations when I found out they were setting it in 1960’s
Alabama, because I really though it was going to be a scathing political satire calling out toxic
white feminism - I was admittedly ambivalent about Anne Hathaway, because personally I think
she’s super hit-or-miss, but I gave up all hope when I found out that they KEPT THE GRAND
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High WITCH RUSSIAN? What was even the point of setting it in Alabama then?? And to make
matters WORSE, director Robert Zemeckis added what he called “cat-like claws” on the Grand
High Witch - oh my god, I just realized she’s called the Grand High Witch… like the literal
female counterpart of the Grand Wizard?!??!!? OH MY GOD, HOW DID THEY NOT MAKE
THIS AN ANTI-WHITE SUPREMACIST MOVIE?! WHAT A FUCKING WASTE!!!!! - UGH! Okay,
but seriously, Zemeckis gave her what he called “cat-like claws” which is fucking ridiculous
because cats don’t have 2 fingers, they have paws, they actually have 5 fucking digits. So
basically the Grand Witch’s hands just ended up really resembling - no, not resembling, literally
embodying - what someone with Ectrodactyly looks like. Sometimes called “split hand” or “cleft
hand,” it’s one of the more common birth defects in children affecting hands and sometimes
feet, and essentially means a person is born with only two fingers on their hand. It occurs in 1 in
90,000 births, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but that means there’s almost 4000 people in
America born every year with this condition.
What really embarrasses me, and I’m not too proud to admit it, is that if like 5 years ago
I’d heard that people were offended by this, I’d say that they were being too sensitive, that it’s
just a movie, and it’s not a big deal. But I’ve learned and grown a lot in the last 5 years, and
have become abundantly aware of the fact that representation fucking matters. And just
because this doesn’t directly affect ME doesn’t mean this isn’t a big deal. Because it actually is,
and if we listened to the people whom it does affect, we might all actually learn something.
Paralympic athlete Amy Marren said she was “disappointed” in Warner Bros. and
questioned if there “was there much thought given as to how this representation of limb
differences would effect the limb difference community.” Lauren Applebaum, the VP of
communications for RespectAbility, an organization that advocates for individuals with
disabilities, said Hollywood’s tendency to disfigure evil characters, even unintentionally, can
cause people to be afraid of those who don’t look like them. “The decision to make this witch
look scarier by having a limb difference — which was not an original part of the plot — has real
life consequences. Unfortunately, this representation in ‘The Witches’ teaches kids that limb
differences are hideous or something to be afraid of. What type of message does this send to
children with limb differences?”
Since I believe so strongly that Representation Matters and this podcast isn’t popular
enough to have guests that I don’t actually know on it yet, I’d like to read a little excerpt from the
Teen Vogue article How Disfigured Villains Like "Wonder Woman's" Dr. Poison Perpetuate
Stigma:
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“Ariel Henley, a writer with Crouzon Syndrome, tells Teen Vogue, “The idea that to be
beautiful means to be good and to be disfigured means to be evil is not new. It’s a really
tired, unoriginal trend in the movie industry, and only perpetuates damaging beliefs
about individuals with facial differences.

Diana ultimately says that she stands by humanity because she believes in love —
something that’s visually shown when she’s looking at a photograph of Steve in present
time — but the physical removal of Dr. Poison’s mask, and her disfigurement in general,
isn’t necessary for this character development. It gives the audience the impression that
if we don’t see disability and disfigurement as inherently evil, we must see it as
something worth pitying, even when the disabled person has been nothing but villainous.
We aren’t supposed to come to conclusions about Dr. Poison based on her actions in
the film, but instead based on the way her face appears.

Henley adds, “There were so many opportunities for Dr. Poison’s story to be interesting,
for her role to be about more than her facial difference, but these threads simply weren't
explored.”

So to bring this back to Jason Voorhees: there’s a pretty similar moment at the end of
Part 2 when we think he’s finally been slain, and Ginny reaches over to finally pull off the mask,
revealing his disfigured face. They both gasp, and cover him back up again. Idk if they meant to
do this, but it’s very reminiscent of King Kong to me - the whole “beauty killed the beast”
moment. And it really, once again, just perpetuates this harmful ableist rhetoric.
And speaking of ableism… I am still REALLY stuck on this logistic loophole here about
how the HELL Jason was supposed to have survived in the wilderness for TWO decades?! Is
there any historic proof of something like this actually happening??
As it turns out: there is! In fact, there are NUMEROUS cases of feral children who either
went missing or were abandoned, and found refuge with a pack of animals (most commonly
dogs, although there are also cases of monkeys, wolves, sheep, goats, chickens, and even a
herd of ostriches “raising” a feral child)
One of the most famous cases was a French feral child named Victor of Aveyron, who
was found in 1801 a forest around the age of 12, believed to have been abandoned by his
alcoholic parents around the age of 3. A physician named Jean Marc Itard worked with Victor for
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a number of years, seeking to educate and essentially domesticate the boy. Victor attempted
running away multiple times, and one time when brought outside, ripped off his clothes and
happily played in the snow, clearly more accustomed to exposure and happier with uncivil living.
Itard was a young medical student a the time, and effectively adopted Victor into his
home as his ward and personal experiment. He believed two things separated humans from
animals: empathy and language, and wanted to civilize Victor by teaching him to speak and to
communicate human emotion. Victor showed significant early progress in understanding
language and reading simple words, but failed to progress beyond a rudimentary level.
And remember, this was all during the context of The Enlightenment era, when philosophers
(like the real John Locke, not the character on Lost) were debating exactly what distinguished
us from the animals, and many were obsessed with this (super racist, colonial concept) of “the
noble savage.” Essentially it was when we came up with the whole Nature vs. Nurture debate.
Some of the big thinkers at the time (like Locke) believed that a person was essentially a blank
slate, and only developed based on what they are taught and experience. This directly went
against the more commonly held beliefs at the time, because it opened the doors to moral
relativism.
I’m sorry, my philosophy degree is showing! So embarrassing. But I promise this is all
relevant, just bear with me. At the end of the day, Victor was never really able to communicate
verbally, and only learned to read a few words. There has been some speculation later that he
may have also been Autistic, which I think would actually make sense - and would give us some
more insight into how an abandoned special-needs feral child might adapt to civilization.
But let’s look at some more recent history: the fascinating case of Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja in
Spain:
- His father was a drunk, and his mother died in childbirth when he was 3
- He was physically abused until he was about 7, when he was sold to a goat herder
- The goat herder then either died or abandoned him shortly thereafter, and Pantoja lived
in the mountains alone for 11 years - until he was around 19 years old
- He lived in the sole company of wolves, and when he was found by the Civil Guard,
they had to grab him by force, bind, and gag him, and he was reported to have howled
like a wolf the whole time
- He was brought to a hospital where nuns and a priest taught himhow to speak, dress,
walk upright, and eat with cutlery
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- He ended up doing military service and become a pastor, but was taken advantage of
financially multiple times and at one point went back to living in a cave
he eventually moved to a small village where he moved in with a retired police officer,
who he lived with until the man died
- He now lives alone and is sponsored by a Dutch family, and has been interviewed a
number of times on TV
- In March 2018 he gave an interview in which he said he was disappointed in human
nature and wished he could return to the mountains and leave society.

So I don’t actually know what to do with all that information, but I think the takeaway is
that you shouldn’t be an alcoholic piece of shit who abandons your children, but if you do and
that child ends up being raised by wolves, just let them stay there. They’re probably fucking
happier there anyway. Like, I don’t know man. Just let people live their lives. Maybe if we’d all
just let Jason stomp around the woods by himself, doing his own thing, he could’ve lived a really
happy life, you know, like maybe leave little care packages for him, some goddamn socks or
mittens or blankies or some shit, but fuck man. Maybe people are the problem.

And speaking of people being the problem, fun little tangent about Jason - according to
the article “Jason Voorhees Literally Wouldn’t Hurt A Puppy” by Karl Smallwood, it’s a widely
beloved Fun Fact that the one of the actors who portrayed him, Kane Hodder, would often
disagree with directors about how he personally felt Jason would act or react to the events of a
given scene, even going as far to outright refuse to follow the script if it included something
Hodder believed Jason wouldn’t do. This came to a head during the filming of Friday the 13th
Part VIII: Jason Take Manhattan, when the script called for Jason to kick a dog in the face to
stop it from barking. Hodder refused to even entertain the idea, telling the director (while he was
stood in their in full costume) that although Jason killed people indiscriminately, he wasn’t the
kind of guy who’d kick a dog in the face because only a total dick would do something that
evil.We’d like to mention at this point that Jason Voorhees is literally one of the most prolific
murders in slasher movies history and depending on which source you look up, he’s killed
anywhere between 150 and 300 people on-screen in some of the most brutal ways imaginable
and Hodder still felt that kicking a dog was going too far. Hodder was so adversed to the idea of
Jason doing it that the scene was cut at his insistence and in every film in which Hodder played
Jason after that, he never hurt an animal.
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NOW To close things out on a somewhat lighter note, I wanna tell you all about
triskaidekaphobia! What is triskaidekaphobia, you ask? It’s the fear of the number 13, of course!
But WHY?! Well there is some shady baggage surrounding the number…
- There are 13 steps on the gallows
- 13 coils of rope in a hangman’s noose
- #13 in a Tarot deck is the card of “Death”
But there’s a lot of good shit around the number 13, too. In fact, before the “patriarchal
revolution” and the spread of Christianity made paganism a dirty word, both Fridays and 13
were considered super lucky and sacred. 13 was considered the most essentially “female”
number, because it is the average number of menstrual cycles in a year. It’s also the
approximate number of moon cycles. Wiccans also view life has happening in 12 kind of
chapters, and the 13th one is the afterlife, when we are most at peace.
So when did religion start making 13 seem evil? According to legend, it was on a Friday
that Eve was tempted by Satan in the Garden of Eden - which is fucking ludicrous because
there was no such thing as FRIDAYS BACK THEN?! Similarly, it’s believed that Cain killed Abel
on a Friday, the Great Flood that Noah built an Ark for started raining on a Friday, and the Tower
of Babel fell on a Friday?
Okay so I had to look this up because it was driving me crazy: It was Emperor
Constantine who decreed that the 7-day week was the official Roman week and made Sunday a
public holiday in AD 321. Just to be clear: that was CENTURIES after Jesus, Noah, Babel, and
everything else. (Also this was the same guy who was trying to placate a civil war between the
Christians and the Pagans in Rome so he combined all the Christian and Pagan holidays: that’s
why Christmas is on the same day as Saturnalia and why Easter is during the Spring Equinox.
Frankly it’s ludicrous to think that the shepherds and wise men would’ve come to visit that little
baby in a manger in the dead ass winter, and more importantly, there is NO fucking way that
Jesus was a Capricorn.)
Another theory goes back to The Last Supper - Judas was the 13th guest, and after that,
having 13 people at a table was deemed unlucky. Also Jesus was arrested that night, which is
called Maundy Thursday, and crucified the next day, which was a Friday.
Curiously, there’s a somewhat similar story in Norse mythology: 12 gods were having a
dinner party in Valhalla - it just cracks me up that gods could have a dinner party - and the
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trickster god Loki was not invited. So he crashed the party - making him the 13th guest - and
then shot and killed Balder with a magical arrow, which made the whole Earth dark for a day.
In case you’re not familiar: Balder was the son of Odin and Frigg. She was the goddess
of fertility, motherhood, and the household, and is most likely where we actually get the name
Friday - or it came from her twin sister, Freya? (although there’s some debate that Frigg & Freya
are actually the same person? Literally couldn’t find a straight answer on that, if anyone knows,
please hit me up at screentimewithsarahruthless@gmail.com)
Now, some famous people who had triskaidekaphobia!
- Winston Churchill: he refused to sit in the 13th row in a movie theatre or in an airplane
- Franklin D. Roosevelt: if he was going to a dinner party with 13 guests, he would
always invite his secretary with him to make it an even 14
- Napoleon: let’s be real, I think he was just afraid of everything
- Christopher Columbus!! In the 1950s, a group of Italian Columbus experts concluded
upon careful study of his ships' logs and notes, that Columbus actually landed on the Western
Hemisphere on October 13, 1492. The date, apparently, was deliberately changed to October
12, to avoid the imprint of such an evil omen!!! HAHA! Columbus was a child rapist and America
is cursed.

Well I was hoping that learning more about triskaidekaphobia would end us on a light
note, but here we are… I think the takeaway is that organized religion, philosophy, feral children,
random numbers, and social recluses hiding in the woods actually have a lot in common: as
long as you don’t force them to do anything, and don’t force people to do anything with them,
everyone ends up a lot better off. But once you start fucking with shit, and stop letting people
just LIVE THEIR LIVES, well… camps get closed, teens get slashed, and heads start rolling.
Thank you SO much for joining me on this gratuitous and bizarre journey through Friday
the 13th parts 1 & 3, I hope you had as much fun as I did. If you are so inclined, check me out
on Insta @screentimewithsarahruthless (that’s Sarah with an H, spelled correctly) and on
Twitter @ruthlessscreen.
That’s all folks, and I’ll see you next time.