During the recent Halloween holiday I watched the documentary His Name Was Jason. It’s basically a look back at the thirty year history of the Friday the 13th film franchise. While entertaining, my mind ended up mostly debating, what does Jason do with all of his free time?
Watch any of the films and you’ll notice that Jason does very little killing during the day. Assuming he is supernatural (and thus able to keep returning to life and survive machetes to the skull), he obviously doesn’t need to sleep. In fact, we often see him trotting through the woods long before he bothers to start killing people. What is he up to out there?
We rarely allow ourselves a view into the personal lives of monsters. It’s so much easier to assume that Freddy Krueger is a killing machine with no other thoughts than doom and destruction. Yet, any given Nightmare film takes place overt a series of days and Freddy isn’t killing that whole time or else the body counts would be in the hundreds or thousands.
My guess is that monsters are readers in their spare time. I bet if you poked around long enough in those Elm Street steam tunnels you’d find yourself a budding library. Why read? They’d need something to relax after the long nights of carnage. I need to wind down after watching an exciting football game, I can’t imagine the high I’d be on after butchering twenty horny teenagers. Wait, strike that.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is one of my favorite horror films because it delves into the mythology of evil in modern society. I’m still waiting for the film that delves in the banality of modern icons of horror. I suspect that the mongoloid kid in Crystal Lake didn’t exactly grow up to be the Fonz.
