Friday the 13th (1980): Crystal Lake, Pamela Voorhees, and Retributive Justice

Ryan Does: Hello everyone, welcome this episode of the podcast. We are sitting down for a discussion on Friday the thirteenth, the 1980 slasher that set Jason Voorhees and the Voorhees family loose onto the world of pop culture. And for this discussion, my good friend Josh Patterson is back. Josh, can you give people a little bit of an introduction to yourself and then What it was like for you to be introduced to Friday the thirteenth as a franchise. Absolutely. My name is Josh Patterson. I am a theologian and podcaster. I'm a former pastor. Now I currently work for the World Institute for Science, Religion, and Culture with Ilia Delio. It used to be called the Center for Christogenesis. now we're World Institute. And we're kind of moving from a like contemplative spirituality focus. to an educational focus. so we're gonna be launching an educational forum, offering fully accredited PhDs and master's degrees. So that's super exciting. and let's see. Yeah, Friday the 13th, I guess so we talked about Nightmare on Elm Street previously together. And I was introduced to like, you know, these films around the the same time. Cause my introduction to horror actually was in this specific genre. And so you know we did Friday the 13th Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween. Yeah. All of these fun things. So I I liked it as an introduction to the genre because like some of the more like supernatural stuff like freaked me out too much at first. And so, you know, why not just watch people get murdered instead? That's normal thing to do. I think I I think that from what I've heard from other people is that Friday the thirteenth and Halloween, they're like These foundational horror intro movies. Like if you if you can get behind the kind of terror and horror that these movies elicit, you're you're in a good beginner stage. This movie is kind of foundational for understanding like where horror is at the end of the 70s and where it's going in the eighties. Friday the thirteenth, as a franchise, would do eight movies in a decade. So like they they took like the saw approach, where it's just like while the iron is hot, let's strike as many times as we possibly can. Even if it gets weird. I get yeah, I mean even if like New York and space and all sorts of shit. Jason becomes a zombie. Like Jason's not really even in this first movie. So Adam's sure we'll we'll talk about that as well. I wanna give people a little bit of a primer. For Friday the 13th, the original 1980 film. And then we'll jump into our conversation about judgment and retribution and why Pamela Voorhees is such a a very, very flawed but a very, very human character. This all is ahead of the upcoming Peacock series called Crystal Lake, which is gonna focus more on Pamela Voorhees as as the the focal point character of that series. This movie came out in May of 1980. It is directed by Sean S. Cunningham, produced by Sean S. Cunningham, and it stars a lot of people that would go on to do things. Namely, Kevin Bacon is the one person from this movie that went on to the biggest acclaim. But it stars Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees. She is fantastic in the minimal amount of screen time in this movie. And like has become a trend in the movies we've been talking about recently. This movie was made for next to nothing and it grossed almost sixty million in its box office run. It was made for less than a million. And I just find that so fascinating. We we talked about this with Cutter Callaway about Texas Chainsaw, where Texas Chainsaw was made for in modern dollars, nothing. And it went on to become this massive boom. Same thing with The Exorcist in our conversation with Andy Durolf. both people who Josh introduced me to, and I couldn't be could be more thankful that I know those people now. So the quick synopsis for Friday the 13th is as counselors are reopening Camp Crystal Lake, the killer, Mrs. Voorhees, acts as this judgment on the counselors for what happened to her son Jason many, many years ago. She goes on this rampage throughout the camp and it ends with her Tracking down Alice, our final girl. they have a scuffle and a skirmish on the beach of the lake, and it ends with Pamela Boreas' head being just lopped off. And we think it's done, and we think that Alice is going to get away. But we see in a very famous last shot of the movie that she is adrift in this canoe and a zombified, still, still a boy, still a boy, Jason. comes out of the water, pulls her under, but then she wakes up in a hospital to find out that everyone she was going to be working at Camp Crystal Lake with is now sadly deceased. So this really is a movie that establishes a lot of the tropes of the genre. The the camp, the masked killer, the the you know, teenagers out there, you know, smoking weed, having sex, and then there's like this moral judgment upon. The the deterministic setup and this kind of critique of human behavior in this movie, it creates this like black and white moral system. When you watch this movie and it presents this moral system to you, what are your what are your thoughts and impressions of that now as someone in 2026? I would call it tributive justice, which it that goes back. Forever. The book of Job arguably could be read as a critique of retributive justice because in the movie, you do a bad thing, you get punished, you do a good thing, you get rewarded. That's the kind of retribution bit. Whereas in Job, Job didn't do anything bad, and then bad stuff still happened to him. So it brings up that question of why do bad things happen to good people, which is a question as old as time philosophically. That's the problem of evil theologically. If God is all good and all loving and God is all powerful, then why is there so much suffering evil in the world? It's kind of that thing. So I think we have this obsession with retributive justice. I think in our culture, specifically here in the States, and there there's other countries where restorative justice is kind of the approach that tends to be taken. So instead of punishment for punishment's sake, it's punishment with the goal of restoration to bring someone back into Back into society to reintegrate them. A transformational bit. Whereas we're more so obsessed with the final judgment. It would be like a final chapter in someone's story. There's no real epilogue after that to to add to the story or change the narrative. I think what what I find interesting about the retributive justice immorality conversation Friday the 13th is that this is not a film that tries to say, That God wants this punishment for this person. It's Pamela Voorhees is the one who is prescribing the morality. She views those things as the sins that led to her son dying. So then she becomes judge, jury, executioner of these people. How common, how why maybe is the the common Trait in a lot of these slasher villains with the mindset of a Pamela Voorhees, I have been wronged and I view this wrong as morally objectionable to the point where I will kill to bring about this retributive justice. But they don't really see them killing a people as a morally reprehensible thing. That like that mindset, can you maybe add a little bit of fleshing out to that and Why I feel like we're coming back around to this. Like retributive justice is in vogue again in 2026. Can you maybe add some depth to that? She is acting out of like unprocessed trauma, right? She has a genuine wound. She then feels the need to take things into her own hands. Basically, she becomes God in this sense, right? She's the one who is enacting the judgment, she's the divine, she's herself is the person giving the commands to kill. You see it with the Different countries acting this way, or militaries, or certain presidents. It's a projection of the human becoming God, or maybe it's the other way around. The retributive images of God is really just a projection of of humans into the sky, as it were. From a theological perspective, I have a difficult time with that because I don't I don't see God as this kind of retributive tyrant in the sky. And loving. And so any any kind of like retributive style justice, I would put more onto onto people rather onto the divine. I actually really I really like the inclusion of specific current event or or current social trends in your response there because I I think for highly individualized forms of retributive justice. We get into the we get into the realm of vigilantism, where my my moral code, the thing that I believe is worthy of judgment and punishment, that is the thing that supersedes that mentality supersedes the actual acts that I am doing. Because the entire movie, Pamela Voorhees is killing these people because of an accident that befell her son. So she then goes on this cleansing of this area of she she claims Crystal Lake as her hunting ground. That nothing can nothing can happen within her territory again. They haven't opened this camp in forever. It's called Camp Blood for a reason and would continue to be called Camp Blood, because we gotta we gotta franchise this thing. But I also find it Really interesting that we have a Harbinger character here. We have Crazy Ralph who keeps saying there's a death curse on this place. There's a death curse on this place. Pamela Voorhees uses that to re-reinstill and give more fear to the judgment she's about to enact on this whole campground. She takes that crusade mindset and really puts it to work. And I think. Between the curses and the trauma and the crusade that she's on, there are pretty evident comparisons to nowadays where you find someone who has a perceived wrong or a perceived vendetta against a group of people. And then whatever they do to that group of people is not as objectionable as the perceived slight that they had in the f in the first place. So this crusader mindset that Pamela Worhe's on makes sense to me. Again, morally reprehensible, but it makes sense to me because we see it so often nowadays. Where have you seen that? I think what you're describing is like the scapegoat mechanism. So this is Renee Girard's whole thing was the idea of scapegoating. Basically you have a society and then when there's issues or perceived wrongs in the society, there needs to be some kind of blow-off valve, as it were. The community has to find the The evil, the bad thing that's that's causing the issue, and then that becomes the scapegoat. If you look back, just look at US history. Who has been who has been our scapegoats, right? It always changes. You know, sometimes it's Russia or it's China or it's Iraq. Different people groups you can point at and they're the problem. With Friday the thirteenth, though, what I think is interesting is in a way, what happened to Jason as an institutional failure. So what's interesting then Is it's not the institution that is critiqued in the movie, it's these other people who are scapegoated. This happens all the time. It's never the institution's fault, it's just like these individual bad actors. And so I think you can this expands then into all sorts of things. This is religion. it's not there's nothing inherently wrong with this theology. It's just a few bad acting pastors. This is systemic racism. The system's not the problem. It's just a few bad actors. And I It's the same thing. We see this in our society where if we can expel the individuals rather than look at the larger structure that caused this in the first place. I love when I think a conversation is going to go one way, and then you you break the story a little bit and it becomes about a whole different other thing. The scapegoating makes total sense because Pamela Voorhees takes it out on the lowest. persons she doesn't go after the institution she goes after the individual counselors she goes after and then later on in the movie she goes after counselors that have not even wronged her she goes after people who are complete could not have been around to cause her immediate harm and instead of going and dealing with tragedy like what happens to Jason is a tragedy but it's not in her mindset the tragedy Then leads to terror and trauma. It doesn't lead to transformation and transcending out of that. It like she she she sees the two paths in the woods and she goes off to the right because I think we we see it a lot interpersonally, maybe not as much, but we see the amplified version on the news, on social media. When there's two paths to take in a crisis moment, the easiest path. Is most often the one that allows us the most immediate gratification. And when emotion bot gets you know boils up to the top, usually that's not going to lead to the most transformative and most transcendent choice. Because that would require us stepping back from the situation and saying, Okay, what do I need in this moment? What do I need to move through this in a healthy way? Pamela Voorhees does not step back. She has that voice in her head. and and I know there's you know, there's psychosis and maternal grief narratives in this film, and and that is worthy of its own separate discussion at another time. But when we're talking about retributive justice, that usually comes out of a more gratifying, immediate response to something because we get to, like you said, blow off that seam and get to release that valve. God, I think that man, you like You unlocked that in my head. Well, I think that goes back to the the question you asked previously, because now if I'm like, you know, you got me thinking if I put myself in Mrs. Voorhees shoes and read it as a critique of exactly what you're talking about. Like we're both like wrestling fans, right? So we love to see we love to see when the heel, you know, gets what's coming to him. Right. Like that feels good. You love to always see the good guys beat the bad guys. Putting ourselves into her shoes can critique this retribution force because, like you were saying, you can understand her, but it's morally reprehensible. But like so often in times of crisis, you're right. We don't we don't step back, we don't hit pause, we don't breathe, we just move forward. Josh, this original film has more to say, and the franchise as a whole has much more to say. And yes, at the end of the day, it is a Schlocky, campy 80s horror franchise. There, like, I know what it is, but I do think that these movies can, as popular media, as popular culture, they can teach us something that is at the core of the populace at the time and the populace moving forward. So I want to ask, is there anything else in the vein of this retributive justice scapegoating lens that we're approaching Friday the 13th? I think that image of the divine is a projection of humans onto God, which is often what I get critiqued with, right? People be like, your lovey dovey version of God is just a projection of you. And I'm like, I don't know. Have you seen people? It's not like you turn on the news and you're like, look how wonderful humanity is. It seems so to me, it's like so funny to kind of get critiqued that way. Cause it's like, no, you know, it's like the one thing about Calvinism that maybe they get a little bit right is they go too far with total depravity, but like, you know, the whole like sinful nature thing, we kind of suck a lot. And so I think that's That's just interesting to me because especially within the Christian tradition, if the whole idea is that like God becomes incarnate and shows that God would rather die for a cause than to kill for one, yeah, that's kind of flips it on its head. Now you get a lot of the kind of retributive stuff, you know, and we can, you know, s spark debates about Old Testament, New Testament, and, you know, become who is it, Marcion Marcionites and like say we should just ditch the whole Old Testament. wouldn't recommend doing that. That's just something it's not really a fully formed thought, but it's I just want to point that out. The the constant retributive stuff, it just doesn't fly with me. And that's why I'm like a process thinker, open and relational, all of this kind of stuff. I think one of the other things just to cap off one thought that I I had as you were talking about the the concept of a retributive God and why that just doesn't really sit sit well. And that thought you were saying of like the the paradigm of People are completely depraved and and not worthy of of any good coming their way. Or people are not depraved and people are essentially all good. It's like, mm-hmm. I think that probably plays really well in an academic setting when you're not dealing with people and the messyness, the messiness of life. We are so much of both. Like, I think there is hope and goodness and wholeness in in people as a as a species, as a group, As individuals, but also I echo what you said. Have you met people? Like people are usually hmm. Sometimes people can be the least humane part of the world. And Friday the 13th really does kind of give us a snapshot into someone going through a hurtful, harmful, grief-filled state and taking that path. to the to the to the to the wrong side, to the least humane path, and to become this retributive administer of of her own justice. Not not a not a morally universal agreed upon justice. Like a very individualized, a very spurned, a very wrong form of justice. And I think this can serve as a cautionary tale to how we view others, other people who have not have not wronged us directly or Maybe why are we so wronged by why are we so wronged by the idea of these counselors, this camp? They're not even the people that wronged me. Like that could stir it some self-reflection up in us and probably should. But Josh, I wanna just say thank you for this chat about Friday the thirteenth, really just like cracking the seal on this as a franchise. Everyone, just remember that even though the horrors persist, so can we.