June 13, 2025

Kids These Days Keep Trespassing At Summer Camp

[Alternately titled To Kill A Camp Counselor]

Happy Friday the 13th, y’all! As promised, this post is about Friday the 13th Part 2, which, I gotta say, I thought was better than the original. But that might just be me. Anyway, let’s get into it! Go to your local library!

So, this is the first sequel I have covered here on So Desensitized. This is partly because I don’t tend to watch sequels, because the first is generally better. The only exception to this rule is the Child’s Play franchise, of which I have seen all seven movies and three seasons of the TV show. Otherwise, the farthest I’ve gotten in any franchise is Friday the 13th Part 3. But, as I mentioned before, I found Part 2 to be slightly more enjoyable than the original, for a few reasons.

The first is, I am a sucker for an urban legend. The plot of the first movie being told as a ghost story/urban legend/etc. In the second and further installments? I eat that shit up. And Friday the 13th Part 2 pulls it off beautifully. The setting helps, because it makes that first massacre at Camp Crystal Lake by Pamela Voorhees into a literal campfire story, told to frighten other counselors and also to try and keep them from trespassing on the old campgrounds. Some of this might be my deep and undying love for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, but it’s a common enough phenomenon that I also think it’s just a universally appealing method of storytelling. There’s a sense of tradition to it, a kind of carrying on, not forgetting.

The second reason I found Part 2 to be slightly more effective and enjoyable than the original is its villain. It is often said that a slasher movie is only as good as its villain, and, while there is no denying that Pamela Voorhees is one for the ages, Jason as a walking, stalking urban legend is just about perfect. He, like Michael Myers, is a boogeyman. He’s not supposed to be alive, he’s not even supposed to be entirely real, but he is, and he’s coming for you. Jason haunts the franchise, always lurking, always just out of sight until it’s too late. As good a villain as his mother was, Jason takes her methods one very effective step further, that makes for an ever so slightly scarier movie.

But underneath all of the fear he brings, Jason Voorhees is a deeply tragic figure. He is doomed to wander the grounds of Camp Crystal Lake for eternity, killing anyone who disturbs his otherwise quiet existence. He is a little boy who died, and was brought back to horrible life by his mother’s desperate grief. And no one but his final girls are willing to acknowledge that. This tragedy is spotlighted in one of the final scenes of Part 2 in which the final girl, Ginny, finds the shack Jason lives in with his mother’s head sweater set up on a kind of altar deep in the woods. She pulls the sweater on, and speaks as ‘mother’ to try and talk Jason down before she kills him. This strategy is ultimately unsuccessful, as she breaks character too soon, and is attacked again, but it draws the audience’s attention to the fact that Jason is still a child. He just wants peace. He just wants his mother. But she’s gone, and now there are loud, clueless teenagers, much like the ones who let him die in the first place, intruding on his sanctuary. And what does he know other than the violence his mother taught him?

In the rumors told about him by the camp counselors in training about Jason, he is a feral creature. A recluse who eats dead animals, a monster who deserved to die, a creature who was never going to live. When, in reality, as I said, he is a scared child. And in this, I see another maligned and misunderstood character. That is, Arthur “Boo” Radley from Harper Lee’s masterpiece To Kill  A Mockingbird. I ended up reading To Kill A Mockingbird in my English class at around the same time I watched Friday the 13th Part 2, which was in March, because I was under the incorrect impression that there was a Friday the 13th in April. There was not. But, I got some good, tragic parallels out of it, so there’s that.

Jason Voorhees and Boo Radley are very similar in many ways. Both are urban legends in their own rights. Jason drowned, then his mother began a killing spree that he was forced to continue instead of ever finding peace. Arthur Radley was a troubled child, who was left to his abusive father’s care after his mother died. Neither of them are seen often. Radley only very rarely leaves his house, and Jason only does so out of necessity. Both are largely maligned by their communities. The circumstances of Jason’s death lead the audience to believe that he was not well cared for by anyone but his mother, and the same thing is implied about Arthur. Rumors about both of them abound, as do rumors about any good urban legend. The people of Maycombe County say that one afternoon, for a reason known to no one but himself, Boo Radley stabbed his father in the leg with a pair of scissors. Campers at Crystal Lake hear that Jason once dragged poor Alice down under the lake, after his mother killed all of those kids. Both are rumored to eat wild animals, and have a real or imagined threat of violence surrounding them at all times. And both Jason Voorhees and Arthur “Boo” Radley are deeply tragic figures. Arthur Radley is a hero who will only ever be looked down on by the majority of Maycombe County as ‘that poor, dangerous Radley boy’. Jason Voorhees is a child forced into bloody shoes he cannot ever fill. Both are likely disabled in some way. Arthur Radley is written in a way we can now understand to likely be non-verbally autistic, but is just described as ‘strange’ or ‘troubled’. The shape of Jason’s head, as well as his mother’s insistence that he was a ‘special boy’ who needed extra attention, and to be watched extra closely while swimming especially, indicates both physical and intellectual disability, potentially due to pregnancy complications. In short, Jason Voorhees and Arthur “Boo” Radley can both be seen as tragic cases of the way society at large treats people with disabilities, especially children, or those in abusive situations. Arthur’s heroism will never be acknowledged because of the cruelty inherent in bringing him into the spotlight of Maycombe County, and Jason was drowned because his counselors didn’t see him as being worthy of their attention.

So on this Friday the 13th, remember Jason Voorhees not only as a villain, but as a child. A child who wants nothing more in the world for his mother to tell him that he’s done a good job, and can stop now. A child who wants to rest. A child who pulled Alice Hardy out of her canoe not out of malice, but out of a desire to live, to leave the water, to be held, and maybe saved. Remember that there were other kids at Camp Crystal Lake the summer he died, kids who were able to play, who were watched  carefully. Remember that he just wanted to go swimming, and is now damned to kill for eternity, punished for a crime he did not commit. Remember that all he wants is his mother.

Thanks for reading, all! Summerween has officially begun over here, so expect summer slashers pretty much from here on out, except for next post, which will be The Evil Dead, for reasons I will reveal then. Happy reading and stay spooky!🩸🔪🏚️