The Jason Voorhees face reveal has become a tradition for the Friday the 13th series, but one major exception was the 1993 film, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, in which the killer’s famed hockey mask remains fused to the skin on his head.
This break from the norm makes a degree of sense for Adam Marcus’ supernatural slasher, seeing how Jason’s physical form doesn’t get a huge amount of screen time in the movie. Instead, the character spends most of the film hopping between bodies and possessing others in order to continue his killings.
But while the movie itself never lets us see beneath the mask, we eventually got a vivid look at Jason’s face in 2017’s Friday the 13th: The Game, and it’s every bit as grotesque as you probably imagined.
As well as missing a few teeth, an eye and almost his entire nose, parts of Jason’s skull are fully exposed, suggesting that the son of Mrs. Voorhees has seen better days.
Though Jason Goes to Hell proved a hit at the box office, audiences didn’t respond well to the title character’s lack of physical presence, and the movie was widely panned by fans and critics alike.
After that, the film series lay dormant for the rest of the decade, before finally returning with 2001’s Jason X. The sci-fi slasher was followed a couple of years later by 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason, then in 2009, the franchise received the reboot treatment with the plainly titled Friday the 13th.
Since then, the series has yet to make its way back to cinemas, due in part to an ongoing legal battle between screenwriter Victor Miller and director Sean S. Cunningham, but if reports from last year have it right, then we could be mere months away from seeing a resolution to the conflict.
