‘Jason Lives’ Turns 40… and Offers Horror a Path Forward
40 years later, Matthew Rozsa revisits Jason Voorhees’ best outing in ‘Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.’
The subtitle Jason Lives was no accident. When Friday the 13th: Part VI arrived in 1986, it made a clear promise: Jason Voorhees was back. After A New Beginning frustrated audiences by removing the franchise’s signature killer, the series course-corrected with a return to its most recognizable figure.
The message was reinforced in the film’s accompanying soundtrack. Alice Cooper’s He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask) underscores the same idea:
Oh, but he’s back!
He’s the man behind the mask
And he’s out of control, he’s back!
The man behind the mask
And he crawled out of his hole!
From a box office standpoint, the strategy fell short. Jason Lives did turn a profit, but it underperformed compared to its predecessor, and subsequent installments continued that trend until Part X. Critically, the film fared only moderately well, earning a mixed reception.
The New York Times‘ Caryn James dismissed it at the time as “a gory waste of time,” and years later Eric D. Snider of ericdsnider.com denounced it as “thunderingly mediocre,” snarkily complaining that it “features no nudity whatsoever. Also, no one falls down while running, no one says, ‘I’ll be right back,’ and there are no cars that won’t start. Surely this is all an editing mistake.”
In contrast, Fangoria‘s Michael Gingold called within the series because, despite its plot holes, “damn it, it’s fun! You have to love how the deputy drops a bunch of cartons of food without food in them. And Jason being re-animated like Frankenstein is on par with Freddy Krueger being re-animated by the urine of a stray dog. It’s just fun and creepy Jason Voorhees doing what he does best. And he even slays a credit-card-handling yuppie, to boot. Take that, mid-eighties America!”
