Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash

The Dead of Winter

In the heart of New England, there is a place called Cunningham County, an underdeveloped slice of New Jersey woodlands (although one can argue that all of New Jersey is just as underdeveloped). At the center of this county is a town where terrible things happened, things so terrible that anyone who bore witness to them went insane and was locked up in a crazy house far away. Or in a wooden box six feet underground...

Welcome, my lords, to Isengard!

Well, actually, it's Crystal Lake, New Jersey, but the same horror stories can be applied. The locals have taken to calling it Forest Green, as if changing the name will erase the terrible history behind this Hell-Town. Trust me; nothing you can do will be able to take away the nightmares once you've lived, and nearly died, through them.

Nevertheless, they did their best to hide their horrendous past with brand new roads, super expensive lakeside condos, and they even built a new warehouse supermarket called Super-Mega-Ultra S-Mart, a supped-up version of one of the better second-rate chain stores, of which I am a department manager at the store in my home town, thank you very much. Shop smart; Shop S-Mart!

But getting good deals on your housewares or some cheap shirts made by the anonymous masses of some third-world country like China won't cover up the blood that has been spilled here in the last thirty years. You see, Crystal Lake, despite being one of the most beautiful waterside communities on the East Coast, is also the birthplace of an evil so foul, and foul-smelling, that it would give even the dreaded Deadites, a breed of the undead that have inherited supernatural powers that I hunt down and kill for a living, a run for their money. This being that I speak of is so evil and awesome in the terror that it spreads that the locals say Hell itself spat him back out: Jason Voorhees, an unstoppable, unkillable, and unsanitary monster.

But he wasn't always a monster. No, he was human once, even if only by loose definition of the term. To many, Jason was a monster to begin with: hideous, malformed, fat-headed; you name it, Jason was called it. Even as a child, Jason was always alone because of his deformed body with an oversized cranium and frail and weak figure. His teeth were stuck out at odd angles, and one eye was lower than the other. He was not very social (but I guess you wouldn't be either if you looked like that).

But there is a tragedy behind this demon. Hell, despite being the monster that he is now, he did not deserve the fate that befell him when he was six years old. In 1957, Jason drowned at the local summer camp where his mother, Pamela, worked as a cook. The two horny, pimple-faced teenagers who had been assigned to watch the poor boy had decided it was a better use of their time to go off and relieve the itch of their burning desire for one another.

Did they know the consequences of their actions? Most definitely. Did they care? Most definitely not. But just one year after the drowning, someone took care of those two anyway. That someone was Pamela Voorhees, who became depressed after the loss of her only son.

For the next twenty-two years, Pamela went to any-and-all lengths to prevent the camp from opening again to prevent the same tragedy that befell her from happening to anyone else.

She would poison the water, set fire to the cabins, anything she could do to ensure the camp stayed closed. But soon, she lost her mind and her mission became lost amid desires of revenge and that led to the Crystal Lake Massacre of '79. But she hadn't counted on someone fighting back; it ultimately led to her beheading.

But here is where the already thin line between fact and fiction vanishes entirely.

According to some, Jason, through some means either holy or demonic, never really drowned that day at the lake, and had managed to survive in the woods on his own for twenty-plus years. And when Pamela was killed, Jason, had witnessed her demise and began plotting his revenge.