Turns out, it would be Jason, who was not in fact dead, but was living in the woods and just watching his mom from afar? It’s not clear.
Which is, of course, the secret pleasure of the franchise. Nothing really makes sense in Friday the 13th, certainly not between films. The amount of time that’s passed, the actual day on which an individual entry takes place; these things are explained about as well as Jason’s apparent ability to teleport to his latest victim.
As with the teleportation, no fan of the series really needs an explanation of the timeline or of Jason’s status among the living. They just want to see Jason kill people in spectacular ways. Jason did that best in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, a tightly-constructed slasher with interesting characters and memorable kills. After the misfire of A New Beginning, Jason Lives added humor and classic Universal scares into the mix, making Jason a gothic monster.
Both of these movies evolved Jason, bringing him to his full culmination with Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.
Jason vs. Carrie… er, Tina
The New Blood opens like every other Friday the 13th sequel, with a series of flashbacks from previous movies, giving the illusion of a coherent narrative. After the credits, however, we get something very different. Young Tina Shepherd (Jennifer Banko), a blond moppet who resembles Carol Anne Freeling from Poltergeist more than any of the franchise’s doomed counselors, runs from her lakeside home and into a canoe after witnessing her father (John Otrin) beat her mother (Susan Blu). When her father comes out to console her, he gets no farther than the dock before Tina uses her telekinetic abilities to collapse the dock, drowning her dad.
The movie then jumps several years ahead, to a teenage Tina living with her mother and trying to cope with her powers and her trauma. Working closely with the Shepherds is Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser), who hopes to turn his study of Tina’s powers into a bestselling book. Pretending to care for Tina, but rather hoping an extreme move will trigger her powers, Dr. Crews brings Tina and her mother to a cabin at Crystal Lake, the same place where her father died. And, because this is Crystal Lake, it’s also the same place where a bunch of teens are partying.
