Betsy Palmer as the "original killer" Pamela Voorhees in Friday the 13th
Pamela Sue Voorhees is a fictional character in the Friday the 13th films, and the main antagonist of the original Friday the 13th film. She is a former camp-cook and the mother of Jason Voorhees, the main antagonist of the series.
In the original Friday the 13th film, the character introduces herself as Pamela Voorhees, and makes reference to her son Jacob who drowned in the lake in 1957. It is later revealed at the end of the movie that camp counselor "Jay" is in fact Pamela's other son Jason.
The character was portrayed by Betsy Palmer in the first two films. During the character's brief appearance in Freddy vs. Jason, she was played by Paula Shaw. According to the actress herself at conventions, Betsy Palmer was asked to reprise her role as Pamela Voorhees for the Freddy vs. Jason film but turned the part down after she read the script, as she stated in the "Friday The 13th Reunion" available as a "special feature" on the 2009 Paramount release of the "Uncut: Special Edition". Palmer would return to cameo as Pamela one last time (at Trenton's personal request) in Jason vs Jason X vs Jason.
Nana Visitor played Pamela Voorhees in the 2009 reimagining of Friday the 13th and later reprised the role again, also in Jason vs Jason X vs Jason.
Appearances[]
Films[]
Friday the 13th[]
Pamela (whose maiden name is never revealed) was born in 1930 (revealed in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter). At age 15, Pamela became pregnant by a man named Elias Voorhees. Very little is known about their romance and short marriage, aside from the fact that Pamela kept a class ring which belonged to Elias which she then wore on her ring finger of her left hand (as seen in the first Friday the 13th film). On June 13, 1946, at age 16, she gave birth to a hydrocephalic boy she named Jacob, as shown in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. Because of his deformity, Pamela never sent Jason to school, and was extremely overprotective of him.
Pamela got a job as a cook at Camp Crystal Lake. On a fateful day in 1957, Jason, infuriated with the constant teasing from other children, sneaked out of his cabin late at night to prove he could swim. The counselors were not watching him, as they were at a party in one of the adult cabins. Jason was never recovered from the lake and presumably drowned. Pamela blamed the counselors because she was working the day that it happened.
After her son's death, Pamela began hearing her son's voice telling her to kill the people who were responsible for his death. In 1958, a year after Jason's death, Pamela brutally murdered two counselors (Barry and Claudette) who she felt were responsible for her son's death. Camp Crystal Lake was closed after the murders and was nicknamed "Camp Blood" by local residents.
In 1961 she gave birth to another son, by a different man (who is never named) who she names Jason. His whole life Jason is dominated by his mother, forced to support her as she goes more mad. Eventually he begins to hallucinate her presence (Friday The 13th: The Return of Jason Voorhees) until he cannot help but surrender to his perceptions that she wants to kill in her name.
When the owner tried to re-open the camp in 1962, Pamela returned, poisoned the water, and set several fires. The camp was shut down once again and did not reopen until 1979. Pamela lived in a house which bordered the Camp Crystal Lake property. In Friday the 13th, it is revealed that no one knew who set the fires or poisoned the water. In Friday the 13th, Pamela says she does not want the camp reopened because she fears that another tragic accident will happen.
On Friday, June 13, 1979, the new owner of Camp Crystal Lake, Steve Christy, and eight young counselors return to the deadly campground to prepare it for reopening, even after several ominous warnings of a death curse by the local residents. Enraged, Pamela goes on a savage killing spree, killing Christy and six of the camp counselors.
The last remaining survivor, Alice Hardy, discovers two of the murdered victims and later meets Pamela, who tells her about Jacob's death. Pamela flies into a rage and chases Alice around the camp with a machete, saying "Kill her, mommy!" in Jacob's voice. Finally, Alice is able to take Pamela's machete and decapitate her. Jason, assumed dead, reappears and open seeing his mother dead, kills Alice himself.
Later films[]
Betsy Palmer returns as a hallucination for Friday the 13th: The Return of Jason Voorhees
Two months later, Jason slowly losing his mind, carries out his own revenge killing against retcon survivor Sally Cheever played by Melissa Gilbert. Jason had kept his mother's severed head, first to frighten the girl (by placing it in her refrigerator) and then took both her corpse and the head to his shack deep in the woods where no one can find it. In it, he has built something of a shrine to his mother and subsequently placed some victims there. He is hit in the shoulder with a machete (the same machete with which his mother was killed) and taken prisoner by the police. What becomes of the crudely made home and his mother's remains are never revealed. Pamela Voorhees is apparently laid to rest in a run down, roadside cemetery seen in The Death of Jason Voorhees.
Although Pamela does not share her son's eventual immortality, she does reappear in later films. Throughout the film Jason's sanity slowly degenerates as he sees hallucinations of his mother at their home. After fighting it for almost a year, Jason finally succumbs to his madness and begins a new killing spree. The character is seen again in the climax of the film in which Betsy Palmer reprises her role when Jason sees his mother talking to him while in reality it is one of Jason's potential victims trying to fool him.
Pamela is seen again in Friday the 13th: 3D when lone survivor Chris Higgins has a nightmare which ends with Pamela's corpse (played by the Second Assistant Director, Marilyn Poucher), wearing her blue sweater with head attached, reaching up from the lake to pull her under. She is seen again in Freddy vs. Jason (played this time by Paula Shaw), seen in Hell commanding her son to kill the children of Elm Street; however, it turns out that it is actually Freddy Krueger masquerading as Pamela in order to manipulate Jason for his own ends. Pamela appears very briefly in the Friday the 13th reboot in the beginning credits chasing a young girl (presumably Alice). She is decapitated, as in the original film, and a young Jason Voorhees finds a locket containing pictures of him and his mother. Jason hears her voice telling him to "Kill for mother."
Nana Visitor plays Pamela Voorhees in the reboot of Friday the 13th
In an interview, John Carl Buechler revealed he had originally intended to have a scene in Friday the 13th: The Resurrection of Jason Voorhees in which heroine Tina Shepard has a surreal vision in which Pamela's severed head appears in Jason's arms, repeatedly yelling "Help me mommy!" The scene was never shot, due to being deemed too over-the-top. Reportedly, the character was to make another appearance for Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday in a flashback. Jason X was originally meant to feature an appearance of Pamela in the holographic projection of Camp Crystal Lake that Jason is distracted by in the film; one idea was to even have Jason attack the virtual Pamela to show just how evil he had become.
To date the last known appearance of the character is in Jason vs Jason X vs Jason in which both versions of the character appears. Betsy Palmer plays a holographic version of the original character, while Nana Visitor plays the reboot variation in the flesh. That Pamela is killed by the original Jason which then enrages the reboot version of Jason which leads them to fight each other.
Literature[]
The cover of Friday the 13th: Pamela's Tale #1, which reveals much of Pamela's early life, such as her pregnancy with her son Jacob.
The severed head of Pamela Voorhees is a major character in the first book of Eric Morse's Camp Crystal Lake series. In the novel, hunter Joe Travers finds an unmarked gravestone in the forest and digs nearby to find a wet cardboard box containing the still living head, having been reanimated by Jason's cursed mask. Pamela then gives him directions to the location of Jason's buried hockey mask, which he digs up and puts on, thus becoming possessed by Jason in the process. Carly, the novel's heroine, later discovers the head still in its box, still in the grave. During the final showdown with Pamela and the hunter, she destroys the head with a shotgun blast, killing Pamela.
In the non-canononical Jason vs. Leatherface comic miniseries by Topps Comics, Pamela is renamed "Doris" for unexplained reasons and appears in two flashbacks, one in the first issue and another in the second; in the first flashback, brought on by Jason being asked his name by Cook, she appears, face obscured, encouraging a young Jason as he writes his name on a chalkboard.
The comic one-shot Jason X Special by Avatar Press features Pamela coming back from the dead by possessing a swarm of nano ants. Discovering Jason has been captured by a bio-engineer named Kristen, Pamela releases him and guides him to a camp near Kristen's laboratory populated by androids, who Jason begins to destroy, quickly becoming disastified with these victims due to the fact that, as Pamela states, "they aren't real." At the end of the comic, Pamela, after Jason is launched into space by Kristen, gets revenge on the bio-engineer by possessing her lover Neil and forcing him to stab Kristen in the stomach and slit his own throat.
In the sequel to the one-shot, the two-issue miniseries Friday the 13th: Jason vs. Jason X, Pamela appears only as a fragmented memory shared between Jason and his clone (which was created using a portion of Jason's brain). After Jason disposes of his clone and assimilates the portion of his brain it possessed, his memories of Pamela (who he and the clone did not recognize) are restored.
In the novel Jason X: Death Moon by Black Flame, a character, while in a holographic version of Crystal Lake, stumbles across an underwater recreation of Pamela's grave in the lake and is attacked by a zombified version of her created by Dr. Armando Castillo. In Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, the character Gretchen Andrews, after an encounter with Jason, seemingly becomes possessed by Pamela. Friday the 13th: Carnival of Maniacs involves Pamela possessing characters who come into contact with her severed head.
In 2007, a two issue comic miniseries titled Friday the 13th: Pamela's Tale, detailing much of Pamela's history, was printed by Wildstorm; the comics take place before the main events of Friday the 13th and feature Pamela picking up Annie, one of the Camp Crystal Lake counselors in-training, and recounting her past. She reveals that Elias abused her while she was pregnant, which may have caused Jacob to be born deformed. Driven by what she believed to be the unborn Jacob's voice, Pamela killed Elias with an axe, blew up their trailer and dumped her husband's body in Crystal Lake. After killing Elias, Pamela moved to Crystal Lake and got a job as a chef at a diner, later being hired as Camp Crystal Lake's cook by the Christy family. After telling Annie her origin Pamela, as in the film, slits her throat, but treats her body as if it were still alive afterwards. The miniseries ends with a recreation of the scene from the film where Pamela meets Alice at Camp Crystal Lake.
In the two-issue miniseries Friday the 13th: How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Pamela appears in a flashback to when she first brought Jacob to Camp Crystal Lake in the first issue and the end of the second issue has Jason visiting his mother's grave.
In the six issue comic miniseries Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, by Wildstorm and Dynamite Entertainment, Pamela appears in the first issue of the miniseries, in a dream sequence of Jason's, where Freddy Krueger uses her to manipulate Jason into seeking out the Necronomicon. The fifth issue of the series, in which Pamela makes a cameo appearance on a portrait in her old house, and also implies she may have used Necronomicon in an attempt to resurrect Jason after he drowned.
2009 film trailer controversy[]
Initial teaser trailers for the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th contained dialogue from the original 1980 film that was spoken by Mrs. Voorhees to Alice. Upon release of the trailer, Betsy Palmer was notified that the voice sounded like her, yet she had never given permission for the studio to use her voice. After contacting Paramount's legal representative, Palmer was given a chance to listen to the recording first hand.
After hearing the voice, Palmer concluded that they had taken an audio sampling of her from the original film. In their defense, Paramount stated that they had used a voice double. Bill Neil has gone on record stating that he was present when Kathleen Garrett was in the recording studio reciting the dialogue from the original film, and that he was the one that originally placed the dubbing into the first trailer. Neil states that Palmer's voice is tied to the music and sound effects of the original film, making it impossible for them to have taken a clean sample for their trailer.
Other media[]
From Sideshow Collectible, the 12 inch Pamela Voorhees doll
Pamela also appears in the Friday the 13th video game for the NES. Her severed head is a mini-boss in a hidden cave. It floats around after lifting itself off a pedestal surrounded by candles, reminiscent of the second movie. Just as Jason has to be defeated three times to complete the game, Pamela can also be fought three times, and each defeat earns the player a unique item—a powerful weapon (usually a machete or axe), then her sweater, and finally the pitchfork.
Action figures of Pamela have been released by both Sideshow Collectibles and NECA.
External Links[]
- Template:Imdb character
- Inside the Head of Pamela Voorhees (Part 1, Part 2) at Bloody Disgusting
- Interview with Betsy Palmer on the podcast The Future and You (anecdotes about working on Friday the Thirteenth and the story of how she got her first acting job.)
Template:Friday the 13th