10 Best Meet The Real Villain Moments In Movie History

Though the Friday the 13th franchise tends to get lumped in with the glut of generic slasher films released throughout the 1980s, the original movie still boasts one of the most brilliantly unexpected villain reveals in cinema history, regardless of genre.

Audiences are led to believe that the unseen killer slaughtering Camp Crystal Lake's careless counsellors is the resurrected form of Jason Voorhees, a disfigured young boy who drowned at the camp decades earlier while two counsellors were off having sex.

But at the end of the film, protagonist Alice (Adrienne King) runs into a middle-aged woman who confirms herself to be Jason's mother Pamela (Betsy Palmer), before revealing that she's actually been the person killing the camp's residents.

The film's sleazy style and fairly generic plotting lured audiences into a false sense of security, that they were going to get a garden variety slasher flick where the boogeyman murders a fleet of horny teenagers.

As such, nobody expected a rug-pull where Jason is subbed out for his vengeful mother, and only the film's final jump scare hints at the possibility of Jason returning from the dead in the sequels, as of course ended up happening to enormous success.