13 Things You Didn't Know About Friday 13th Part III
3. The Ending Is Weirdly Ambiguous Yet Again
The climactic scenes of Friday The 13th Part 3 provide yet another weird dream sequence on the part of the Final Girl Friday.
In the first film, Alice hallucinates Jason as an undead child emerging from the lake to pull her under; in Part 2, Ginny seems to dream an unmasked Jason crashing through that window behind her (as previously discussed, although writer Ron Kurz insists it wasn't supposed to be a dream, the series appears to have retconned it as such).
In Part 3 we're treated to a deliberate, more elaborate restaging of the first film’s ending. Chris, floating in a canoe just like Alice, hallucinates an unmasked Jason, still alive, appearing at the window of the house, then battering the door down and running at her - but blinks and sees the door restored to its frame, the killer nowhere to be seen.
A moment later, the misdirect complete, the film goes for the classic Friday scare again, as the decomposing corpse of Mrs Voorhees, head attached and jumper on, rears up from the lake to drag Chris down with her… only for us to then see that Chris is actually safe with the police and has presumably hallucinated the whole thing.
The thing is - as previously discussed - Chris doesn't know anything about the history/legend of Jason Voorhees and his mother… so why is she hallucinating the authentically-costumed reanimated corpse of a killer she’s never heard of?