13 Things You Didn't Know About Friday The 13th Part 2
3. What Happens To Paul?
To this day, no one can agree on what happens at the end. Jason crashes through the window and grabs Ginny, pulling her backward in slow motion, machete still embedded in his shoulder from the fight scene in the shack earlier on. The music screeches… and the scene fades to white, then to morning, with Ginny, alive, being wheeled into the back of an ambulance.
"Where's Paul?" she moans. Good question... and where's Jason?
Some insist it’s a dream sequence, riffing on the first film. This would explain why Jason’s character design was so different in the third movie, which takes place immediately afterwards: that longhaired, bearded brute is Ginny's fevered idea of what he looked like under the mask.
However, screenwriter Ron Kurz insists that Jason did kill Paul, but off screen. When Ginny asks where Paul is, the scene cuts to Jason's shack and the shrine to his mother - in the script, Mrs Voorhees' decapitated head grins, revealing the diabolical truth just for the audience in the theatre.
Supposedly, director Steve Miner decided that the smile looked ridiculous and cut it out. Of course, that still doesn't explain why they cut the window scene - why not just show the audience what happened?
One more prosaic explanation comes from the rumour that John Furey, the actor playing Paul, had simply left the shoot over a pay dispute and wasn't there to complete filming. Asked about it at a convention, Furey replied that he would leave it for the fans to decide.