13 Things You Didn't Know About Friday The 13th
4. Jason Was Never Supposed To Still Be Alive
The ending of the film sees a young, deformed Jason Voorhees rises from the lake to drag Alice Hardy, the final girl, underwater
Cunningham wanted one last scare: the daylight, the warm, relaxing music - all were specifically engineered to lull the audience into a false sense of security after that frenetic last fight scene and the demise of the killer.
Someone had come up with the idea of having Jason rise from the water to attack Alice, but Cunningham thought that was ridiculous. His movie was based in a ramped-up version of reality, and in that story Jason had been dead for over two decades. He was a plot device, not a character: the catalyst for the murders, not an antagonist.
Cunningham only went with it once Miller wrote it as a dream sequence. It would provide a reason for Jason still being in the lake, still being eleven years old, without resorting to supernatural theatrics.
Cunningham’s idea was a deliberate riff on the ending to Brian DePalma’s Carrie. DePalma himself had been riffing on Deliverance, which had a hand coming out of the water in a similar manner at the end of the movie. The series of homages came full circle in an ironic fashion, as Deliverance’s watery tease is revealed to be a nightmare that survivor Jon Voight wakes from in a panic.
Cunningham was ripping off a climax which was in turn ripping off a climax which was actually closer to Cunningham’s own scene than the scene he was ripping off.