Jason Voorhees is one of the most iconic names in horror. Featuring in eleven films to date, with a twelfth right around the corner, the masked anti-hero of the Friday the 13th franchise is the very definition of a cult cinematic and pop culture icon. Everyone knows Jason, but what about the many men whove donned his trademark hockey mask over the years to slice and dice scores of nubile teenagers? Here we take a look at the men who brought Friday the 13ths killing machine to life
9. Ari Lehman - Friday The 13th (1980)
In the original Friday the 13th, the killer was not Jason as we have come to expect from the subsequent entries in the franchise, but rather his Mother Pamela Voorhees, played by Betsy Palmer (sorry if you havent seen it!) Driven on a murderous rampage by the death of her son, due to the neglect of camp counsellors, Mrs. Voorhees returns to Camp Crystal Lake and stalks its current crop of counsellors, including a young Kevin Bacon, who rather unfortunately, gets an arrow through his neck. Jasons lone scene in the film comes at the end of the film, when survivor Alice, having lopped off Mrs. Voorhees head with a machete, gets in a canoe and floats out into the middle of Crystal Lake to wait for help. She is soon attacked by the decomposing corpse of Jason himself, played by Ari Lehman. As Jason tries to pull her down into the lakes abyss, Alice wakes up in hospital screaming; The boy! The boy! - A line that would foreshadow eleven films across three decades of cinema. Ari Lehman is virtually unrecognisable in his role as Jason; his make-up job took four hours to apply. In his teens when he played the horror icon, Lehman has only recently returned to the big screen, returning to his horror heritage with roles in ThanXgiving, Hell-ephone and Terror Overload. In the two and a half decades between his role as Jason and his recent return to the genre that made him a cult icon, Lehman toured the world with his band Ari Ben Moses Band. He released a Jason-based project in 2004 with the band Young Jason, the music was a lot darker than his usual reggae/world music flavours, with the lyrics supposedly coming from the mind of Jason Voorhees around the time of the first movie.