The thirteenth Friday the 13th movie, Camp Blood Gore Tour, is a welcomed reinvention of the horror franchise starring Jason Voorhees. The film is a meta experience that blurs the line between reality and fantasy, leaving your heart pounding and your nerves on edge. Director Harry Gorman1 weaves a sinister tapestry of terror, delving deep into the primal fears that lurk beneath the surface of fan obsession and the Hollywood entertainment industry, resulting in a slasher film that pushes the boundaries of the genre.
The movie begins innocuously enough, with fans of the Friday the 13th franchise embarking on “The Camp Blood Gore Tour,” a special interactive fan experience at the locations where the original 1980 movie was filmed in Warren County, New Jersey. It's part theme park, part museum, part haunted house, part live-action role-playing game (LARP), part movie studio, part summer camp, part resort, and a full-on party. The tour begins, like the original movie, on Main Street of Blairstown, NJ, then the local diner, and a bus ride to the cemetery in Hope, NJ. The tour then descends upon their final destination: Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, which in the film was called Camp Crystal Lake—or nicknamed by the locals as “Camp Blood.”
The lakeside campsite in the remote wooded mountains of Northwest New Jersey has been carefully reconstructed with exact replicas of the sets and scenes from the original Friday the 13th movie. Guests stay over the weekend, sleeping two nights in the cabins as if they are campers—except they are also pampered by the counselors/waitstaff with room service and an endless supply of alcohol plus all manner of recently legalized cannabis products. Their bunkbeds are decorated with fake blood-stained sheets, foam knives, and machete-shaped pillows. The camp exclusively uses technology and cars from the 1980s, and the retro atmosphere is enhanced by the fact that guests must turn in their cell phones at the gates. No photography is allowed on the premises to prevent spoilers from being posted online.
The “Camp Blood Gore Tour” has been going on all summer and is a major hit, selling out every weekend. What is extra special about this particular weekend in August is that Friday happens to fall on the 13th. Fans who embark on the tour are treated to a live-action recreation of the slasher movies they love, witnessing the carnage firsthand. Prowling the campgrounds are a dozen actors dressed as Jason Voorhees from each movie in the franchise, including zombie Jason from Part 6 and cyborg Jason X.2 One building on the tour includes the sets from the spaceship Grendel, where they do a mind-blowing (literally) reenactment of the liquid nitrogen death scene. All weekend long, menaces in hockey masks emerge from the woods with machetes to attack unsuspecting camp counselors (who are also actors) while the famous “ki ki ki, ma ma ma” theme song by Harry Manfredini plays through hidden speakers. Tour guests are always on edge, as around every corner might lurk another Jason.
We are gradually introduced to the tour guests as they explore the camp.
There is the obsessive Superfan, a 20s-something man obviously on the autism spectrum, who has meticulously rewatched and analyzed every movie in the series dozens of times each and knows every line by heart.
There is the Purist, a female cinephile currently in film school as an aspiring director3, who only likes the first movie in the series. She and the Superfan quickly develop some veiled love/hate chemistry.
Superfan: The first one doesn't even have Jason in it.
Purist: Yes it does, at the very end.
Superfan: That doesn't count, it was just a dream.
Purist: Not according to the sequels—which is why they suck.
Superfan: You suck.
The Critic is a snobbish middle-aged pseudo-intellectual journalist from a prestige media publication. She hates all the Friday the 13th movies and is only there to write a scathing review. “Even the original was an inferior ripoff of Halloween,” she says, “and the sequels were inferior ripoffs of a ripoff, becoming more debased over time until viewers began rooting for Jason and took pleasure in the absurdity of his increasingly brutal kills. The films are steeped in problematic misogyny and fetishistic violence against women.” The Critic is not popular among the other guests—or the crew.
Then there is the Contrarian hipster who claims, “Actually Part 5 is the best in the entire series.” He is not well-liked by anyone either.
The Poser hasn’t seen any of the movies, just clips of the “SICKEST KILLS” on YouTube. The young teen begged his mother to bring him on the tour, even though she hates horror and they live in California. She embarrasses him by screaming hysterically at every little jump scare.
The Hater constantly talks about how much better Freddy and Michael are while pointing out all the flaws, plot holes, and continuity errors in the Friday movies.
The rest of the guests are just casual horror fans there to enjoy the cheap thrills and (not so cheap) booze. They spend much of their time on the party boat, a smaller version of the cruise ship from Part 8 that Jason took to Manhattan, drinking beer and blasting 80s music.
The 12 Jasons try to frighten the tour guests but always let them narrowly escape, focusing their attacks on fellow actors, who include camp counselors, maintenance workers, random extras, and plants posing as tour guests (including the prototypical Jock, Slut, Virgin, Nerd, and Other Slut). The actors are rigged with squibs of fake blood created by veteran Hollywood prop masters who were hired to create seamless special effects.
While making s’mores by the campfire Friday night, a counselor is stabbed by a poker with a flaming marshmallow at the end—then the Poser happily eats it. Another camper is stabbed through a hammock while napping. A disabled counselor receives a machete to the face before being pushed down a long flight of stairs in his wheelchair. A stuntman Jason 9 (from Hell) runs through the camp with his suit on fire before splashing into the lake. Guests are elated as a teenage skinny-dipper is hung from a tree swing rope. Later, kayakers and row boaters “ooh” and “ah” as they paddle by the floating corpse of teenage Kevin Bacon and other mannequins made to look like victims from the previous movies. Tourists can also go snorkeling to view Jason 6 chained to a rock on the bottom of the lake. Special prosthetics make the speargun Jason 3 shoots at a counselor appear to impale him4. Women are constantly thrown through cabin windows and fall on sharp spikes. In a fan-favorite performance, Jason 7 secretly swaps a sleeping bag with a live actor in it for one with a dummy before smashing it against a tree trunk as the fabric stains red with fake blood. The tour guests laugh and cheer for each sadistic “kill,” blissfully unaware of the true terror that awaits them.
On the second night at the Camp Blood Gore Tour, the line between what is staged and what is real begins to blur when guests start vanishing one by one. The Poser is found sliced in half at the torso by a chainsaw with makeup effects that seem too realistic even for a legendary FX wizard like Tom Savini. And the screams of Jason 2 (pre-hockey mask and wearing just a sack over his head) while being de-limbed with an ax by another Jason (it’s not clear which movie he’s supposed to be from), if indeed a performance, is uncharacteristically Oscar-worthy. Most of the “actors” are college students and wannabe thespians hired off Craigslist whose line delivery sounds like it belongs in a porno.5
The Superfan starts to notice these discrepancies. “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen,” he says, “The Poser wasn’t a plant.” But the other guests ignore him. “Stop nitpicking everything, bro. Just enjoy the show.” The Superfan tells them he went on the tour earlier that summer and knows the script, but they still dismiss him as being paranoid from smoking too much weed—which he admittedly has been doing. But when the bodies continue piling up, the camp owner/director of the tour alerts them: “He’s not one of ours… There’s a 13th Jason.”6 But is the owner/director sincere, or just another actor trying to frighten the guests? The remaining Friday fans are conflicted.
They find the storage locker containing their cell phones, but it has burned to the ground, and all the radios are destroyed, leaving no way to contact the outside world for help. Attempts to escape the camp are futile as the tires of all the vehicles have been slashed (including the replica of Mrs. Voorhees’ blue Jeep), and anyone who attempts to flee the campground via foot gets slashed themselves. When the Slut discovers the “fake” corpse of the Other Slut is not a body double, panic ensues. The actors in Jason Voorhees costumes turn on each other, fearing one of them is an imposter—that is, he is not an actor and is an actual serial killer. This ironically highlights the film’s meta satirization of Hollywood entertainment.
The subsequent “real” kills upstage the previous fake ones. Each death is more grisly and inventive than the last, with practical effects that will stick in your mind and keep you up at night. The Hater finds a screenplay and thinks it will be his way to survive…until Jason goes off-script—literally—and stabs him through the pages. The Critic and the Contrarian are chained to seats in the film screening room where all twelve Friday the 13th movies play on an endless loop. Before their eyes are razor-sharp needles rigged to stab them the moment they look away or blink. “Screw it,” the Critic closes her eyes during the opening credits of the first film. Unfortunately, the hipster Contrarian doesn’t make it to his favorite movie of the bunch and blinks during Part 4, paradoxically titled The Final Chapter.
Jason 5 (the copycat killer) tries to hide in the gift shop among the life-size cardboard cutouts of Jasons—but also mixed with them is another real Jason: the killer with a real machete. Luckily Jason 5 has him out-armed thanks to the gun he found in the sheriff’s station arsenal earlier. It even has a laser pointer to aim so he can’t miss. But despite emptying the chamber at Jason 13’s chest, he remains standing. The bullets are blanks—the gun was just a movie prop from the tour. Jason 5 then grabs a machete to defend himself, but it's a plastic toy. The killer slashes right through it—and his head. The scene provides a biting critique of gun policy7, late-stage capitalism, and hyper-consumerist culture.
In one especially gruesome scene, three Jason actors are locked in the underground service room by the 13th Jason who throws the key in a giant vat of fake blood.8 After telling them that only the one who finds the key will escape the room alive, they all dive into the vat, dousing themselves in fake blood as they battle for control of the key. The three Jason actors, former friends and colleagues, viciously slash each other with their machetes, mixing real blood with fake. Jason 11 is stabbed in the back, and Jason 8 is drowned in the liquid. The final Jason (from the 2009 remake) emerges from the vat with the key, completely drenched in red. He unlocks the door, only to immediately have his throat slit by the 13th Jason. The deliciously grotesque scene slyly comments on the excessiveness of gore in movies, the cutthroat nature of the Hollywood industry, and the over-saturation of retreaded sequels.
But what truly sets Camp Blood Gore Tour apart from its Friday the 13th predecessors is the surprising identity reveal of the killer. [Spoiler Alert] The 13th Jason Voorhees is a member of the infamous Jackson Whites, an isolated group of albinos who have been inbreeding in the Ramapo Mountains of North Jersey for generations. The Jackson Whites are extremely private and hostile to outsiders, upset at the camp’s recent popularity and all the new tourists flocking to the area. The killer’s natural inbred albino face is gruesomely deformed from genetic mutations, making it even more petrifying than the eerie hockey mask.9
The Jackson White version of Jason Voorhees brilliantly embodies the local population’s resentment towards the intrusion of horror movie fans, turning an idyllic rural town into a tacky tourist trap. It also represents the type of gentrification experienced in towns across the country as rich and privileged yuppies flock in to price out locals with expensive coffee shops, superfluous stores, and ridiculously themed restaurants. It could also be interpreted as a metaphor for colonization more broadly, as some members of the Jackson Whites are believed to be descendants of Ramapo Indians who refused to leave their native land during the Revolutionary War. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into this, and the director simply thought that inbred albinos are gross and creepy.10
There is a false ending when the final two guests left alive (the Superfan and the Purist) lure Jason up to the top of the 200-ft radio tower using a dummy and “scream queen” sound effects as bait. There, the Superfan sneaks up from behind him and pushes him off the tower. The Purist waits below to finish him off with an ice pick to the heart. As savvy horror fans, they know to always double-check that the killer is dead, so the Superfan jams a corkscrew into Jason’s skull. He is certainly dead now.
They head for the camp’s exit, but before making it to the road, an albino Jason re-appears in their path holding an ax.
“He’s back from the dead!” the Superfan says. “Zombie Jason can’t be killed. We’re fucked…”
“Zombies aren’t real,” the Purist says.
“Then how—”
“It’s like Scream,” she says. “There was a second killer. Maybe if you weren’t so obsessed with Voor-cheese and watched some other movies you would’ve known that.”
They easily out-run Jason who never runs himself, always walking at a steady pace, though he will never stop until he finds them. It is only a matter of time.
As a Friday the 13th aficionado, the Superfan knows there is only ever one Final Girl, though having watched Part 4 countless times, he also knows the final “girl” can sometimes be a boy.
“I think I have a plan to get out of this alive,” he says. “Come on, this way.”
Having done the Camp Blood Gore Tour earlier that summer, the Superfan knows exactly what time the RV from Part 6 is scheduled to do its simulated crash that night. He leads the Purist to the road then hits her on the back of the head with his shovel to knock her out. She wakes up as he’s tying her to the tracks that the RV runs along. Confused, she pleads for help. The Superfan apologizes but explains, “It’s like Highlander, there can only be one.”
“In Part 4 Tommy and his sister survive,” the Purist says. “There can be a Final Boy and Girl.”
“You don’t even like the sequels,” the Superfan says. “Part 6 is the best, by the way. That’s when it gets meta and comedically self-aware.” He leaves, ignoring her desperate screams of obscenities at him, to hide behind a tree with a bloody smiley face on the trunk. Jason takes the bait and approaches the Purist with his ax. But the Superfan can’t let him kill her too soon—or else he’ll be next. So he creates a distraction by taunting the killer (making fun of his pale skin and deformed face) to keep him on the tracks until the RV comes. Right on cue, it runs over both the Jackson White and the Purist before flipping over in a spectacular crash with dazzling pyrotechnics.11 The Superfan goes over to triple-check that they’re both dead—which they aren’t—so he chops their heads off with Jason’s ax. Then, finally, the Superfan becomes the Final Boy.
He continues on the road back toward town, excited to recount what will undoubtedly become the most epic story ever, which he will tell friends and fans at conventions over and over again for years to come.12 But alas this will not come to be, as he does not expect the next plot twist. After waving down a pickup truck driving along the road for a lift, he notices the man behind the wheel is pale—really pale. Like an albino—a deformed inbred albino. The driver puts on a Voorhees hockey mask and raises a knife. The Superfan then realizes there were three Jackson White killers the entire time, which is how they managed to cover so much territory. “You can’t kill me,” the Superfan says, “I’m the Final Boy! Someone has to survive!” The Jackson White clearly does not care about horror movie tropes and guts the Superfan like a pig, emptying his entrails in one of the most savage kills of the film.
Just when you think it’s over, ending on a depressingly dour note, there is one more twist. This entire time there has secretly been another survivor: the true Final Girl. She is not a guest, but a worker—and not a starring actor with a juicy role, but a minimum wage waitress/maid. She’s been unaware of the mayhem going on, having spent the whole day cleaning up the messes of the kills, thinking they were all a part of the show. (The Owner/Director makes her avoid the guests while cleaning so as not to spoil the illusion.) She is portrayed with remarkable depth and vulnerability by an AI deepfake amalgam of all the final girls from all the Friday the 13th movies. The Final Girl was previously seen serving the guests food, alcohol, marijuana, and changing their dirty sheets. Of course, she was the only one who didn’t have sex, drink, or do drugs that weekend. Her underdog status lends a genuine emotional weight to the film, creating a character audiences can’t help but root for.
The Final Girl starts to wonder why everyone in the camp is playing dead, and why she hasn’t been summoned to serve any food or drinks lately. She notices something is truly off when a Jason starts chasing her with a knife—the actors usually just ignore her. The Final Jason is not just angry about tourists invading his town; he’s hellbent on revenge for his two brothers’ murders.
The Final Girl finds a rowboat and tries to escape to a Boy Scout station on the other side of the lake, but the Jackson White follows her on a rowboat of his own. Bigger and stronger, he paddles more rapidly and catches up to her in the middle of the lake. Just as he stands and raises his knife to slash her, a young decomposed Jason Voorhees leaps out of the water—an animatronic prop based on the shocking jump-scare climax to the original movie, intended to be the culmination of the tour. The Jason prop hits the Jackson White’s rowboat, tipping it over and knocking him into the water. He doesn’t know how to swim (because his albino skin is too sensitive to sunlight) and tries to climb onto the Final Girl’s boat for help, but she uses her oar to push him back down into the water. Jackson Voorhees drowns, and the Final Girl survives. The horror is over.
…Or is it? The final shot shows the still surface of Crystal Lake as a decomposing albino hand covered in seaweed pops up out of the water. Was it real or a part of the movie tour? Or was it just a haunted dream of our Final Girl? That is left ambiguous as the credits roll, leaving audiences questioning the very fabric of reality. Is the nightmare over, or has it just begun?13
In the end, Friday the 13th: Camp Blood Gore Tour transcends its genre, leaving us with a bone-chilling contemplation of our own macabre fascination with horror. It elevates the ordinary half-rate exploitative slasher movie to an artistic meta-critical commentary on the exploitation of slasher movies. Director Harry Gorman proves that, at least in this instance, you can have your cake and eat it too. The film will leave you questioning the boundaries of fiction and reality long after leaving the theater. Brace yourselves Jason Voorhees fans, because this Friday the 13th, Camp Crystal Lake will never be the same again.
This is a pseudonym for a director who for whatever reason wishes to remain anonymous, but there has been rampant speculation online about who it might be, including Sean S. Cunningham, John Carpenter, Mike Flanagan, Ari Aster, and an AI (on the assumption the entire movie is computer-generated).
There is no Freddy Krueger from Freddy vs. Jason because they (the movie studio and therefore the tour within the movie) couldn’t get the rights to the character.
Some fans believe this to be evidence that the Purist is actually Harry Gorman, the true director of the film, making an Alfred Hitchcock/M. Night Shyamalan-inspired cameo. However, the actress who portrayed the Purist, Alice King, is also a pseudonym and cannot be tracked down for confirmation. In fact, no cast or crew has been found since, leading some conspiracy theorists to believe that the entire movie is actually a documentary.
The 3D effect is replicated in the movie but not on the tour within the movie.
To achieve this effect, director Harry Gorman hired actual college students and people from Craigslist rather than professional actors for the roles—plus a few ex-porn stars (including the Virgin).
This has already become an iconic line used in all the trailers and promotional material.
Which side of the gun debate the filmmakers fall on is not entirely clear.
The tour uses the vat to generate 1,000 gallons of fake blood each weekend, a gory cocktail containing corn syrup, red food coloring, and titanium dioxide. Red-dyed water is also used in the showers, where animatronic Jasons pop through curtains to “stab” the guests with retractable rubber knives.
Though why a Jackson White would go to such extents to kill the victims in a way that mockingly critiques the movie franchise is a slight plot hole.
Then the screenwriter did some half-assed internet research to discover the Jackson Whites are from vaguely the same geographical region of northwest New Jersey (give or take 60 miles).
Twenty minutes later the RV automatically extinguishes the flames, uprights itself, and reverts back along the tracks into the garage in the woods where it will wait until its “crash” next weekend. Normally guests get to ride inside the RV (with a face dent on the bathroom mirror wall) like a theme park roller coaster.
Ordinarily on the final day of the tour, guests get to choose if and how they want to be faux-killed by which Jason—or they can become a Final Girl/Final Boy/Final Non-Binary Person.
Likely the latter, as a post-credits teaser assures us that the story will continue in the fourteenth Friday the 13th: Jaclyn White’s Revenge Tour… “In theaters everywhere next Friday the 13th.” In a reversal of the original movies, the sequel features the mother of the Jackson White Jasons seeking revenge for her sons’ deaths.