a few weeks ago i promised to give a free copy of the friday the 13th documentary his name was jason to the person who sent me the best friday the 13th related… anything. well, all the ‘anythings’ have been read, viewed, puzzled over, eaten and/or poked at — so it’s time to announce the winner. and the winner is…

a guy named patrick!

to secure his win, patrick sent in the following story which had me giggling for days and wishing my father had owned more power tools.

When I was about 12, I started getting into horror movies. After catching several Fridays during a late night showing hosted by Joe Bob Briggs, I had some new favorite films to rave about. After continually telling all of my friends about them, my parents were kind enough to let me have a bunch of buddies over for an all night Friday the 13th movie marathon. I distinctly remember my dad asking me in the truck on the way over to the video store if there was much nudity or violence in these films. “Nah, I don’t think so.” I sure pulled one over on him!

So we came back with 2, 4, 5 and 6. As we were all young guys, we huddled up in the basement living room with a lot of popcorn and soda to take in all of the blood soaked tits that we could. We made it through just about all of the movies but we started fading about half way through 6. Just as we had all fallen asleep, I hear a loud cranking noise and an engine roar. We all bolt up to see a fucking chainsaw cutting through the wooden door. Wood chips are going everywhere. After slicing the door in two, it’s kicked in and Jason comes walking in with the chainsaw blaring and smoke shooting everywhere.

He turns off the chainsaw and takes off the mask to reveal my dad. We’re all screaming uncontrollably and he’s cracking up. As we start calming down I look over at my buddy Jason. There’s no nice way to put it, but he pissed and shit all over himself and was crying. What none of us knew was that Jason wasn’t allowed to watch TV at his house growing up, so not only had he never seen a horror movie before but he had never seen anything like this. Looking back on it now, it was safer than it seemed at the time (my dad had moved the TV to the opposite side of the room that evening for reasons I hadn’t understood, there was a bunch of furniture between us and him, my mom had scoped us out beforehand through a little window in the room, etc) but it sure seemed crazy at the time. They had wanted to remodel the room anyway so tearing it up a bit didn’t matter when it came to scaring the crap out of us. My folks had told most of my friend’s parents they were going to scare us, and all were fine with it. Jason just told his parent’s that he was coming over to hang out and strangely enough he never came back.

As my dad used to build giant mechanical monsters for haunted houses at the time, I should have expected something like that. So, while standing in line for the midnight showing of the new Friday the 13th last night, I was reminded of Jason the pansy and how crazy awesome my dad was.

congrats, patrick! your 2 disk set of his name was jason will be mailed out shortly. even nph and elmo are excited for you…

i want to give a shout out to two other notable entrants…

• bloody mary outlined her earliest experience with the franchise, which she also posted at her blog, bloody mary’s movie revue.
• emily sent in a very detailed argument for why jason takes manhattan is the best film in the franchise. she is, of course, wrong — but made a valiant attempt to persuade fans never-the-less, and i applaud her for it. her blog, the deadly doll’s house of horror nonsense, was just launched this year, so please stop by and give her some horror-blogging community love.