Superman vs. Jason Voorhees
How Superheroes and Monsters Are Related
It’s Halloween and I’m enjoying my day off from my 9-5 by marathoning horror movies. First up on my marathon was Friday the 13th Part 6 and I was tweeting out an interesting notion: what if Superman battled Jason Voorhees?
Someone brought up how Batman might be a better pick or that Superman’s strength would make the fight over in 2 seconds but, in my opinion, they miss point: just as how magnetism and electricity are related, so to is horror and the superhero genre.
Superficially as James Rolfe from Cinemassacre noting in a video Why Superheroes are Like Classic Monsters? notes comparisons and inspirations of superheroes like Batman and the Hulk. However, what drives horror and what drives superheroes?
In the documentary Nightmares in Red, White and Blue proposes that horror movies speak to our fears and anxieties. The central theme to David D. Gilmore’s Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors is that monsters appeal to not only our anxieties, but to our fascination and admiration as well. Also in Gilmore’s book he shows how different cultures throughout the world, long before cinema and printed media existed, created rituals to not only purge these anxieties but to come to terms with these feelings.
I think it’s uncontroversial to say that superheroes are a power fantasy. Take for example Shazzam (aka Captain Marvel) about how it takes the powerless feeling of being a child in an adult world and subverting it with the power to become a super-powered adult, or as Les Daniels perfectly encapsulates in his book, DC Comics : Sixty Years of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes , about the power fantasy of Superman; taking those adolescent (or even prepubescent, however I’m going to lump them together as adolescent) anxieties about being an outsider, longing from afar that epitome of beautiful and cool (Lois Lane) and showing that the outsider and become the object of desire. Horror and superheroes are the energies refracted through a prism of our anxieties, fears, and desires.
More to the point, monster-killers like Jason Voorhees (who are mass murders or serial killers who possess superhuman abilities), personify the nightmares and anxieties of adolescents? It is no surprise then to see how easy it is for a film like Brightburn to convert the story of Superman and turn it from a sci-fi power fantasy into a nightmare scenario slasher movie. When you look at even the first trailer, but especially the second trailer you can see how Jason Voorhees would be a twisted distortion of Clark Kent/Superman, and that is because baked into superheroes is DNA of monsters.
This is why I would love to see Jason vs. Superman. Story-wise, it can be fairly straightforward. When these two-icons battle, this is one of those times where not having THE Jason Voorhees would actually be a boon, because you can up enough of the character so that the “fake” Voorhees can be more of a match for Superman (honestly you can claim that he is powered by magic or something since Superman is vulnerable to magic). However, all that is superficial, what IS important is you pit the boogeyman of the nightmare adolescence vs the power fantasy adolescent hope.