Today, we’re talking about scrupulosity, Friday the 13th, and purity culture. Interested?
I’ll go ahead and tell you my thesis early on: Jason and Pamela Voorhees function as instruments of moral formation. What do I mean? You are told to abstain from sex before marriage. Then you visit a certain campsite with your high school lover. You do the deed. And you walk away with a machete in your head.
Far-fetched? Absolutely. But we are talking about a seminal horror film from the 1980s here. You make one wrong move, and an immortal being in a hockey mask is hacking you to pieces. I don’t know why, after repeated annual massacres, they keep deciding to reopen the camp… but again, it’s the 80s. Seventh time’s a charm?
What other absurd entities from the 1980s continue to haunt us? Purity culture is one. Granted, it wasn’t only in the 80s, but Friday the 13th has also existed for decades. And we keep coming back. Yet, nothing ever changes. Horny teens get a bit more than they bargain for. A bloody bit more.
Who’s your Jason? Your Freddy? Your Leatherface? I hope that you have not been hunted down by one of these maniacs. But I’m gonna make a bold claim today. If you grew up in an evangelical home, you may have more than one. In real life.
We’re talking today not just about villains and protagonists. Boooring! Instead, I want to ask you this question: what’s their motive? Why do they torment you? Do they get off on it? Why is it that Jason and Pamela Voorhees murder numerous people? And what effect does that have on those who cross paths with these villains, aside from a seemingly certain death?
What I feel Friday the 13th does best is that it shows us when suffering becomes too much: when we cause other people suffering just to calm our own nerves. Or, to piggyback off last week’s entry, when we withhold or prohibit things, like knowledge, to fit our narrative.
In case you are wondering, the seemingly-never ending Friday the 13th series is a popular horror franchise from the 1980s. You already knew that. In the first film, the killer is revealed to be a middle-aged woman, whose son drowned at the very camp where she conducts her massacre. All the other films follow the son, Jason, seemingly invincible. Like mother, like son.
They stalk and murder mostly horny teenagers having premarital sex. They also target bikers, gangsters, musicians, among others. You’d better not do any drugs on a Friday the 13th set, or you might walk away wearing a machete.
Ah, the 1980s.
Reagan was president. The War on Drugs was at its peak. AIDS/HIV rightfully frightened everyone. Van Halen and the Ramones were making music about sex, drugs, and horror movies. All while Weird Al was singing about his bologna, televangelists were telling you you’d burn in hell for saying a bad word. And of course, the hair. We cannot forget the hair. The hair that literally almost destroyed the ozone layer.
But some campers have it worse. Much worse. In the Friday the 13th series, it seems anyone who steps foot on Camp Crystal Lake will die a gruesome death. But this is where Scream makes for excellent commentary. Scream establishes “rules” in the slasher genre, many of which come from Friday the 13th.
There are indeed such rules in these movies. You have to behead the villain, or they’ll come back for you. If you are, and remain, a virgin, you will almost certainly survive. If you do drugs, act rebellious, have sex… you’re dead. Scream was right, at least with Friday the 13th.
What about Scrupulosity?
For the scrupulous mind, these rules make sense. A lot of sense. Scrupulosity, also known as religious or moral OCD, is a subtype of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder characterized by distressing, intrusive thoughts about moral or religious transgressions. Example: you told a lie. Now you panic that someone will find out.
Your mind becomes restless. “They will hate me forever,” “I will go to hell for this,” “God will make me suffer because of it,” etc. Those thoughts will motivate you to not repeat the action, until you don’t offer money to the homeless one night, and the cycle repeats all over again.
Again, perhaps a bit far-fetched. But my research focuses on one word sometimes translated as “absurdity.” So, I hope you are not expecting anything normal from me. The Friday the 13th movies show what it is like to suffer from scrupulosity. They become a sort of modern parable.
The horny teens did not pay attention to the boy, “not a very good swimmer,” who then drowned. Now, anybody who repeats those actions in that land faces death.
It’s always the “sinners” who face the earliest or gnarliest death.
These movies never make you guess who is good and who is bad. They wear a leather jacket? They’re bad. They wear chains as a scarf? Don’t go near ‘em. Seriously, let’s talk about Ali.
Ali, played by Nick Savage, appears in Friday the 13th Part III. True nerds will also know this as the film where the hockey mask first appears! Ali swings his chains around during a confrontation with the main character, whom he has never before met, in a convenience store. If you think he’s going to survive… you don’t watch a lot of horror films.
These films elicit the same response of scrupulosity: you do bad, you act bad, you hang around the wrong people… and you are D-E-D, dead. You have sex in the woods? Dead. Indeed, the path to salvation is narrow, I guess…
We all know the general premise of the series. Horny teenagers get axed, or macheted, by a man in a hockey mask. Or his mother. These movies really embody the tropes Scream identified.
People get murdered during, in between, and after having sex. The drug users, they all face the machete. There’s usually just one final character who survives the massacre, embodied by innocence… until they too die in the first scene of the next movies. No spoiler alerts, because these movies are all 20–46 years old. You’ve had plenty of time to watch them.
Family Values Have a Body Count
Let’s consider the context. It’s a film from the 1980s, drawing on the 1950s… like most popular 80s films. And so, some commentary on motherhood/family values is necessary.
During these periods, the idea of a fiercely protective stay-at-home mother was significantly prized. Pam Voorhees is a camp cook and mother to an unusual child. Her natural, protective instinct becomes a pathological nightmare. One with a high kill count.
Under this ideal, women are supposed to stay at home. They are to take care of the children. They are to do all the cooking. Friday the 13th STILL holds up, decades later. The mother is not their own person; they are there to ensure the husband is happy, and the kids go off to school with grins and snacks.
And Pam Voorhees is an example of this gone extraordinarily wrong, as the Crystal Lake series is showing us now in 2026. What happens when the child dies? What happens when the mother is left, but the child is… gone? Vanished? Then, only revenge remains.
And so, Pamela acts as an aggressive, violent enforcer of conservative morality. Who does she target? Not just anyone who wanders onto Camp Cystal Lake property. No, she especially targets the young adults engaging in: premarital sex, drinking, drugs, essentially anything opposed to conservative values.
Family values. That’s where it is. Or, to quote Dire Straits, “that’s the way you do it. You play that Bible on CTV.”
These kids coming to the camp? These foreigners crossing that border, that border between Crystal Lake and New Jersey? Jason answers for us: kill them, mommy.
“Kill Them, Mommy”
Pam Voorhees operates on soul-crushing grief. She has not processed the death of her son, even 20 years later. Instead, she replays his death constantly. She hears the voice of her lost son encouraging her to murder the campers.
“Did you know a young boy drowned the year before those two others were killed? The counselors weren’t paying any attention… They were making love while that young boy drowned. His name was Jason”
“Jason should’ve been watched. Every minute. He was… he wasn’t a very good swimmer.”
“They weren’t paying any attention to you, Jason… make them remember.”
“Kill them, mommy.”
That last one matters. It matters because, in the original film, our antagonist is acting out of love. Or her perception of love, at least. How far will you go for someone you love? Will you go to this length?
You answered yes, but you do not want to. You hesitate. “Murder is wrong.” But at the same time, death by ignorance is also wrong. Those counselors should have been watching.
So what do we do when we suffer because of someone else’s inability to observe or care? Anything? Anyone?
Pamela Voorhees answers: we kill them.
That’s obviously not the right answer, but it is her answer. Don’t let any of them survive.
The Man Without a Mask: James Dobson
“Yeah ’cause he’s back, he’s the man behind the mask. And he’s out of control he’s back.” ~ Alice Cooper “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)”
While Donald Trump has been a common (and destructive) name since my life began, he had no impact on me until adulthood. But one of his religious supporters did. His name is James Dobson. This is not the first time I’ve mentioned him.
That’s right, this is my second hit piece on James Dobson. James Dobson, to me, is Jason Voorhees. “If you do bad things in this sacred land, you will die.”
I mentioned last week that my parents never had “the talk” with me. No, instead, Dr. Dobson did. In his book, Preparing for Adolescence. Yikes. That’s my one-word review of the book. My one sentence review is that it took me about 3 years to finish that awful book.
Both Pamela Voorhees and James Dobson use a similar fire-and-brimstone pedagogy. Behave, abstain, and avoid bad influences; if you do not, something terrible will happen to you. Obey.
Pamela doesn’t want teenagers screwing around in the woods. Why? Because her son drowned while two camp counselors were doing just that. So, she perceives any outside influences as threats. Letting them in only desecrates the serene woods where her son may or may not rest.
Jason is her everything. These woods are the last place she saw him. It is her church. People can screw around all they want, but not here. These woods are a place for reverence and peace. But only for her.
Dobson does something similar. In his view, you cannot be a gay Christian. While I doubt he targeted anyone with physical violence, he has traumatized many people. His books elicit shame for any non-fundamentalist. I’m sure I’m not the only one who had his books as “curriculum.” He was a stalwart of the fundamentalist faith, standing strongly and proudly with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
Preparing for a Death Sentence
Dobson tells people that if they have sex out of wedlock, they receive a death sentence. He said toddlers are “tyrants.” Dobson even suggested fathers should take their sons into the shower to show them their anatomy. As a form of gender modeling. I could go on. We could discuss his comments on Sandy Hook, 9/11, even Spongebob Squarepants.
Maybe he’s not hiding in your tent with a machete, but he’s far from Casper the Friendly Ghost. His methods are threatening and alienating. His advice is creepy and traumatizing (shower example, again). He maintained that homosexuality was destructive, a disease needing to be cured.
If you act out of line, you will suffer. That is the shared message of Pam Voorhees and James Dobson. Oh, and you deserved it.
Dr. Dobson is one of the founders of the Moral Majority, along with the founder of my undergrad, Jerry Falwell. Yikes, again. Anything you think about the 1980s and American fundamentalism, I can promise you Dr. Dobson was involved somehow.
He promoted family values. Children must only learn heterosexuality and traditional gender roles. People are not to engage in sex outside of marriage. Abortion is murder, but capital punishment is mandated by God Almighty. Feminism and the LGBTQ+ community are more dangerous than guns. Purity culture is COOL… Oh, and of course, sponges are gay.
As I recounted in that article months back:
Mr. Dobson was such a good Christian that Jeffrey Epstein shared his work with his own victims. His book suggested that having sex outside of marriage would result in venereal disease. And, he tells us, “If you do get AIDS, you have received a death sentence.” May the Lord bless you and keep you.
If you do bad things, you will die. And worse, after you die, you will suffer for eternity. And there is NOTHING you can do about it then. Better get it right now.
That’s Preparing for Adolescence. Blame the victim, not the aggressor. Blame the sin, not the person. Just blame anything that doesn’t mention Jesus. Those are your family values. What does our other conversation partner have to say about family values?
My Jason… My sweet Jason
Well, my Jason was not sweet. My Jason suggested fire and brimstone. He might have a lot more in common with Jason/Pam Voorhees than we might have thought. James Dobson’s answer indeed echoes the Voorheean “kill them, mommy.” Tell them they will die. Tell them they will die after they die. They will suffer for eternity. Any time they want a breath, they must suffer for it. That’s Dobson, not Jason.
Personal Foreshadowing
As a child, I hated summer camp. I’m an Eagle scout. I’m not going to sit here and tell you those were the best years of my life, or how those merit badge classes made me a better person. Pardon my French, but fuck all that!!!
Again, I’m an Eagle scout. An Eagle scout who hated summer camp. Hell, my best friend will tell you I hated camping altogether, and avoided it like it was a game. He isn’t wrong. And I fault Boy Scouts.
It’s an excuse for dads to drink and have their kids wash their glasses. There, I said it. It isn’t about the classes. It isn’t about the badges. And it definitely isn’t about the fellowship. It’s a weekend away from the wife.
I hated it. I can remember laying in my tarantula infested bed thinking, “I would give anything to not be here.” 15+ years later, I’m here to tell you I WAS NOT wrong. What happened in those few days I was away? Did I miss out on the best days of my life? Probably not, but also, probably. I could’ve met the woman of my dreams. I could’ve watched the movie that would change my life. But no, I spent it learning environmental science from some dude who packed way too many blunts.
I hated it. Even now, I hate it. Summer camp was the worst.
But, at least, I’m still alive. I didn’t die. Is it because I didn’t sleep with the camp counselor I, a 5th-grade boy, was deeply attracted to? Probably not, but who knows.
Nobody in a hockey mask threatened me. We don’t do hockey down here, in the Deep South. We make tents, and wipe our asses with poison ivy. Or so says Pete Hegseth’s autobiography, I imagine. I’m sure he imagines that too.
But still.. Summer camp. Oh, how I dreaded it.
It’s the perfect setting for a horror movie, honestly. I believe Piranha did something similar a few years before. At least from my experience, kids hate summer camp. Isolated in the woods, far from civilization? It’s perfect.
It’s perfect because it demonstrates the tension between scrupulosity and innocence. As a middle schooler at summer camp, my mind was already fixated on sexual things. But, here in the deep south, raised in a deeply fundamentalist home, I knew lust was wrong.
If I acted on lust, I would face dire consequences. Eternal consequences. By that point, I was somewhere in the middle of Dr. Dobson’s book. I’ll get AIDS. God will hate me. I shouldn’t explore my body because then only bad things will happen. And surrounded by attractive camp counselors, my mind was unclean.
Thank God Pam/Jason Voorhees don’t stalk a certain camp in rural Georgia. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this.
I struggled with lustful thoughts. It was that summer that I smoked tobacco and marijuana for the first time. And while I am still alive, writing this…
I cannot deny that my soul was in despair. Because my Jason, my not-so-sweet Jason, James Dobson, told me that if I did these things, I would suffer physically, and then eternally. Talk about walking on eggshells.