Friday the 13th Part 2 certainly did poor Alice Hardy wrong. Played by Adrienne King in the firstFriday the 13th, the franchise’s original final girl just wasn’t meant to last in the movie series, as Alice is killed off almost immediately in the 1981 sequel. The film quickly moves on from there, but some fans were left thinking about one of the many Friday the 13th mysteries…
How did Jason Voorhees find Alice?
It’s a reasonable question. What we know is that the film picks up after some time has passed, and yet Jason seems to know exactly where Alice is living in order to sneak inside and carry out the murder. Smartphones with GPS were not around in the early 80s, and even if Jason did have an iPhone, he’d still need to know the address. How does one emerge from the dense woods of Crystal Lake and track down a specific target?
There are really a couple of different ways you could go about solving this mystery, and we’ll take a look below at two ways this could have happened.
Theory 1 – Supernatural Forces Guided Him to Her
Whichever theory seems more believable to you might depend upon how you see Jason in the earlierFriday the 13th movies. Did he really drown as a child and come back from the dead as a supernatural being, possibly a Deadite? Or had he survived and stayed hidden in the woods for all those years, living in the woods as a feral boy? That’s for you to decide as the films don’t give a clear answer, though we discuss the possibilities in another Friday the 13th Mystery.
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If Jason Voorhees has been a supernatural zombie since the start, resurrected through the forces of black magic, then the finding Alice thing becomes very easy to explain. Evil spirits, possibly even Pamela herself from beyond the grave, could have helped “guide” Jason to where Alice was located. In the later sequels, when Jason is a full-fledged unkillable zombie, he always seems to know where exactly his intended victims are, even when they try to lose him in freakin’ Manhattan. Maybe whatever brought Jason back continues to give him a helping hand by always putting him on the right track.
When you’re dealing with movie black magic, there really isn’t a limit to the possibilities. Without a full explanation of how these things might “work” in this fictional world, there really aren’t any “rules,” so who’s to say that the above explanation isn’t true? If we can accept that black magic brought Jason back, it’s not a stretch to believe that same magic somehow clued him in on where Alice was staying.
With Alice dead, Jason takes her body back to the Pamela shrine, where he submits it as an offering, letting mama know that revenge has been carried out. He then remains dormant, satisfied without the need to kill anyone else, until a new group of counselors venture into his territory and reawaken this mystical evil five years later.
Theory 2 – Alice Made It Easy for Him
If you’re in the camp that feels Jason was still “human” inPart 2and the supernatural explanation doesn’t leave you satisfied, the good news is that there’s a rational explanation that seems rather plausible as well. Going this route means answering two big questions concerning how Jason found and killed Alice, and we’ll be tackling them separately below.
How does Jason know where Alice lives?
This is the burning question most readers are probably here to see get an explanation. At the start of Friday the 13th Part 2, Alice speaks with her mother on the phone, mentioning how she just needed “a little time alone.” While novelizations aren’t exactly canon (there are two separatePart 3 novelizations, after all), thePart 2 novel by Simon Hawke does shed some more context on what’s probably happening in this scene.
In the novel, Hawke details that Alice had rented a home in Crystal Lake, returning to the “scene of the crime” as it were as a way to get over the trauma she still felt from the incident. By forcing herself to stay close to where it happened, the hope was that she’d finally get over the murders and move on with her life. If true, Jason wouldn’t have had to go very far at all to find Alice, as apparently, she did the work for him by coming closer to him.
From the novel:
Her parents simply didn’t understand. What it took was going back to where it had all happened. The camp itself had been shut down and the buildings had all been condemned, but she came back to the town of Crystal Lake where people did not know who she was since her picture had been kept out of the papers when it happened. There she could confront her private demons by herself. Confront them and heat them, or be constringed by them. She had no choice. There was just no other way.
With this in mind, it should help to know that Jason didn’t have to walk 20 miles with a burlap sack on his face to find Alice’s house. At this point, we must also still ask how exactly he knew which house she was in, but it becomes much easier to explain knowing that it’s a rented home in Crystal Lake. Jason may have been lurking around in the woods near the houses, stalking them through the darkness of the night, perhaps with a certain curiosity.
Because Alice had been staying at this place for some time, it’s reasonable that Jason could have spotted her there at some point or another, either through a window or maybe when she’d gone outside. He may have even seen her car outside, noticing it was the same one used by that camp counselor. Recognizing her as the killer of his mother, he would have then started plotting his revenge, stalking the house each night as he thought about the best way to commit his first murder. He then waited for the perfect night.
The Phone Call
We might be able to explain away how Jason tracked down Alice, even if it was mostly just good luck for him more than anything else. What still remains unexplained in this case is the mysterious phone call Alice receives shortly before her murder. It’s safe to presume that Jason called her to first frighten her before the killing, perhaps the same reason he placed his mama’s head in the fridge. Unless someone else in Crystal Lake coincidentally pranked her at that very moment.
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Buthow did Jason make the call? He must have been awfully close to do that and be in the home moments later. Was there a neighbor’s phone nearby he had access to? Possibly a pay phone? In that situation, he’d still need to get Alice’s number somehow, but if he’d been skulking about for a while and snuck in previously, it’s feasible that he would get that information.
However, this most likely falls back upon the classic urban legend of “the babysitter and the man upstairs.” The tale, which has been told with many variations over the years, consists of a babysitter getting threatening phone calls and calling the police, only to be told that the calls are coming from inside the home. Times have changed, but back in those days, there was no caller ID or any way to screen calls, and it was possible to make the phone ring from a second phone in the house.
And there you go.
For a quick recap of this theory, the idea is that Jason lucked out when he spotted Alice (or her car) after she returned to Crystal Lake. He stalked and studied his target first while planning the murder, which he wanted to be especially horrific for Alice. One night, he snuck in while Alice was distracted, placing his mom’s head in the fridge and hiding out in another room. Jason then calls her from a second phone in the house to scare her before going in for the kill soon after, but not without making sure Alice first sees what she’d done to Mrs. Voorhees.
Some of these otherFriday the 13th mysteries I’ve delved into have left me with some theories but without a definitive conclusion. In this case, it seems pretty safe to mark this one as “solved,” given how the rational explanation seems to fill in all of the holes. Even so, others might disagree or have other theories as to what happened that fateful night for Alice. If you have one, let us hear about it below.
For a look at more lingering Friday the 13th series questions, check out our otherFriday the 13th Mysteries!
