The first "Friday the 13th" film boasts the series' most haunting ending. After a no-holds-barred showdown with Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), Alice (Adrienne King) gets the upper hand — and the machete. She beheads Jason's mother ... but the movie doesn't end there.
As the film moves slowly into daytime, Crystal Lake actually looks idyllic for once. Alice is draped over the side of the canoe, her fingers trailing in the water, finally resting after all the horror she's been through. The cops have arrived. Everything is safe — until the moldering corpse of a young, drowned Jason rises up from the water and drags her down with him. The movie then reassures the viewer that it was a dream sequence — just one final way to cram in a jump scare — and Alice is actually safe in a hospital bed. But Alice herself isn't very comforted when she hears that they found her alone on the lake. If there was no boy, she says, then "he's still there."
It's a great, shiver-inducing final scene, and it's one that plays into the franchise's sometimes-muddled mythology, which vacillates on whether Jason actually drowned as a child or only seemed to drown. If he did die, then his decomposing body in the lake makes perfect sense, and it also hints at the supernatural elements that will come later in the series. No matter what, Alice is right. The series' original slasher may have been killed, but Jason will be back.
