Quentin Tarantino’s bizarre theory connecting Jason Voorhees and The Three Stooges
One of the many hallmarks Quentin Tarantino has developed during his career is a fondness for rewriting history books, but even by his standards, drawing a straight line between The Three Stooges and Jason Voorhees is a stretch.
It’s not entirely unexpected, though. Considering this is the filmmaker who had his titular band of rogues machine gun the Nazi hierarchy to death in Inglourious Basterds, saw Sharon Tate survive in brutally violent fashion at the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and played fast and loose with the chronology of the American Civil War in both Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, the reality is simply a barrier to the story.
Still, joining the dots between a vaudevillian troop who were active for almost half a century and inspired countless slapstick comedians to a murderous supernatural entity with a deep-seated love of hacking teenagers and law enforcement officials to death with a machete hardly jumps out as the most obvious.
Moe and Larry were the constants, but the third spot in the titular trio was filled by a revolving door of additional Stooges, including Shemp, Curly, Joe, and Curly Joe. Their pratfalling and general buffoonery endeared them to several generations, with the act as a whole regarded as one of the most uniformly beloved in the history of American comedy.
Jason is beloved, too, albeit for very different reasons. The law of diminishing returns eventually set in with the Friday the 13th franchise gradually becoming less and less of a relevant concern amongst the cinemagoing public, even if the hockey mask-wearing figurehead of the property remained a shining light during the peak slasher years alongside Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers.
What connects the two? Nothing, probably, even if Tarantino was willing to disagree. “I’ve always had the theory that Jason from the Friday the 13th movies is Curly,” he told Filmmaker Magazine. “Because they both wear a jumpsuit most of the time.” Tenuous, absolutely, but the two-time Academy Award winner nonetheless felt compelled to elaborate.
“They have the same stocky build. They’re both bald-headed,” he mused. “And they’re both completely indestructible.” That’s an interesting way of looking at it, which does admittedly present some fascinating possibilities, were the truth to be revealed as having been hiding in plain sight, with Friday the 13th and The Three Stooges having shared a universe all along.
Jason would no doubt murder his compatriots the second the opportunity presented itself, but reimagining the first Friday the 13th as an origin story for Curly secretly being the traumatised son of Pamela Voorhees would be a crossover like no other. There hasn’t been a new entry in the saga since 2009, but Friday the 13th: The Three Stooges might be just the tonic to kill two birds with one stone and revitalise both brands in a maelstrom of comedic carnage.
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