Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday mask while digging in the dirt. Freddy Krueger's gloved hand bursts out of the dirt and pulls Jason's mask into the ground. John D. LeMay is one of only two actors from the TV series to appear in the film series; the other is John Shepherd, who played Tommy Jarvis in "". Producer Sean S. Cunningham originally conceived an action-horror film in which Jason Voorhees would battle Freddy Krueger of the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" series. Paramount Pictures, who had released the previous eight "Friday the 13th" films, negotiated with New Line Cinema over the rights to the series,
Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees were appealing to the participants. In the survey, Jason was considered to be an "unstoppable killing machine." Participants were impressed by the "cornucopic feats of slicing and dicing a seemingly endless number of adolescents and the occasional adult." Out of the ten monsters used in the survey—which included vampires, Freddy Krueger, Frankenstein's monster, Michael Myers, Godzilla, Chucky, Hannibal Lecter, King Kong and the Alien—Jason scored the highest in all the categories involving killing variables. Further characteristics that appealed to the participants included Jason's "immortality, his apparent enjoyment of killing [and] his superhuman strength." Jason Voorhees is one of