Jason Vorheees has gone through some extreme makeovers, most of which fans of the long-running slasher series will be well familiar with. Savini Jason, however, is a Vorhees variant that you probably won't have heard of, but will definitely wish you had.
To explain what Savini Jason is, we need to go back to 1993. Thirteen years after the first Friday the 13th film was released, the franchise was ready to wrap up for good on its ninth installment: Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday. Following on from the dismal reception of Jason Takes Manhattan in 1989, this was to be the last, bloody hurrah for the machete-waving slasher and it was for the next decade, until 2002's Jason X resurrected the series in a new, futuristic timeline.
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Jason Goes To Hell sees Jason lured into an explosive trap set by the FBI at Camp Crystal Lake, leaving his body damaged beyond repair -- save for his still-beating heart. His remains are taken to a morgue where the coroner, entranced by the heart, eats it and seemingly consumes Jason's soul. This body-napping cycle continues throughout the rest of the film until Jason's supernatural trail of destruction is finally halted by a mystical blade to the heart. All hell quite literally breaks loose then as Jason is dragged into the undergrowth by supernatural forces, the last of which is a clawed hand accompanied by an evil cackle, both of which horror fans would instantly recognize belonged to Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Kruger.
It would take 10 years before this teased crossover would come to fruition in the form of Freddy vs Jason, which -- love it or hate it -- became the biggest box office success in both characters' histories. The film is also a direct sequel to Jason Goes To Hell, beginning with Freddy plotting his escape from the underworld by manipulating his fellow slasher's mommy issues. It's between these two movies that Savini Jason theoretically slots into Friday the 13th's chronology.
This alternate form imagines a Jason who managed to bust his way out of hell without Freddy's meddling. It was created for the 2017 video game, Friday the 13th: The Game and named after legendary special effects makeup artist, stuntman and actor, Tom Savini, who worked on the first and fourth films in the series.
Design-wise, Savini Jason has touches of Marvel's Ghost Rider about him. His blackened colorization, chains, molten eyes and flecks of ember are all in-line with some kind of cursed abomination. Removing his hockey mask reveals his lips have almost been sewn shut by fused skin. When walking around, he leaves ashy footprints in his wake. His choice of weapon is also monstrously upgraded -- from a simple machete to the "Devil's Pitchfork." How he came by it is unclear, but the fan fiction practically writes itself.
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Also unclear is whether Savini Jason is the most powerful iteration of the character. He was certainly powerful enough to break through a dimensional barrier and his demonic form suggests he's undead. (But, then again, Jason was always pretty unkillable even when he was just human.) In-game, he can take someone down with just three-five moves and the Pitchfork gives him much greater reach than his old machete. His opponents are even encouraged to avoid Savini Jason entirely rather than engage him.
His biggest competition -- for both power and weirdness -- is Jason X; a film version that survives being cryogenically frozen, thawed-out hundreds of years later, blown to bits, reformed into a cyborg and goes on to punch a robot's head clean off.
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Considering that made it into the official cinematic canon, it doesn't seem unreasonable that Jason's demonic video game variant couldn't also get a film of its own. Whether that film would be any good is another matter entirely. Jason X, which would be its closest touching point, barely recouped its $14 million budget and has just a 19% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The horror genre is also going through a renaissance at the moment that a creature of Savini Jason's mold would struggle to fit into.
Complex psychological dramas like Get Out, The Babadook and It Follows that use their scares more subtly are all the rage, while villains of Jason Voorhees' original era such as Pennywise the Dancing Clown and Michael Meyers have found success by returning to their roots rather than straying from the familiar. But, by cashing in on nostalgia and finding the right creative team, Savini Jason on the big screen could be a fun throwback to the genre's excessive ridiculousness before it started taking itself so seriously again.