Adam Marcus has made it clear in recent years that the Evil Dead prop cameos in Jason Goes to Hell, namely the Book of the Dead and Kandarian Dagger, weren’t mere Easter eggs but rather links between Evil Dead and Friday the 13th… at least in his own mind. As far as Marcus is concerned, they exist in a shared universe, as he again explains in a new chat with Syfy.

If you go by Marcus’s own canon, Jason Voorhees is… well… he’s a Deadite.

“[Co-writer] Dean Lorey and I thought everything had to come from a place of logic,” Marcus explained to Syfy. “In the first movie Jason is a little boy, thirty years dead and trapped at the bottom of a lake. By Part Two it’s only two weeks later, and this kid has grown two feet. So that’s the logic I have to build off of?”

He continued, digging into the Evil Dead connection that came into being as a way to make sense of Jason’s nonsensical mythology…

“When we were pre-producing the movie, Bob Kurtzman and the guys at KNB said we’re gonna do the effects on the movie. So I got to go on Sam Raimi’s set for Army of Darkness. I asked Bob if Sam would lend me the Necronomicon for Jason Goes To Hell. I let Bob in on my secret plan and knew I couldn’t say Deadite or Evil Dead in the movie because Universal owned the rights. If I just take that prop and put it in the Voorhees house, and use the Kandarian dagger as the thing that kills Jason, what I’m doing is setting up a mythology that Jason’s mom wanted her son back so badly that she made a deal with the darkness. So she reads from the Necronomicon and brings about the resurrection of her son.”

“So now the fact he lived at the bottom of the lake and grows two feet makes sense.”

Again, these aren’t exactly new reveals from Marcus, but it’s interesting to learn some more insight into the reasoning behind the Evil Dead props cameos in Jason Goes to Hell.

Fun fan fiction from a Friday filmmaker, if nothing more.