Top 5 Underrated Horror Movie Villains
By Jeremy Dick
“What would Jason do?” (Photo: Paramount Pictures)
1. Roy Burns (Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning)
When the “final chapter” of Jason’s story came with Part IV of the Friday the 13th franchise, fans weren’t ready to be done with the series. So another sequel was commissioned dubbed A New Beginning, set in a halfway house far away from Crystal Lake. But despite the distance, it seems Jason Voorhees has somehow returned to keep killing people.
Tommy Jarvis, the boy who killed Jason in the prior film, moves into a halfway house. Soon after, a chocolate-loving boy is murdered by a delinquent chopping wood with an axe. This seems to have a profound effect on Roy Burns, one of the responding paramedics.
The ending proves Roy’s reaction to be foreshadowing. A man in a hockey mask, presumably Jason Voorhees, starts killing the other delinquents in the home. Tommy worries that the menace has somehow returned, or maybe he’s gone crazy and is doing the killing himself? Nope— it was Roy Burns, the aforementioned paramedic, all along.
You see, the first young man killed by the wood chopper was the son of Roy. He gets revenge by killing the other occupants of the home, blaming the killings on Jason Voorhees. This angered many fans, who felt cheated by not having it be really Jason who was the killer in the film.
But I say Part V is one of the better films in the series. If you look past the fact that it isn’t Jason, all of the other pieces are there. The music is great, the deaths are Jason-like, and the overall atmosphere feels very much like a Friday the 13th film. If anything, Roy deserves kudos for managing to fool so many people into thinking he was actually the legendary Jason Voorhees.