Did a 1960 Lake Murder in Finland Inspire 'Friday the 13th'?

A Mount Rushmore of horror villains would almost certainly feature the hockey-masked visage of the undead antagonist from the Friday the 13th films: machete-wielding, serial killing Jason Voorhees.

Across a dozen films, including a 2009 reboot of the 1980 original, the deformed, criminally insane Jason has stabbed, slashed, hacked, crushed and impaled nearly 200 horny campers, high schoolers, incompetent cops and even astronauts—and generated more than $380 million.

Jason’s journey will continue in Crystal Lake, an upcoming Friday the 13th prequel series developed by Brad Caleb Kane that wrapped filming days ago, and work has already begun on Jason’s return to the big screen. Jason even has his own house this year at Universal’s popular Halloween Horror Nights events.

But could there have actually been a real-life inspiration behind a character as macabre as Jason? There have been theories.

Some have referred to the unsolved murders of three Finnish teens on June 4, 1960, as “the real Friday the 13th": Nils Gustafsson and Seppo Boisman, both 18, went camping with their girlfriends, Maila Irmeli Björklund and Anja Tuulikki Mäki, both 15, along the shores of Lake Bodom in Espoo.

The couples were fast asleep when someone started violently stabbing their tent. The killer’s knife pierced the tent’s canvas, leaving the slumbering teens inside. One of the girls suffered 22 stab wounds.

Before the killer fled the scene, they beat the teens with a sizable rock.

Two boys happened upon the shredded tent, finding it collapsed and soaked in blood. Police said it appeared Björklund had been dragged halfway out of the tent by the killer. Only Gustafsson survived the attack, with police finding him barely breathing and lying outside the tent—his cheekbones and jaw fractured.

In March 2004, Gustafsson was tried for the triple homicide, but he was ultimately acquitted of all charges, and no further suspects have been named.

In Friday the 13th—written by Victor Miller and starring crooner Bing Crosby’s fifth son, Harry, a young Kevin Bacon and a seasoned Besty Palmer—a bunch of teenaged camp counselors go to reopen an abandoned summer camp, only to be picked off one-by-one by a merciless murderer. Throughout the movie, the targets learn from Jason’s mother, Pamela, that her son tragically drowned there 20 years earlier while his negligent counselors were busy having premarital sex.

One of the female counselors, Alice, manages to survive the murder spree, killing Jason’s mother before falling asleep in a canoe that drifts into the middle of the lake. Soon after she awakes, a waterlogged Jason emerges from the water, pulling Alice into the drink. The film cuts to Annie in her hospital bed, screaming as she wakes from her nightmare. Police at her bedside tell her they found no evidence of a young boy at the camp site, to which Alice utters, “Then he’s still there.”

Dr. James Francis, an expert on horror films who teaches at Texas A&M University in College Station, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that Miller “created Jason Voorhees as a ghost story to fuel the story, because the villain for the original film is the mother. The screenplay set up a sympathy for Jason as a drowning victim and simultaneous fear of him as a spirit of unrest visiting his vengeance upon people who dared to do anything at Camp Crystal Lake.”

According to Dr. Steve Jones, a horror movie scholar at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, Miller let his own personal experiences shape elements of the screenplay as he wrote it. Miller and director Sean Cunningham, though, were mostly inspired to make Friday the 13th because of the enormous success John Carpenter’s Halloween experienced in 1978, grossing $47 million worldwide.

“After Halloween hit big at the box office, Cunningham came up with the idea to create a film that followed its footsteps, and Miller came on board to write the script,” Jones tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “He went to see Halloween multiple times to get a feel for its structure. He suggested setting Friday the 13th at a summer camp as a way of isolating the teenagers.”

Friday the 13th filmed in the fall of 1979 at Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco in Hardwick, N.J., which still exists as an active Boy Scout camp. While scouting locations, Jones says, “The attempt was to capture the kind of camp that Miller and Cunningham both went to when they were young.”

Jones further notes Miller went to high school with a girl whose last name was Voorhees, and the name Jason is a combination of his son Josh and Ian’s names.

Miller “intended Jason to just be the story’s victim,” Jones says, and opposed the film’s sequels, leading to civil court battles.

Francis also says Miller and Cunningham were clearly inspired by Mario Bava's 1971 film A Bay of Blood.

“Although Miller never admitted to such a connection, the comparisons are quite striking visually in a couple of scenes, and more than likely were the result of the production team allowing not-so-subtle influences to show,” Francis adds.

Miller also hasn’t publicly mentioned the Lake Bodom murders in connection to Friday the 13th’s genesis. “Of course,” Jones notes, “it is possible that Miller or Cunningham heard about the unsolved murders 20 years before, which might have unconsciously led them to feel that the setting was right for a murder mystery movie.”