Friday The 13th

In 1980, a series of gruesome murders occurred at the former site of a summer camp in Crystal Lake, New Jersey, and the perpetrator, who was killed by the only survivor of the attacks, was revealed to be one Pamela Voorhees. She was driven insane by her son Jason’s drowning in 1957 due to negligence by the teenage counselors, and this drove her to become a serial killer. However, Jason later turned out to be alive and mentally unwell, and he has been cited as the culprit behind close to 300 murders in nearly twenty years. This has been achieved despite numerous instances where Voorhees was killed, and his longevity and unnatural power have been attributed to his abusive father Elias’s possession of a copy of the Necronomicon.

Elias Voorhees, who abused Pamela to the point that he was her first murder victim in 1947, was the younger brother of Klaus Voorhees, a Dutch criminal-turned-lab assistant who gained superpowers in 1963 from an experimental snake venom anti-toxin, escaped to America, and frequently tangled with Thor as the supervillain Cobra. Elias had an illegitimate child, a girl named Diana, who would later marry into the Kimble family with a cousin of Dr. Richard Kimble. This makes the notorious serial killer Jason and the innocent fugitive Richard related, albeit as distantly as second-cousins-in-law.

Elias and Klaus were the sons of one Admiral Voorhees, a commanding officer in the Dutch Navy who fought in World War I. It has been said that he fought not for love of his country or personal glory, but for the sake of fighting. The Allies were fortunate that unlike his spawn, he used his possibly genetic psychosis in service of a good cause, even if it was not for good reasons. He garnered an impressive record of kills in his career of submarine warfare, including the destruction of the U444 in 1918. All hands were killed, including its infamous commander, Captain Gerhardt Krueger. Gerhardt was later sighted in a malevolent phantasm in the Atlantic in 1966, which was very likely caused at least in part by his brother, the famed German mad scientist known as Herr Doktor Frederick Krueger.

Doktor Krueger straddled the line between genius and insanity and was widely regarded and feared as the mad scientist of Kaiser Wilhelm’s German Republic, with such inventions and schemes as the resurrection and re-enlistment of fallen German flying aces, bat-human hybrids, giant magnets that pull planes to the ground, and, in one utterly bizarre moment of the war, the summoning of Satan himself. During the war, he largely considered Allied Master Spy and crackshot aviator G-8 to be his archnemesis, but after his beloved brother’s death and the end of the war very shortly afterward, he also developed a hatred for the admiral responsible.

Gerhardt’s daughter, Amanda Krueger, migrated to the United States at around 18 and became a nun in Springwood, Ohio. In 1941, when she was 34, she was accidentally locked in the sanitarium of Westin Hills Psychiatric Institute over the holidays and raped and beaten hundreds of times. Nine months later, she gave birth to a child and immediately put him up for adoption. Frederick Charles Krueger, named after his grandfather because she believed him to be just as monstrous, grew up in foster care and went through several homes, learning nothing but pain and hatred. This led to the complete corruption of his soul and the decision to murder around twenty children in his hometown. “The Springwood Slasher” was surprisingly freed on a legal technicality, but the parents of the victims took action and lit the steel mill he worked in on fire while he was still inside in 1968. However, in the painful seconds before his death, Freddy Krueger was contacted by supernatural entities who gave him the power of invading dreams in exchange for his services to them, and he accepted.

Freddy became a powerful demonic being post-death and carried out even more murders by entering nightmares and killing people within their dreams, thus causing them to die in real life. He has been defeated multiple times and even dragged into Hell, but his spiritual contacts have brought him back whenever there was ample fear of Krueger at any place on earth. The two family timelines converged once more in 2003 when Krueger tried to use Jason Voorhees to kill people in Springwood, spurring new fears that Krueger had returned. However, Voorhees would not stop killing and Krueger, now deprived of victims, ended up battling Voorhees. The battle ended in both their deaths, with some interference from Springwood locals, but they might return again someday and even clash once more.