Summary

• The Friday the 13th franchise has become increasingly fantastical, but its original movies depicting horrors that could happen in real life are the scariest.
• Many members of the franchise's production team denied that the original Friday the 13th was based on a true story, but a 1960 massacre in Finland shares eerily similar details to the movies.
• The Lake Bodom murders, where four teens were brutally attacked with three of them dying, bear striking resemblances to the premise of Friday the 13th.

Friday the 13th has solidified itself as a horror classic, spawning an impressive number of sequels and making Camp Crystal Lake the most feared getaway in America. Comprising twelve films, the franchise and its iconic killer Jason Voorhees have progressively become more extreme, with some of its entries serving as straight-up sci-fi/fantasy. Despite this expansion, the simplicity of the original movies gives the franchise its fearsome reputation, as they depict a horror that's somewhat feasible in real life.

Due to the grounded nature of these murders, it raises the question whether the original Friday the 13th is based on a true story. The upcoming Peacock streaming series Crystal Lake -- billed as a prequel and set-up to the first movie in 1980 -- has kindled interest in the possible origins of the story. While the franchise's production team has largely denied taking inspiration from any real-life events, a massacre in 1960s Finland shares eerily similar details with the movies. These similarities have fueled speculation that this is where the story in Friday the 13th came from. Thus, it's definitely arguable through the Finland massacre that there was a real-life Jason Voorhees, which may play a role in the narrative of the new series.

Updated on April 9, 2024 by Robert Vaux: With the news of a reboot of the series from Blumhouse on the way, many moviegoers are looking back at the history of the Friday the 13th franchise. Likewise, the murders that supposedly inspired the series have always held a keen interest for modern true-crime enthusiasts. This makes it more pertinent than ever to look at the real-life story "behind" Jason Voorhees. The article has been updated with new information on another film based on the Lake Bodom case. The formatting has been adjusted to meet current CBR guidelines.

The Story of the Friday the 13th Franchise

Fittingly, the Friday the 13th series began with the original 1980 slasher movie. Despite some misconceptions among horror neophytes, these movies didn't start out featuring Jason Voorhees as the main antagonist. Instead, the first killer was his mother, Pamela Voorhees, who sought vengeance upon the sinful youth of Crystal Lake. Years before, her beloved son Jason was at the lake's camp. Though he was supposed to be watched by counselors on duty, these young adults were instead busy becoming particularly frisky with each other. With no one watching him, Jason drowned, which lead to his grief-stricken mother killing several new teenagers at Crystal Lake a year later.

Pamela is beheaded in the climax by the movie's "final girl," but Jason Voorhees shows that he's not quite as dead as believed. Survivor Alice hallucinates that a boy who's surely Jason tried to drag her into the watery depths of Crystal Lake. In the movie's sequel, Alice is killed by the real Jason Voorhees, who's now older and seeking similar vengeance for his mother. From there, he goes on to enact a series of evil murders recounted in the bulk of the franchise's entries. This eventually sees him go to Hell, into the far-flung future in space, and even face-to-face with fellow slasher Freddy Krueger. The sequels got increasingly outlandish, but some still wonder if Friday the 13th was based on a true story. The answer may lie in an infamous Finland Massacre that possibly inspired Jason Voorhees.

A Real-Life Event Mirrors Friday the 13th's Premise

During a Finnish summer in 1960, four teens, two girls and two boys, went on a camping trip to the isolated area of Lake Bodom. They set up tents along the lake's edge. Already, this bears similarities to Friday the 13th's Crystal Lake, where the movie's group of young adults go to visit a campsite. Unfortunately for the real-life campers, the parallels don't end there.

On June 5, 1960, a group of young birdwatchers claimed to have witnessed the tent collapse from a distance, and a blond man fleeing the scene. A local carpenter later stumbled upon the campsite to discover the brutal crime scene. Three of the campers had been stabbed to death, and one of the boys, Nils Gustafsson, was found alive but unconscious. He sustained multiple stab wounds and facial fractures. Once police arrived, Nils claimed that someone broke into their tent in the early hours of the morning and attacked. The severity of his injuries matched his story, and Gustafsson was initially cleared as a suspect.

The randomness of the attack meant there was little for police to work with. Although, the strangest of all was Gustafsson's description of the attacker. As he was awoken in a tired state, he claimed to have seen a man dressed in black with bright red eyes. Of course, this didn't help the police in their investigation, and given crude investigation methods at the time, evidence at the crime scene was ruined by people casually walking over it. With Gustafsson's creepy description, combined with the brutality of the seemingly unprovoked murders, it seemed as though these unfortunate teens had met their own Jason Voorhees.

The Friday the 13th-Esque Tragedy's Suspects

While the Friday the 13th murders at least had a clear culprit in the mother of Jason Voorhees, the 1960s Lake Bodom murders lacked concrete suspects, and to this day the murders remain unsolved.

• Karl Valdemar Gyllström: Gyllström was known to be aggressive toward campers, but at the time of the investigation there was no evidence that pointed toward Gyllström. He also had an alibi, with his wife confirming he was in bed at the time. To confuse things further, Gyllström confessed to the murders nine years later in a suicide note.
• Hans Assmann: A KGB spy who had recently moved into the area, Assmann told police he was in Germany at the time of the murders. Police let him go, but recent evidence suggests he was seen in Finland on the morning of the murders.
• Nils Gustafsson: The sole survivor of this horrific attack, Gustafsson may have been disregarded as a suspect initially, but in 2004 he was back on the suspect list. With investigators reexamining what little crime scene evidence they had, they found no traces of Gustafsson's blood -- which in itself seems odd when considering how brutally he was beaten and stabbed during the attack -- despite DNA tests showing blood of the three remaining victims present on his body. He was arrested in March 2004 -- over 40 years after the fact -- and put on trial, only to be acquited of all charges in October, 2005. The Finnish government was forced to pay his restitution for mental trauma incurred by the trial.

From the brutal lakeside murders to the creepy suspect descriptions, the event certainly resembles the original Friday the 13th and the killings that spawned Jason Voorhees. Even if this tragic event wasn't the inspiration for the initial Friday the 13th film, it goes to show that more often than not, reality is more horrifying than fiction. The fact that no conclusive killer ever emerged adds to the mystery, and even lends it a grisly romanticism similar to the infamous Jack the Ripper murders.

Other Adaptations of the Finland Massacre

In recent years, several true-crime podcasts have covered the Finland Massacre on Lake Bodom, including Heart Starts Pounding and RedHanded. The former is the most recent, showing that the legendary crime has yet to leave the consciousness of crime history enthusiasts around the world. "Children of Bodom" was a death metal band previously known by different names and with different lineups, with its final form being inspired by the infamous killings. So far, however, 2016's Bodom (also released as Lake Bodom) is the only narrative or movie "adaptation" of the story.

Even then, this movie didn't truly bring the Finland Massacre to life. It was merely inspired by the events, with the story seeing a group trying to perform a reconstruction of the murders. Bodom was fairly well-received: many lauded it as an equal to international horror movies of the same era, and it even received an invitation to the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. It's also firmly in the slasher genre, evoking the same types of movies as Friday the 13th and the killings of Jason Voorhees.

Little is known about the upcoming Crystal Lake as of now. The official synopsis states only that "a group of friends vacation at a house that's connected to a dark past." It's reasonable to assume that the series will take place in the late 1950s, matching the background of the original Friday the 13th and covering the events of young Jason Voorhees' drowning. (However, in a 2022 interview with Fangoria, producer Bryan Fuller described the series as a "pre-remake-uel," suggesting that the creatives are free to explore other incarnations of the story.) Assuming the time frame is in the cards, the Lake Bodom murders come into focus as a contemporary real-life tragedy from which they can draw inspiration. While the Finland Massacre may not have been Jason Voorhees' "real story," it seems that the murders of Camp Crystal Lake gleaned at least a little inspiration from the brutal murders at Lake Bodom in the 1960s.

Friday the 13th is available to stream on Max. Crystal Lake will be released on Peacock sometime in 2025.