[Pride 2020] The Weird Wild Love Story Of Jason Vs. Leatherface

If you’ve never heard of it, Jason vs. Leatherface was a three issue crossover comic published by Topps in 1995. Despite the name, Jason vs. Leatherface dedicates far more time to exploring the sincere affection between its two leads than it does to a bloody fight between two hulking horror icons. As a die hard fan of both big ol’ slasher boys, I find it charming. Because Jason vs. Leatherface is my two favorite kinds of media: horror and gay as hell.

Jason vs. Leatherface kicks off with Jason chained at the bottom of Crystal Lake before being accidentally scooped out by property developers who plan to drain the lake due to pollution. He ends up on a train headed to a disposal facility, where he does his thing to everyone aboard, and, surprise surprise, crashes in Texas.

Cool guys don’t look at explosions.

Long intro short, Jason crosses paths with Leatherface and the narrative’s equivalent to Nubbins Sawyer, and they bring him back to meet the Drayton-equivalent at the Sawyer home, where he introduces himself by writing his name on the wall in chili.

Seriously, you have no idea how much I love this comic.

But what’s so gay about all of this? There’s a central theme to this story about two big bad slashers duking it out: Jason vs. Leatherface is a comic about love.

No, really.

Ever the strong, silent type, Jason’s role as the narrator of the story is told through third person descriptions of the situation he’s found himself in…and the topic he seems to dwell on the most is love. He’s very clear that his motivations as a slasher are born of his devotion to his beloved mother (named Doris in the comic, rather than Pamela) and his absolute loathing for anyone else who dares to live and to love in his domain. Jason is presented as a creature driven by hate, someone who lost the ability to feel love or compassion a long time ago at the icy bottom of Crystal Lake.

But our favorite loner Jason takes to Bubba “Leatherface” Sawyer remarkably fast. Like, instantly. He’s visibly enraged when Nubbins starts hitting and berating his little brother, because it reminds him of the physical and mental abuse he suffered as a child, at the hands of his father, Elias. Every time he sees Leatherface abused, his empathy for him grows more powerful. All the while, he struggles internally with the strange feelings he has towards his new friend. He’s confused and unsettled by how much he cares about Leatherface, because he can’t quite place the feeling he’s experiencing. But Jason does have a frame of reference for love. He loves his mother, and he remembers enough about romantic love to recognize it and punish the living for it. The latter is what his mind goes to when he’s trying to understand how he feels about Leatherface.

No, really.

As he comes to realize, Jason is not as disconnected from the concept of love as he thought. He’s not confused as to what he’s feeling so much as he is about the finer details of why he’s feeling it. It scares him.

Slashers are movie monsters. Some are more malicious than others. Jason and Leatherface are Frankenstein’s monsters. The sympathetic ones. The tragedies. Jason vs. Leatherface is aware of this. In order to hammer this metaphor home, when Jason checks on a crying Leatherface in his room, there’s a Frankenstein poster hanging above Leatherface’s bed.

Right next to his Conan the Barbarian poster.

Jason wrestles with his compassion for Leatherface as he finds it increasingly difficult to tolerate the rest of the Sawyer family and the way they treat their little brother. His building resentment towards them is always accompanied by his memories of his father. In one such memory, we see Jason’s mother kill his father with a machete to defend Jason. What his father says right before he meets his end sticks out.

Jason’s last memory of his father’s abuse is specifically and expressly homophobic in nature. As a child, Jason is misunderstood and bullied because of how he looks, and punished by his father for not being “manly” enough. He remembers these words as cruel. As hurtful to him.

That’s right, even Jason Voorhees won’t tolerate homophobia.

Jason vs. Leatherface takes note of how stoic Jason is, but the way he is perceived outwardly is at odds with what the reader knows is going on inside whatever is left of his zombified brain at this point. Jason is not unfeeling, he has simply long since lost interest in caring about somebody else. Until, that is, he meets someone who is like him, and it just clicks.

Whenever he sees the elder Sawyers abuse Leatherface, his immediate instinct is to protect him from what Jason himself went through, because he finds a kindred spirit in Bubba. He feels so deeply that they’re the same and he finds himself respecting Leatherface and actually caring about him. These thoughts go against every instinct he has, while only beginning to piece together why he would even do that. What he grasps is that he’s just being true to some part of his nature While he questions it, he doesn’t resist it.

Historically, a villainous character being so devoted to someone of the same gender is used to “other” them, treat them like a joke or make them more “threatening” through their lack of conformity to traditional gender roles. (As a kid I thought it made them cool, personally.) Here, his affection for Leatherface becomes Jason’s humanizing trait. And it’s not a punchline; it’s an earnest study in the motivations of both characters.

Leatherface reciprocates Jason’s interest in him, but much more cautiously. There’s much about Jason he doesn’t seem able to wrap his head around, but he always responds with quiet gratitude to Jason’s attempts at kindness.

As any fan knows, Leatherface is deeply indoctrinated into the practices of his family, despite occasionally displaying an underlying, more gentle nature. His main reason for anything he does is his fear of punishment at the hands of his brothers. But he does love them, because they’re his family, and the saw is family. The Leatherface of Jason vs. Leatherface is utterly miserable pretty much 100% of the time. He just seems to accept that this is just his life, and doesn’t have the opportunity or privilege to imagine that things could be any different. Jason’s empathy baffles him, but he likes him. Jason is someone that Leatherface likes because he chooses to. But after a lifetime under the thumb of his family, the concept of being himself is unimaginable to him.

Inevitably, the divide between the stages the two of them are at causes a problem. The “vs.” part of Jason vs. Leatherface occurs in the third issue when Jason finally snaps from witnessing all the abuse of Leatherface and goes Voorhees on the older Sawyer brothers, who need their little brother to save them from his wrath. Even then, Jason has no intention of harming Leatherface until he attacks Jason.

Jason may love him, but hey, he’s Jason Voorhees, king of the kill. He goes ballistic.

Yet, even then, Jason’s rage towards Leatherface is not simply because he was attacked. He’s angry because he’s heartbroken. (He still has a heart in there; we saw it restart in Freddy vs. Jason.)

In his own words:

Jason is sure he’s met someone who knows what it’s like to be like him, who he gets along with, who has been belittled and hurt for the same reasons he has, and he believes their connection is going to go… where, exactly? What else could he be hoping for but to kill Nubbins and Drayton and take Leatherface back to Crystal Lake with him? Jason wants to rescue him, come on.

Maybe he reacts less than ideally to the rejection he faces, but he is a homicidal zombie with a higher kill count than any other slasher. He’s deeply hurt and frustrated and doesn’t understand why Leatherface can’t see that he can’t be happy with his family, because he will constantly be torn down for being who he is. His internal justification for attacking Leatherface is that Leatherface is alive and feels love for his family, and thus Jason is bound by his own code to kill him. Yet if Leatherface had allowed Jason to kill his family, he would still be returning his feelings, which Jason has already tentatively identified as Love, so he should still have to die, no? Apparently not.

Of course, anyone who has dealt with homophobic family members knows it’s not as simple as Jason thinks it is, but he only just remembered what not hating other people was about 24 hours ago, so I give him an A for effort.

Their fight ends anticlimactically when, spoilers, Nubbins brains Jason with a meat tenderizer (in true Sawyer fashion). Leatherface then stands up to his brothers for the first time when Nubbins attempts to remove Jason’s mask, threatening Nubbins himself to prevent such disrespect. Despite their clash, he’s very upset over what has happened to Jason. He had to protect his family, but he didn’t want to hurt his friend.

The Sawyers end up dumping Jason’s body into a nearby lake, where he wakes up. As he sinks to the bottom and the older Sawyers walk away, Leatherface stays behind to quietly drop a red rose into the water before turning his back on Jason. Leatherface leaves a small token synonymous with expression of love while out of sight, then returns to his life. He understands Jason, and he feels the same way about their connection, but their paths simply don’t meet.

He has to go back to where he belongs, and Jason has to return to Crystal Lake.

So it goes.

Jason, unwilling to spend any more time uncomfortably confronting these “feelings” he’s found himself with, decides to head home rather than get his revenge. He doesn’t dwell on why. And what of Leatherface? Jason has given him a new freedom, even if it just cracked a door that he may never be ready to throw fully open. Here, exactly like when he crushes on Stretch in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, he attempts to defy his family for someone he loves, only to eventually fall back in line and obey. Nevertheless, Jason has an impact on him. He’s a little more confident in who he is.

LGBTQ+ horror fans know what it’s like to relate to the outcast who just wants some understanding, what it’s like to recognize the anger that builds up facing so much cruelty and rejection. We can cry for these monsters. Jason vs. Leatherface takes the premise of your basic crossover horror comic and turns it into a strange, morbid little love story, divorced from either canon, but fully understanding of what's so important about these characters. It’s a story all its own, an adventurous story that needs some room. Whenever I reread it, I hope that this time Leatherface finally goes with him.

I’ve always rooted for slashers.

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