Pamela Voorhees () is a fictional character and the overarching antagonist of the Friday the 13th series of horror films. She was created by Victor Miller, and first appeared in Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980), played by Betsy Palmer. Pamela is the main antagonist of the first film, in which she is known only as Mrs. Voorhees, and remains an antagonistic presence in its sequels, in which she is seen mostly as a severed head or a figment of her son's imagination. In Friday the 13th Part III (1982), the character appears as a reanimated corpse in a hallucination, played by Marilyn Poucher. Paula Shaw played Pamela in the crossover Freddy vs. Jason (2003); according to Palmer in Friday The 13th Reunion, she was asked to reprise her role in the film, but turned it down after reading the script. Nana Visitor played Pamela in the 2009 reboot. In the original film, Pamela is introduced as the mother of Jason Voorhees, a boy who supposedly drowned at Camp Crystal Lake in 1957, where Pamela worked as a cook, due to the negligence of the camp staff. After exacting revenge on those she blamed for her son's death, the camp is closed, only for its new owner and a group of counselors to attempt to re-open it twenty-one years later. To ensure the camp remains closed so no child will suffer the same fate as Jason, the vengeful and psychotic Pamela stalks and kills them one by one, but is ultimately decapitated by the sole survivor of her killing spree. After Jason is revealed to still be alive, he avenges his mother and later murders anyone who sets foot into Camp Crystal Lake and the surrounding woods area, guided by Pamela's spirit, which he hallucinates inside his head as urging him to kill.