The Books Tommy Jarvis Buys To Stop Jason In 'Jason Lives: Friday The 13th Part VI'
With bullets and sharp instruments unable to stop Jason, the characters had to get creative to escape the machete wielding killer. Luckily writer/director Tom McLoughlin was adept to supernatural story lines and came up with the idea of stopping Jason by returning him to his original resting place, Crystal Lake. In order to get the Tommy Jarvis character to understand this within the film, he had to do a little shopping.
In one scene Tommy is seen getting into his truck with a few books (for which we are going to highlight two of them) titled a Manual of Occultism and 30 Years Among The Dead. They served as a guide to get Tommy to understand how to properly stop undead Jason. Most fans probably thought these were made up books to use within Jason Lives, but they really were published works!
a Manual of Occultism was first published in 1914 by author Dr Walter Gorn Old (better known as Sepharial) who was born in 1864 in Handsworth, England and later died in 1929. He was a notable 19th-century astrologer and eminent English Theosophist who wrote numerous books about astrology and of course, the occult. You can read the Occultism book for free online at archive.org.
30 Years Among The Dead was first published in 1924 and written by Dr. Carl August Wickland, chief psychiatrist at the National Psychopathic Institute of Chicago, who changed his scientific beliefs to conclude that psychiatric illnesses were the result of influences of spirits of the dead. This belief led him to publish the aforementioned book that ended up in Jason Lives.
Although these publications only appeared in Friday The 13th Part VI for nearly a few seconds, it is interesting to understand the history of how these books came to be and the background of the authors who propelled them into being used in a film about a resurrected homicidal maniac.
