Also he doesn’t fit the Romero mold for a zombie (see: why would a zombie put on a hockey mask? Really? C’mon.. it’d get in the way of those delicious humans! Also it doesn’t spread to anyone that he kills!)

I’m not a big Jason fan (Freddy lover here) but it was my understanding that Jason is a demonic ghoul. Demonic insofar as he is relatively immortal compared to humans as his spirit can easily be transferred between our plane of existence and “hell”. Ghoul insofar as when he’s in “our world” his vessel is a corpse. The same can be said of Mike Myers (again not a Halloween buff but I understand him as a demonic ghoul as well).

Though I can think of several graphic novel characters that have zombie anti-heroes that break many zombie conventions (enough to qualify as a central character, so that means the big “lack of individual intelligence” convention is quickly discarded) and yet remain very zombie: Xombie, Emperor Zombie in Amazing Screw-On Head, Marvel’s Simon Garth, Wormwood the Gentleman Corpse, and the most obvious is the lumbering giant of Marvel Zombies. But as far as film, I can’t think of a zombie anti-hero that doesn’t also live in a world full of zombies. The decapitated doctor in Re-Animator is as close as it comes, though the only reason there aren’t more zombies about is the plot’s chronology – and Re-Animator is not, to me, as “zombie movie” as it is “intentional B horror” and simply “[attempted] Lovecraft adaptation”.

I do not think this is a zombie film. It is a MacGuffin to continue the franchise. In a fashion, Jason is part of its own genre like Frankenstein or the Mummy.

The first 5 films go so far into making its own mythology that I cannot see what it would take to make it a zombie film. He could be renanimated by a voodoo priest and I would still have doubts.

I’m going to call it NOT zombie movie based on the Mummy defense.