courtesy Paramount Pictures
Last month we got a Friday the 13th, but it was unfortunately overshadowed by Valentine’s Day. Whatever. Now it’s March and this time around, Friday the 13th is about the same thing it’s been about since 1980: Jason Voorhees and his bloody reign of terror on Crystal Lake. But it all started in 1957, really, when Jason drowned in that lake thanks to a lazy lot of camp counselors more concerned with pre-marital sex than looking after their charges. The first mysterious killings came in 1958 and that’s when the locals started calling it Camp Blood, the place you went to but didn’t come back from, the place with the “Death Curse.” Tshh tshh tshh ha ha ha!
But what began as a cabin-in-the-woods slash fest evolved over the years into something much more unwieldy. Although Jason almost always ends up back home at (and sometimes literally in) Crystal Lake, he also takes trips to Manhattan, to hell, and eventually even to space. In Part VIII he appears as his inner child, and in Part IX his demonic consciousness goes body hopping between unsuspecting victims. Among the Four Horsemen of the super killer apocalypse—Leatherface, Michael, Freddy—Jason is by far the most flamboyantly un-killable. Seriously. The whole point of a super killer is that they themselves won’t die, but the number of times and over-the-top ways that Jason has been revived over the decades boggles the mind.
Jason is also the only explicitly supernatural of the four Big Bads, being revived from his grave by a strike of lightning in Part VI and entering un-dead territory. Considering he would go on to anchor 12 total movies over time (including nine sequels from the original, one spin-off in Freddy vs. Jason and a remake in 2009), it’s no wonder they made him extra fantastical. And Jason clearly ruled the 1980s, with eight installments coming to theaters between 1980 and 1989.
And remember when we mentioned pre-marital sex earlier? Yeah, there’s a whole lot of that throughout the Friday the 13th franchise. Right now you’re thinking, “Well, yeah, that’s what happens in slasher flicks,” but this series takes it to the next level, even making the R-rated moments a running joke by parts IX and X.
So how does one keep track of all the sex, slashing, and supernatural activity? With so many movies and only one Friday during which to truly celebrate them, we’d like to offer you a handy binge guide for all of your Friday the 13th viewing needs. (Most of the main franchise is playing on Epix today, by the way.) http://ift.tt/1AjZUTs Here’s everything you need to know about all the movies, complete with kill counts, notes on the highest quality executions and, most importantly, Final Girl rankings.
Friday the 13th (1980)
The granddaddy of them all, as they say. The landmark debut of Friday the 13th was the first and last time the franchise used subtlety to affect scares, with as many murders happening off camera as they did on. Keep an eye out for a baby Kevin Bacon, the first appearance of Pamela Voorhees and use of the term “grass” when referring to marijuana.
Kill Count: 10*
Top Kills: Arrow through the throat and a clean decapitation via machete.
Final Girl: Strong, practical, realistic, and good fighting skills despite taking a heavy beating. She was a strong model for all eventual Girls to come and ranks overall at No. 2.
Setting: Camp Crystal Lake in Hope, New Jersey
Victims: Camp staff
Friday the 13th Part II
Five years after the massacre of the inaugural Friday the 13th people can’t seem to leave well enough alone. For Part II a bunch of soon-to-be counselors are set up across Crystal Lake at a camp training facility. But even though they aren’t at the Camp, this is still Jason’s lake and he will waste all those who trespass on it. Marijuana is now referred to as “dope.”
Kill Count: 8 (with one unconfirmed)
Top Kills: Machete to the face sending the victim careening down a staircase in his wheelchair. (See below.)
Final Girl: This one is tough. She’s more of a runner than a fighter, which isn’t a criticism, but at one point she gives away her position to Jason by urinating on the floor at the sight of a mouse. (Who loses their bladder over a rodent when the madman who just killed all your friends is now hunting you down?!) However, she does try to use a car, a chainsaw, and trick psychology to ward off Jason, so cleverness in crisis lifts this Final Girl all the way up to No. 3 in our power rankings.
Setting: Cabin facilities near Camp Crystal Lake
Victims: Camp staff in training
Friday the 13th Part III
The third Friday movie is the technological masterpiece of the series, sporting cutting edge 3-D technology and plenty of stunt camera angles to show it off. You can practically feel the yo-yo spinning into your face! And despite the fact that the hockey mask is iconic in the franchise, Part III is actually the first time Jason puts it on. It’s the first movie to transition out of the camp framework, and also kicks off a several movies long trend of Jason running after his victims—a departure from the standard walk-and-stalk hunting style. Part III is definitely one of our favorites of the series.
Kill Count: 10
Top Kills: The bisection in mid-handstand was the top Jason kill, but for sheer grit, the multiple deaths of Jason in the final act at the hands of our hero are all excellent.
Final Girl: Easily the best of the franchise. She’s got a strong survival instinct and channels her childhood PTSD into full-on ass-kicking abilities when necessary. She’s the best fighter of the Final Girls and ranks overall at No. 1.
Setting: Secluded cabin near Crystal Lake
Victims: Vacationing youth
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Part IV)
Part IV keeps the Friday mythology outside of camp grounds, continuing to focus instead on groups of sex-having, weed-smoking vacationers. It marks the first appearance of Tommy Jarvis (Cory Feldman), the franchise’s only recurring character in a lead role. There’s also an appearance by pre-Back to the Future Crispin Glover, and one of our favorite finales in the whole series.
Kill Count: 13
Top Kills: It happens fast, but the death-by-window-toss onto the top of a massive station wagon is one of our favorites from the entire series. The hacksaw-to-the-neck and in-shower face crush were also highlights. (See below.)
Final Girl: This girl puts herself in harm’s way to protect her family and demonstrates adequate fighting abilities, but is also really uninteresting. She gives Jason a good taunting, but when your much-younger brother has to save your life and do the killing for you, it totally drops your credibility. Final power ranking score is No. 9.
Setting: Secluded cabin near Crystal Lake
Victims: Vacationing youth and a neighboring family
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Part V)
When your franchise gets to five installments, you’ve got to start spicing it up if you want to keep people interested, and for A New Beginning that means a skyrocketing body count, the first appearance of drugs harder than weed, and the most gratuitous use of sex and female nudity to this point in the series. It also marks the first time the series leaves Camp Crystal Lake, transitioning to a sort of “halfway house” for troubled teens in the wilds of Pennsylvania. The use of a bulldozer as a self-defense weapon is also a franchise highlight.
Kill Count: 19*
Top Kills: New Beginning wasn’t our favorite movie for impressive kills, but if we had to choose, we’d go with the road flare to the mouth and the garden shears to the eyes.
Final Girl: She’s not the best fighter, and isn’t very smart, but demonstrates a keen awareness of her surroundings by making good use of deadly tools (e.g. a chainsaw) when it really counts. Good enough to earn her a power ranking of No. 6.
Setting: Pinehurst camp for rehabilitating youth in Pennsylvania
Victims: Troubled teens
Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI
Jason Lives is the unveiling of supernatural Jason, having been slayed in the previous movie and put six feet underground. It’s also the final film featuring Tommy Jarvis, who was originally supposed to become the masked villain in Part VI, but demand forced production to keep with tradition and bring Voorhees back from the dead as the One True Jason. This installment also marked a tonal shift in the franchise, featuring a very Scream-like self-awareness of the genre and touches of the meta-humor Wes Craven’s future franchise would popularize. It makes a series that’s six parts deep feel refreshed and a little more fun. Thankfully, Jason doesn’t run anymore from Lives onward until the 2009 remake. That was too weird and unfair.
Kill Count: 17
Top Kills: The folding a man in half backwards like human origami and the excoriation using nothing but his iron fist are both top tier Jason strength moves.
Final Girl: We didn’t really love this girl. Her level of sass didn’t turn out to be commensurate with her survival instincts, and even a tremendous final kill can only earn her a ranking of No. 8.
Setting: Camp Forrest Green (formerly Camp Crystal Lake)
Victims: Camp staff
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
New Blood adds another stylistic twist to the Friday movies by adding a telekinetic protagonist who accidentally raises Jason from an underwater prison with the power of her mind. Part VII also marks the first appearance of Kane Hodder as Jason, who would go on to play the role through Jason X, by far the longest-serving Jason of the franchise.
Kill Count: 15
Top Kills: Jason’s first sleeping-bag-based kill and his dispatching of the movie’s resident bitchy girl by means of a hatchet-to-the-face/across-the-room throw combination are the standouts of Part VII.
Final Girl: Our girl in New Blood has the unfair advantage of telekinesis upping her Final Girl game, but we’re factoring it in anyway! Her ability to fight Jason with her mind, in addition to her dogged determination to help her mom, raise her power ranking to No. 4.
Setting: Crystal Lake
Victims: Vacationing youth, a mother and daughter with PTSD
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
Once again, the power of electricity pulls Jason back from beyond, and this time he’s heading for a party boat! Part VIII is the low point of the franchise. One of the hallmarks of any Friday movie is that Jason’s victims are typically unlikable, but Manhattan is filled with more assholes than usual. The death count is pretty high and combined with the limited setting of a ferry vessel, that adds up to more tedium than normal. If you want to see people die by drowning in toxic waste and a few other standout kills, Part VIII will fill that void. Otherwise, this movie doesn’t need your undivided attention.
Kill Count: 19**
Top Kills: This one features two of Jason’s best finishing moves: shoving a hot rock through someone’s chest in a sauna and decapitation by a single punch.
Final Girl: This was our least favorite of all the Final Friday Girls. There were flashes of strength, but for the most part she was pretty meek and defenseless. We know it’s tough to summon courage in the face of a super killer, but someone has to be the cellar dweller, and it’s the star of Jason Takes Manhattan. Judges say No. 11.
Setting: Passenger ship, Manhattan
Victims: Graduating seniors on a field trip
Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (Part IX)
Whereas Part IV advertised itself as The Final Chapter and then definitely broke that promise, Part IX was almost true when it called itself the The Final Friday, since it was the last one in the original series to be concerned with the earthly construct of Fridays. This is also the first movie to send an adequate amount of resources to fight Jason, which is to say there’s an entire battalion of federal agents with guns and explosives. Unable to be truly deterred, though, Jason finds a way and starts hopping from body to body until he can reunite his dark soul with a surviving member of the Voorhees bloodline to become whole again. Final Chapter sports the second highest death toll of the series, and one of our favorite characters in the form of a shotgun-toting diner waitress. There’s also a newscaster who says “83 confirmed murders” have been attributed to Jason up to this point in the series, but by our count he is at 117 (counting five referenced at the beginning of this movie).
Kill Count: 26***
Top Kills: The split-in-half during sex kill and the writhing, melt-y deterioration of a surrogate Jason into human soup take the cake amidst the staggering 26 deaths in Jason Goes To Hell.
Final Girl: We didn’t love this girl, but she wasn’t quite the worst, either. She needs to be saved kind of a lot, and you can only spend so much time reaching for an object trapped under a credenza before we just sort of want you to die. She did administer a crushing final blow, but her gentleman protector did most of the hard work for her. Survey says she can only reach No. 10 in the power rankings.
Setting: Crystal Lake
Victims: Town residents
Jason X
Movie number 10 gets bonus points for going full crazy. After being cryogenically frozen in a military lab— located at the government-run Camp Crystal Lake Research Facility—Jason is brought to life on the space ship Grendel in the 25th century. Jason X features such standout moments as the creation of “Uber Jason,” a cyborg hybrid of the killer; two sexy young campers in a hologram environment exclaiming “We love pre-marital sex!”; and this quote: “You’re lucky you weren’t alive during the Microsoft conflict. Hell, we were beating each other with our own severed limbs.” High fives all around if you can spot David Cronenberg amidst the madness.
Kill Count: 26**†††
Top Kills: Jason X was really strong in the kills department. First he dipped someone’s head in liquid nitrogen before shattering their face like glass. Then he impaled a man on a spiraling motor blade, causing their body to spin slowly downward. And then there was the time he beat someone trapped in a sleeping bag to death using another person trapped in their sleeping bag as the bludgeoning instrument. This was some of his most novel execution—even if they were just hologram people.
Final Girl: Not the most memorable character, but that was likely due more to writing than a poor Final Girl performance. Overall, she put in a solid showing as a military trained ass-kicker and, most importantly, never underestimated Jason’s killing abilities, attempting at every turn to emphasize the completeness of his evil nature. Results are in and she’s No. 5 on our list.
Setting: Research space shuttle Grendel, 25th century
Victims: Ship’s crew
Friday the 13th (2009)
In rebooting the Friday franchise, the brains behind the 2009 entry made a movie that looked more like Part III than the OG film from 1980. We’ve returned to Crystal Lake in New Jersey, but still not to Camp. Well, the camp is present in the film, but the victim pool certainly isn’t comprised of counselors in training. These are just some good old-fashioned teens who came to the woods to party and—you guessed it—have pre-marital sex! The time period is current (unlike the time The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got remade in 2003 and set back in the original 1973 timeline despite the fact that nothing felt like the 1970s at all), which is all to say that Jason has been lurking around Crystal Lake for about 30 years. It also means the timeline from Jason X hasn’t happened yet. He went into deep freeze in 2010 for that movie, so, chronologically, both Uber Jason in space and this Jason can still be the same person, which is fun to consider. The eleventh movie also has Jason running after his victims again, which just feels wrong. You get to walk and be un-killable or run and be mortal. Otherwise it’s just no fun.
Kill Count: 12
Top Kills: Increased realism from better special effects makes the deaths in this reboot harder to stomach. There was something about watching a girl being cooked over a fire in her own sleeping bag that was particularly savage.
Final Girl: The FG category had a twist this time around, with one character serving as a faux Final Girl before the real one emerged later and put a fantastic finishing move on her monstrous assailant. And lucky for us, both were pretty good, so we will combine them for our purposes here, and give a cumulative Final Girl power ranking of No. 7.
Setting: Crystal Lake
Victims: Vacationing youths
* Denotes number of kills not by a Voorhees
† Denotes number of hologram kills
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