Friday the 13th film series: Encyclopedia II - Friday the 13th film series - The films

Friday the 13th film series - The films

Friday the 13th film series - Friday the 13th 1980

In the first film, a group of teenagers return to a summer camp, Camp Crystal Lake, to prepare it for reopening. Many years earlier, a young boy named Jason Voorhees had drowned at the camp. Shortly thereafter, the two counselors responsible were murdered. One by one, the new teenage counselors are brutally murdered by Jason's mother, Pamela Voorhees.

Friday the 13th film series - Part 2 1981

In the second film, it is retroactively revealed that Jason did not drown in the lake and had been living as a hermit in the woods next to the camp for several decades. Having watched his mother's murdering from afar, Jason tracks down and kills the survivor of the first film and resumes his mother's work, hacking and slashing through numerous other victims at the nearby camp.

Friday the 13th film series - Part 3 1982

In the third installment (filmed in 3-D), Jason acquired his trademark hockey mask and found himself slaying a group of teenagers and a motorcycle gang who are spending time at a farmhouse near a lake

Friday the 13th film series - The Final Chapter 1984

The fourth installment continues Jason's slaughter before he encounters a young Tommy Jarvis, who is the one to end Jason's life. Part 4, simply titled Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter featured up and coming 1980s stars Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover and did extremely well at the box office--so well that it immediately caused Paramount to go back on their plan to have the film serve as the ending to the Friday the 13th franchise.

Friday the 13th film series - A New Beginning 1985

The fifth film picks up with a mentally troubled adult Tommy at a halfway house when a series of familiar murders start up. However, the killer is not Jason, but a copycat avenging the death of his son. Fans were unhappy with the twist, and the producers decided to bring Jason back in the next film.

Friday the 13th film series - Jason Lives 1986

The sixth entry in the series made this clear in its title: Jason Lives. However, since Jason had been supposedly rotting through the years since Part 4, writer and director Tom McLoughlin brought back the monster in a classic Frankenstein approach. Seemingly ignoring the events of the previous film, Jason Lives opens with Tommy digging up Jason's corpse so he could destroy it, only to have the body struck by lightning, which brings Jason back to life. From here on, Jason is now a zombie (though many fans argue that Jason was never completely human in the previous films). The film's use of humor made it slightly more popular with critics and many fans consider it the best in the series.

Friday the 13th film series - The New Blood 1988

In this seventh outting in the Friday the 13th series, a telekinetic girl revives him again from the bottom of the lake where Tommy had left him imprisoned. The film, which has been dubbed "Jason Vs. Carrie" by fans, featured the first appearance of Kane Hodder as Jason. Hodder would continue to play Jason in all the following entries in the series until Freddy vs. Jason, and would become the most well known of the actors who have played Jason over the years.

Friday the 13th film series - Jason Takes Manhattan 1989

Jason Takes Manhattan the eighth film in the series picks up sometime after the end of the previous film, where Jason is resurrected again, this time by a cable tow. From there he boards upon the cruise ship Lazarus where he stays for most of the film, slashing its teenaged passengers who are aboard the vessel for their post-graduation senior class trip. Despite the title, only a third of the film actually takes place in New York.

Friday the 13th film series - New Line Cinema purchases the franchise

In the early 1990s, New Line Cinema acquired the rights to the Friday the 13th franchise and quickly rushed out plans to revive Jason Voorhees.

In 1991 New Line Cinema obtained the rights to the "Jason Voorhees" character hoping to make one final attempt at cashing in on the movie with 1993's Jason Goes to Hell. New Line has since obtained the rights to the title "Friday the 13th" but has chosen not to use it; on its 2004 boxset, Paramount had to credit New Line for use of the name.

Friday the 13th film series - Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday 1993

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday kills Jason off, and he instead possesses others to continue his rampage. While the film (which only featured Jason in the opening sequence and climactic final fight to the death) is often derided by fans, the final scene of Freddy Krueger's arm grabbing Jason's discarded hockey mask created a great deal of hype towards the possibility of a crossover between the characters.

Friday the 13th film series - The road to Freddy vs. Jason

The road to this crossover was filled with problems. The biggest was the numerous scripts which sought to come up with a logical way to have these two monsters meet. Several of the scripts that were written featured Freddy Krueger retroactively inserted into the origin of Jason, including scenarios where Jason was molested as a child by Freddy, who then "drowned" Jason to keep him from telling the authorities. Other scripts featured Jason as the hero of the film, recasting Jason as a tragic figure instead of the monstrous killing machine that he is associated as being.

Ultimately, two scripts were written for the film. The first one had Jason being raised from the dead by a teenage girl using the heart of her dead boyfriend, to save her sister from a cult of psychotic teenagers who worshipped Freddy Krueger and were seeking to raise him from hell via a ritual sacrifice. The second film featured the main male and female leads from Jason Goes to Hell and the "Alice" character from A Nightmare on Elm Street Parts 4 and 5 teaming up on the eve of the year 2000 to rescue their kids from Freddy and Jason, who seek to kill the children so as to bring Satan (who is revealed to be Jason's father) to Earth.

The second script was deemed unfilmable due to costs and the first script was greenlit (and underwent several additional rewrites), but ultimately was abandoned due to the massacre at Columbine High School, which made the film's main plot point about a murderous teenage cult be considered too controversial in the wake of the school shooting. Meanwhile, Sean Cunningham was tired of waiting on the series to stand still, so he ordered a film to be made in the meantime. The idea was developed to set it in the future so as not to hamper the continuity of Freddy vs. Jason. When it was proposed that Jason being alive in the future would reveal who won, Jason X writer Todd Farmer retorted "There are three things in life that are constant: death, taxes, and Freddy and Jason will always come back."

Friday the 13th film series - Jason X 2001

Taking place both in the future and in space, Jason X followed the cryogenically frozen Jason being thawed out in the ship Grendel where he wakes to draw blood. The film went further by climaxing with Jason being turned into what has been dubbed "Uber-Jason" - an indestructible metallic cyborg.

Friday the 13th film series - Freddy vs. Jason 2003

Two years later Freddy vs. Jason was finally released. Living out his killings in Hell, Jason "wakes up" in order to kill the children on Elm Street for his mother, who is actually Freddy Krueger needing the large lug to spread fear so that he can regain his powers lost due to a new drug the children are taking. But Jason will not stop killing Freddy's "children," and the two finally duke it out, ending the film with a fairly ambiguous image.

Friday the 13th film series - Further films?

The film's success has been the conductor for a possible sequel. As of now, rumors have circulated about the character of Ash joining the fray (due to the Necronomicon from The Evil Dead trilogy making an appearance in Jason Goes to Hell), but Evil Dead director Sam Raimi and actor Robert Englund have both denied this, and the film seems to be set as a direct sequel with no further monster team-ups.

Reports in March 2005 suggested that Quentin Tarantino was in talks to direct a twelfth "Jason" film. Tarantino later denied the rumors.

There have also been rumors of adding the character of Michael Myers from the Halloween series to the mix. However, since Dimension owns the rights to the Halloween series and the character of Michael Myers, some kind of an an agreement would have to be made between them and New Line if this were to happen.

Actors who appeared in the series before going on to bigger roles include Kevin Bacon, Steven Culp, Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover, Kelly Hu, Allison Smith, and Miguel A. Núñez Jr. In addition, popular Weekend at Bernie's actor Terry Kiser (who played the title roles in the 1989 comedy and its 1993 sequel Weekend at Bernie's II) appears in the series' seventh entry (Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The films", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki