The Friday the 13th series is one of the most enduring mainstays in slasher cinema.
Sure, for decades, critics railed against the saga of Jason Voorhees for being nothing
more than a shallow slaying delivery system, cheap and hacky, yet audiences kept coming
back for more.
Now, the series is so embedded in pop culture that even people who've never seen the series
know the face of Jason Voorhees, but unless they've sat with the whole saga, they only
know part of the story.
Here are seven things even hardcore horror fans may not know about Friday the 13th.
Zero stars
Today, whole generations have grown up knowing Friday the 13th as a classic series, but there
are likely still some critics who would scoff to hear them say it.
In fact, each entry was raked across the coals by critics, with the most well-received movie,
the original, still topping out with a "rotten" ranking by Rotten Tomatoes' reckoning.
Many critics used the series as an excuse to pen famously lacerating reviews.
Gene Siskel found the original so distasteful that he used his write-up to both spoil the
movie and encourage readers to write letters to Paramount in protest of the film.
As the critic wrote,
"I hope I've ruined Friday the 13th, which is the latest film by one of the most despicable
creatures ever to infest the movie business.
[...] If any film should be X-rated on the basis of violence, this is it."
"How does a guy like that go into a store and buy a new hockey mask?
I mean what do you think he looks like underneath the mask?"
"I know exactly what, I'd love to give away the ending of this picture.
I'm debating it."
Like the later slasher series Saw, Friday the 13th never stopped doing very poorly with
critics while working just fine for audiences.
In Friday the 13th's case, critics almost seemed vindictive, wondering how people could
enjoy and financially reward such a formulaic series of violent trash.
You'd think they would've figured out by movie six or seven that the violent trashiness was
the whole point.
Televised tales of terror
Friday the 13th: The Series ran for 72 episodes from 1987 to 1990, with Jason Voorhees and
Camp Crystal Lake showing up a grand total of zero times.
Originally developed under the name The 13th Hour and released in some markets as Friday's
Curse, the series followed two cousins who travel the world with an occultist researcher
to collect magical or cursed relics.
The open-ended story allowed for an episodic series in the vein of Supernatural or The
X-Files, with one overarching plot connecting standalone tales.
It was Friday the 13th in name only, which star John LeMay felt might have worked against
the series in the long run.
"I think a lot of people who were really big fans of the series didn't like the fact that
they stole the name and tried to sneak a fast one past everybody."
While the series is up-and-down in terms of quality, it's associated with the earlier
work of a few great filmmakers, with episodes directed or appearances by the likes of David
Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, and Sarah Polley.
Not surprisingly, Friday the 13th was soon joined on television by a Nightmare on Elm
Street spin-off series called Freddy's Nightmares.
While that show didn't last as long, it did at least have its famous slasher, Freddy Krueger,
in the cast.
[Evil laughter]
"But the game's gotta end!"
[Gunshot]
"Arrgh!"
The series that wouldn't end
Movie series producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. was so confident that the series was over after
the 3-D third movie that he declared aloud at the movie's wrap party, which celebrated
Jason's demise with "Happy End Day" cake, that he was not going to produce another one.
"When we got done with three, I was like, 'Okay, what I wanna do now is, I really wanna
bring this thing to an effective close.'"
The decision was walked back after Part III opened to the most successful opening weekend
the series had seen yet.
This time, they decided to be decisive with it, giving the fourth entry the subtitle of
The Final Chapter.
This being a 12-film franchise, we all know how that turned out.
"Friday the 13th, 13 hour movie marathon continues right here, only on the new TNN!"
Even at the time, it seemed producers had cold feet about truly ending Jason.
Special effects designer Tom Savini and his team of artists made several sculptures that
showed Jason not just taking a machete to the face, but being fully decapitated.
These effects, of course, went unused, so Jason could live again, just in case.
The series would ultimately end up having two inaccurately-named last chapters: the
fourth movie and the ninth, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.
Tommy Jarvis almost replaced Jason
Portrayed by three different actors in three of the franchise's movies, Tommy Jarvis is
arguably the second-most important character in the franchise, not that he makes a lot
of sense.
Twice, the filmmakers ended a sequel with the tease that Tommy was damned to become
the new Jason, possessed or corrupted by his spirit, only for the concept to be walked
back each time.
The fifth movie appeared to end with Tommy on the verge of madness, having been driven
insane by visions of the Crystal Lake slasher.
The setup for a sixth movie with Tommy as the new Jason could not have been clearer
or more explicit, which makes it all the more jarring when the sixth movie begins with him
as a hero once again.
Evidently, his insanity was cured off screen.
Not that we're complaining, of course, in a franchise as shallow as Friday the 13th,
the tragic story arc of a slasher, Tommy is probably best left unexplored.
"I think they could've gone a great number of really cool places with it after that point."
Bring Jason back
When producers brought the series back for part five, they remained curiously determined
to make the end of Jason stick.
[Scary music]
[Grunting and even scarier music]
In Part 5: A New Beginning, the series tried to have it both ways, keeping Jason dead while
bringing in a ruthless, hockey mask-wearing copycat slayer to slay in his stead.
When the slasher is revealed to be a minor character in the movie, audiences scratched
their heads.
"Don't allow the overweight, mentally handicapped son of the local ambulance driver to get hacked
to s--- over a candy bar, because chances are that driver is gonna turn into a Jason
clone and try to take people out."
What's interesting about that?
"It remains one of the least satisfying endings in the history of film as far as I'm concerned."
The failure to effectively switch up the formula was acknowledged at the start of the next
movie's production, with a directive coming down from producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. to bring
Jason back for the sixth movie, no matter what.
"Five was a bad dream, so it was important to me that Jason come back in a very spectacular,
fun way."
A budget slashed to pieces
The most disappointing Friday is easily the eighth one.
Subtitled Jason Takes Manhattan, the 1989 release is well-known for generally not taking
place in Manhattan.
Instead, the majority of the movie takes place on a small boat slowly floating from the confines
of Crystal Lake out to the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, somehow.
This wasn't a creative decision, but rather an inconvenient financial limitation.
Many fantastic, NYC-centric setpieces were planned for the movie, almost none of which
were actually accomplished on the film's small budget.
According to producer Rob Hedden,
"Everything about New York was going to be completely exploited and milked.
There was going to be a tremendous scene on the Brooklyn Bridge, a boxing match in Madison
Square Garden, Jason would go through department stores, Broadway plays.
He'd even crawl onto the top of the Statue of Liberty and dive off."
"Production reality set in, and it was like, okay, instead of, you know, uh, 75 percent
of the movie taking place in New York, we'll do 50 percent.
And then it was, well we can't really do 50, either."
To save money on location shooting, the production shot most of the scarce Manhattan material
in the not-quite-lookalike city of Vancouver.
"So there was a joke running around, it was 'Jason Takes Vancouver,' instead of 'Jason
Takes Manhattan.'"
A long-awaited duel
In 2003, the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series met in a long-awaited collision:
Freddy vs. Jason.
While the movie might strike the uninitiated as a cynical way to wring one last payday
out of both franchises after they ran out of gas, the first attempt to make it actually
took place in 1987, when the Elm Street series was ascendant and Friday was just beginning
to see its box office fortunes decline.
At the time, both properties were owned by different studios, meaning any crossover would
involve tricky negotiations that proved difficult to navigate.
Paramount owned Friday while New Line Cinema owned Nightmare, and both parties wanted the
upper hand.
As a result, progress on putting the movie together was full of starts and stops, not
coming together until after New Line became the owner of both properties in 1989.
With the franchises united under New Line, the crossover was teased at the end of 1993's
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, with Freddy's fist bursting from beneath the earth
to drag Jason's mask underground.
Even so, ten years would pass and two more movies, Jason X and Wes Craven's New Nightmare,
would come and go before the fight flick finally came together.
Fortunately, after all that buildup, they ended up sticking the landing, not only is
Freddy vs. Jason a pretty fun watch, it's also the highest-grossing movie in either
series by far.
Teamwork, that's how you go out on top.
Will it ever happen again?
Well…
"There's room for more!"