All 12 Friday the 13th Movies, Ranked

It's fair to wonder why there were so many Friday the 13th movies, as most of them aren't particularly good, and they traditionally received a critical reception comparable to a coyote at a cat show. There are diseases that people hate less than Friday the 13th. You either like these movies because they're kind of bad or you don't like them at all.

If you want an answer, follow the money. Most of the F13 films were made cheaply and quickly, with casts of then-unknown actors, and a formula — gore, jumpscares, near-guaranteed nudity, next to zero actual plot, absolutely despised by parents worldwide — that made them catnip for 1980s teenage audiences. As a result, many F13s were an incredible return on investment for then-distributor Paramount Pictures.

Friday the 13th proceeded to become a victim of its own success. As the series went on, each entry had to up the ante: more victims, more gore, more nudity, new settings, better special effects. That meant the budgets had to get higher to match, so the later films didn't make quite as much money.

Finally, 1989's Jason Takes Manhattan wasn't enough of a success to justify the franchise's continuation. After a sustained period of development hell, producers tried to kill the franchise with 1993's Jason Goes to Hell. That only worked for nine years, but the subsequent underperformance of 2002's Jason X was finally enough to shut the original Friday the 13th series down.

New Line Cinema rebooted the franchise in 2009, in a movie that reimagined Jason as a sort of Eli Roth-influenced vengeful murderer. That movie was a hit, but a planned sequel got canceled due to post-Great Recession financial problems at Paramount Pictures. Subsequently, a famous lawsuit between the original F13’s writer and director meant most attached projects were DOA, including the most recent video game.

That decade-plus of chaos left the series in a strange position, with only 12 full-length Friday the 13th movies. While a franchise revival is on the horizon due to the success of the prequel series Crystal Lake, a true return for Jason himself is still uncertain at time of writing.

Some of the Friday the 13th films are trash classics and some are just trash, but they've still carved out a unique position in American pop culture. Out of all the post-Halloween slasher films, F13 still has some of the best, worst, and most successful entries. In celebration of this Friday the 13th, here's an informal, highly biased ranking of the films in the franchise.

Note: the youngest movie in this list is over 20 years old. If you haven’t run this marathon for yourself, you might want to hold back, as there are a few spoilers below.

12 A New Beginning (1985)

Just in case a psychopath in a mask ever forces you to answer horror trivia questions: this is the second F13 movie without Jason as the killer. A New Beginning, or simply Part V, was an abortive attempt to start a new era of the franchise, featuring a copycat murderer who runs amok at a therapy camp in California.

A New Beginning is arguably Friday the 13th at its most grindhouse. It's tied for the second-highest body count (as long as you count dream sequences), with a full crew of deeply unlikable troubled teenagers for not-Jason to chop into kielbasa. Unfortunately, it's got a knack for gross-outs and a dumb twist ending that conspire to make Part V the least popular film in the core franchise. It deserves its reputation.

11 Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Really, it's more like Jason Takes the Love Boat. Jason sneaks onto a cruise ship full of partying high school students for no particular reason, then proceeds to chase the survivors into New York for roughly the last third of the movie. If there's a joke here, it's that Jason is only the third or fourth worst thing that could happen to a bunch of unsupervised teenagers in 1989 Manhattan.

Part VIII was written and directed by first-time filmmaker Rob Hedden (Clockstoppers), who decided to slap together his two big ideas: Jason on a cruise ship, and Jason in New York. The result is an overlong mismatch with a couple of truly baffling plot twists, a few all-timer quality kills, and what might be the single dumbest finale in F13 history. If you lived in Manhattan in the 1980s, did you know that your sewer system floods with unspecified toxic waste every night?

10 Friday the 13th (2009)

The big draw to the F13 reboot, at least for Veronica Mars fans, is watching Dick Casablancas catch an arrow to the forehead. Anyone else might have a tougher lift.

The screenwriters on F13 2009 made a real effort to work around and defy many horror clichés, which does add some degree of unpredictability to the movie. In some ways, it's ahead of its time, in that it's an active attempt to reconstruct the slasher formula after Kevin Williamson had so much fun tearing it apart in Scream.

That being said, there's a vicious streak in F13 2009 that owes more to post-Eli Roth "torture porn" horror than anything else. The original series’ Jason was largely impersonal most of the time, but this one genuinely seems to hate most of his victims, with a sadistic brutality that’s more reminiscent of Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers or Victor Crowley. If you've got a higher tolerance for that kind of thing than I do, you'd enjoy this movie more than I did.

9 The Final Chapter (1984)

It's fun to think about the lowest moment of all of the classic slasher villains. For Freddy Krueger, it's probably that music video where Dokken kicked his ass. Michael Myers lost a fight to Busta Rhymes. Leatherface's nadir might be the 2003 remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

For Jason Voorhees, his worst night is absolutely when he got ganked by a 10-year-old Corey Feldman. If not for the failure of Part V and Jason's subsequent resurrection, that would've been the end of the character: a sudden and ignominious death under the knife of the third most successful member of the Goonies.

The Final Chapter, as one might expect from the name, was supposed to be the series finale, as several of the filmmakers were getting sick of it all by that point. Then it made well over 10 times its budget at the box office, so the slaughter continued. That might be why The Final Chapter doesn’t feel like anyone’s heart is really in it. It’s a reasonably watchable slasher movie with a surprise appearance by a young Crispin Glover, but its low budget and strange ending both keep it in the bottom half.

8 Part 2 (1981)

The late Victor Miller, writer of the original F13, didn't work on its sequel because he didn't agree with the other filmmakers’ plan to make Jason the new villain. To Miller's mind, Jason was an innocent victim in the original F13 and had been dead for over 20 years. Instead, Ron Kurz (Off the Wall) came aboard to introduce Jason, seen here as a backwoods murderer with a bag on his head, who wasn’t quite as deceased as the first movie had suggested. His rampage begins as a successful attempt to avenge his mother, then turns into a killing spree directed against anyone over 18 who dares to get anywhere near Crystal Lake.

Part 2 had several lasting impacts on F13 as a franchise, but most of it's a little forgettable. Besides Jason’s debut, its two most famous moments are a particularly violent machete kill delivered to a guy in a wheelchair and the introduction of Pamela’s sweater, which went on to become a mechanic in the two most famous F13 video games.

In retrospect, the most interesting thing about Part 2 is how it contradicts many of what would become the invisible rules of the slasher genre. Those rules eventually got codified to the point where they could be parodied in Scream, but they weren't quite in place yet in 1981. Roughly half the counselors in Part 2 live through the movie because they're partying at a nearby bar, while Jason kills everyone who actually stayed home. While Jason does murder his share of horny teens in Part 2, anyone who hit the bar dodged the massacre. Remember, kids: underage drinking might save your life.

7 Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

It took more than 15 years for this movie to get made. Paramount Pictures was allegedly pushing for a crossover as early as 1987, but A Nightmare on Elm Street was handily crushing Friday the 13th at the box office, so New Line Cinema wasn't inclined to play ball. By 2003, both franchises were on the way out, so it was time for the team-up.

Let me get this out of the way: this is a dumb movie. It’s not quite as dumb as its reputation would indicate, but it’s full of plot contrivances, strange decisions, and missed opportunities (none of either character's surviving nemeses appear, etc.). There are probably a half-dozen fan rewrites out there by now that are more satisfying than FvJ’s theatrical cut turned out to be.

FvJ begins after both franchises’ respective finales, with both killers trapped in hell, and Freddy finds a way to release Jason on Springwood as part of a plan to build Freddy’s own power back up. It’s not a bad concept for a crossover.

That being said, it spends too much time with an unlikable pack of new teenage protagonists, and the actual fights between Freddy and Jason are strange. The result is less a long-anticipated battle of horror titans and more like a high-concept wrestling match, complete with elbow drops, knee strikes, and an R-rated brawl in a construction site. While it’s got some promise early on and a couple of scenes are legitimately creepy, Freddy vs. Jason eventually gets too damn goofy to really recommend.

6 Friday the 13th (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDrOvFtzyPQ - original trailer (Scream Factory)

The original F13 is still the best, at least to go by its Rotten Tomatoes score (a scorching 49%/60%). It's also the most directly inspired by Carpenter's Halloween, in that for much of its running time, it's a slasher movie where the slasher is an almost invisible presence. With a couple of exceptions, like a young Kevin Bacon getting an arrow shoved through his neck (Jason Voorhees' Bacon Number: technically 1), the villain of F13 is mostly seen through the carnage that she leaves in her wake. One good edit could turn F13 into a movie about a murderous poltergeist.

The original killer in Friday the 13th is famously Jason's mother Pamela (Betsy Palmer), out to avenge his death by neglect at the hands of Camp Crystal Lake's counselors, but she isn't in most of the movie. She only shows up once there's only one counselor left standing so she can drop some exposition. Before that point, she rampages through the campsite like Agent 47. It’s actually kind of funny in retrospect, as Pamela could not possibly have the upper body strength to do half of what she does.

F13 will probably land better if it's the first one you watch. It sets a distinct tone for what comes afterward, courtesy of some shockingly gory kills by future legend Tom Savini, but it's quite a different sort of horror movie from everything that followed it. One could go so far as to say that it’s the only real horror movie in the series.

5 Part III (1982)

This is only as high as it is because it was the first Friday the 13th movie that I ever saw. On some level, I've never recovered from the scene with the harpoon gun.

Part III introduces Jason's now-trademark hockey mask, which he takes off of one of his victims. It's also a weirdly bedrock entry in the development of the "final girl" trope, as Part III's last survivor Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell, Days of Our Lives) runs down the trademark qualities of the role like she's hitting a checklist. There are more famous final girls in horror, such as Nancy Thompson or Sydney Prescott, but Chris should get more credit as an early trope codifier.

Part III originally hit theaters as a 3D movie, which is why it involves so many shots where something flies directly at the camera. If you saw Part III on home video like I did, it was a standard cut with no 3D elements, so it ends up just looking goofy. That adds an element of camp into what's otherwise a really brutal series entry. Part III isn’t the best horror movie in the series, but it’s one of the better slasher movies, if you can appreciate the difference thereof.

4 Jason X (2002)

Pinhead, the Leprechaun, and the Critters (but not Freddy, inexplicably) all went to space before Jason did, and for all of them, it was a mistake. Weirdly, Jason X wasn't. It isn't the best, goriest, or scariest Friday the 13th, but it is the most deliberately funny, and that has to count for something.

Jason X is technically set after the events of Freddy vs. Jason, although it's anyone's guess how deliberate that was. After years of random slaughter, Jason gets captured by the U.S. government, then thrown into cryogenic stasis through a sacrifice play by researcher Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Dolg). 400 years later, scavengers of the now-dead Earth defrost them both, but Jason isn't as dead as he looks.

There's a weirdly high amount of cast and crew crossover between Jason X and then-contemporary Canadian sci-fi, especially Andromeda and Stargate. Combined with the slightly janky sets, it makes Jason X look like an unusually gory TV movie. Having said that, many of its jokes land, it has at least one all-timer quality kill, and it manages to be camp without fully descending into self-referential post-Scream hell. It sends the series out on a surprisingly high note.

3 Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

I have a soft spot for Jason Goes to Hell based entirely upon its first 10 minutes, in which a completely stereotypical F13 scenario ends with Jason's explosive death at the hands of a SWAT team. If the rest of the movie had been 80 minutes of CSIs scooping Jason chunks into a sandwich bag, I'd still have enjoyed the experience. It's a really effective bait-and-switch.

Instead, JGTH suddenly transforms into The Hidden for the rest of its run time. The subtle implication intended by the director is that Jason's strange resurrection in Part VI made him into a genuine Deadite. Therefore, instead of dying outright, he goes on a body-swapping rampage through Crystal Lake in an attempt to find his last living blood relative (Erin Gray, Silver Spoons) so he can be reborn. None of these rules have ever applied to Jason before and will ever be brought up again.

That additional supernatural element and a relative lack of the actual Jason both make JGTH one of the least popular films among F13 die-hards, but it's my list and I genuinely appreciated this movie in the theater. The body count is high, the quality kills are consistent, and the intro’s worth a laugh, especially on a blind watch.