Few franchises have cranked out as many films as the Friday the 13th franchise. For over 40 years, Jason Voorhees (or his dear mommy) have been terrorizing campers and audiences with brutal beheadings, sinister stabbings, and the occasional sleeping bag piñata. But when you release a dozen movies, you’re sure to have a bit of a mixed bag.
So here is your breakdown of the Friday the 13th movies ranked from worst to best:
12. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
On the surface, Jason Takes Manhattan sounds like an amazing idea.
Why not take the machete-wielding murderer and place him in the most populated city in America? Unfortunately, Jason doesn’t quite take Manhattan. In fact, he spends only about a sixth of the film’s runtime there. No, in Part VIII, Jason more accurately takes a cruise yacht full of teenagers.
Budget is largely to blame for the problems with Jason Takes Manhattan, as writer/director Rob Hedden had all sorts of plans for Jason in the Big City. But the budget for the Friday movies has always been small and it just wasn’t in the cards. So instead, Jason stalks the students on a cruise ship to celebrate graduation on their way to the Big Apple.
The most criminal part of Jason Takes Manhattan is that it’s just boring. The time between kills feels so drawn out and while there are few scenes are nice (Jason on a subway and in Times Square just feels right), it largely falls flat and features the worst Jason face prosthetic in the entire franchise.
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11. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
Look, it’s obviously one of the worst of the Friday films, but Jason Goes to Hell has some decent ingredients cooking in the pot. The film boasts some great special effects from Greg Nicotero and KNB Effects.
But while Jason Goes to Hell has some of the right ingredients, it just doesn’t have the right chef (or director) to know how to make them work together…or if they should even be in the pot together at all.
One of the biggest problems here is that it turns Jason’s lore into something way too complicated. Jason isn’t merely a kid who became a monster, he’s also a worm-like creature that is Hell’s assassin on Earth and the role of “Jason” passes on depending on who the worm uses as a host body. It’s an interesting thought, but not in a Friday movie.
Eventually, it’s discovered that the worm parasite needs to re-enter a Voorhees body in order to be reborn as Jason. But while it does make for a nice finale, and the Friday movies aren’t necessarily strangers to hereditary horror, bloodlines being the thing that can kill Jason doesn’t really fit in Friday movie.
Jason Goes to Hell, much like the next movie on the list was a step in the direction of trying something new. But that doesn’t always work.
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10. Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning
After Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, what do you do? Jason is presumably dead, hacked to bits by Tommy Jarvis, and Tommy himself seemed primed to be the next focus of the franchise, given his ominous look in the final freeze-frame of Final Chapter. So what do you do?
A New Beginning makes the choice to feature Jason still, but not really. No, Friday the 13th Part V features a fake Jason.
Tommy Jarvis, now a grown adult is struggling with the traumatic events of his childhood and his encounter with Jason Voorhees. Now a part of a halfway house after leaving a mental institution, he soon finds that murders happening around him are all tied back to Jason Voorhees in various ways. As it turns out, the murders were actually being committed by Jason copycat.
One would think that, given such a great opportunity to look into Tommy’s psyche that A New Beginning would take full advantage, right? Wrong.
A New Beginning is bizarre in numerous ways. It was the only non-pornographic movie that director Danny Steinnman ever directed and…the movie feels that a bit. Tommy’s story arc leads us to believe that he is assuming the role of Jason in its final moments with seemingly no lead-up. But again, the biggest crime is that at the end of it all, it’s not even Jason.
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9. Jason X
Essentially Alien, but with Jason as the Xenomorph, Jason X follows a collection of students in the year 2455 who discover Jason Voorhees frozen on Earth and take him aboard their ship to Earth 2.
Jason X’s biggest crime is that even with its bonkers premise, it’s largely kind of boring. There are long gaps between each of the kills and while some of them are excellent (the liquid nitrogen face smash is an all-timer), it kind of makes the runtime drag a bit.
But here’s the thing: Jason X is a stupid movie, but it wears its stupidity like a badge of honor and uses its ridiculous setting to have fun with Jason without messing up future installments (which would happen in the past…if that makes any sense). It pokes fun at itself in self-referential ways, has characters that are way over the top (the android Kay-Em is a delight), and features some pretty great comedy to go with the kills.
It makes one kind of wish that the Friday the 13th franchise had gone more in this direction with stories that place Jason Voorhees in wild scenarios and see what he does. An island, the Arctic, a casino, a company Christmas party…just a bunch of non-canonical simulations where Jason gets to go bananas. That would have been (or still could be!) a blast.
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8. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
Again looking for a change of pace, Friday the 13th: The New Blood attempts another change of pace. This time, the movie asks: “How would Jason fare against someone that could square off against him?”
The New Blood introduces Tina, a telepath whose doctor moves her to Crystal Lake in order to study her abilities by exposing her to stress. As she flexes her telepathic abilities, she ends up unchaining Jason from his watery grave and of course, the killing starts.
Boy did the MPAA have a field day with this one. The New Blood was notoriously ripped to shreds by the censors and huge chunks of the film were taken out, leaving one of the least bloody Friday films to date. Entirely new sequences had to be redone in order to beef up the kill count as the MPAA threw out whole scenes.
While The New Blood isn’t terrible and holds the distinction of being Kane Hodder’s first film playing Jason, it has to be in contention for one of the most WTF finales in the franchise as Tina summons her father’s rotting corpse to drag Jason down to the watery depths of Crystal Lake.
Quite the flex.
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7. Friday the 13th (2009)
Look, in terms of Friday the 13th movies, the 2009 remake isn’t very good.
The Jason Voorhees here doesn’t necessarily line up with the Jason we get in the other films (Jason doing archery? Jason using booby traps? Floodlights? Taking prisoners?), even though he’s not really supposed to.
Also, there’s a certain air of survivability to some of the characters that are not present in previous films (mainly Jared Padelecki’s character) that make them feel completely invulnerable which sucks some of the air out of the suspense. One of the hallmarks of these movies is that everyone is dispensable except for the Final Girl, but having her brother be so competent makes him feel invincible and never in any real danger.
With that being said, just because this isn’t a great Friday the 13th movie doesn’t mean it isn’t a good slasher movie. I mean, if this was a regular slasher, it checks all the right boxes.
The kills are solid, some are fantastically bloody, and Jason is really menacing because of his speed. I mean, he’s a HUNTER here! He’s running these kids down rather than some of the other films where Jason kind of plods along (not all of them of course).
It’s pretty good even if it does have a pretty sluggish 25 minutes right in the middle and diverts away from some of Jason’s hallmark attributes in favor of a more “recent” Jason.
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6. Freddy vs Jason
Freddy vs Jason is the perfect example of what early 2000s horror felt like. It’s loud, incredibly bloody, tonally inconsistent, full of remarkably stupid characters, uses asinine amounts of blurry slo-mo, and is accompanied by a heavy metal soundtrack.
But even then, Freddy vs Jason is just fun.
It could be so easy to make a movie that throws out so much of both characters’ lore in service of “the big fight”, but Freddy vs Jason actually has a finale that really delivers. Sure, the path to get there is a bit bumpy (it’s hinted that Jason’s biggest fear is water…for some reason?), and it definitely feels more like a Nightmare on Elm Street movie featuring Jason Voorhees, but it features some really great kills (the bed sandwich is great), and watching the absolute bloodbath of a final act between these two slasher titans is definitely worth the time.
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5. Friday the 13th Part III
Friday the 13th Part III is perhaps best known as “The One That Was in 3D” or “The One Where Jason Got His Hockey Mask”. After two entries in the Friday franchise, now-executive producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. wanted to up the ante on the Friday series.
So they went 3D.
Part III is a movie that is having a ton of fun. The movie utilizes its 3D elements to full effect, having Jason lash out at the audience through POV shots, a head is squished so that an eyeball pops out at the audience and Jason even shoots a harpoon right at the camera before it goes right in a poor girl’s eye.
The movie doesn’t quite take advantage of some of what it sets up, namely how one of the characters had actually survived Jason previously, but the film feels like it’s trying out new things, but never in a way that feels forced, but looking for that next natural evolution.
And they found it in a hockey mask.
Part III isn’t the best of the franchise, and its home video release doesn’t quite pack the punch of the 3-D effects, but on the whole it is definitely in the front half of the Friday franchise and a solid slasher watch.
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4. Friday the 13th
Is this a hot take? It can’t be.
The original, the one that started it all. Friday the 13th is a classic.
The original Friday the 13th finds a group of camp counselors meeting up to prepare for campers at Camp Crystal Lake. Soon they start getting offed one by one by a mysterious killer. Certainly, it must be the boy who “drowned” in the lake 13 years ago, seeking revenge.
But nope! In a great twist (especially to anyone who was anticipating a hockey-masked killer), it turns out that Pamela Voorhees, the mother of the drowned boy, Jason, is the one killing camp counselors in a twisted act of revenge for her dead son. After Mrs. Voorhees has her head lopped off by Alice, one would think the film was over.
That is until Jason’s decomposed corpse jumps out of the water and attacks her! An ending that is a true treat to witness with Friday first-timers.
The performances are largely wooden and uninteresting, including the film’s Final Girl, Alice, the kills themselves pale in comparison to what comes later in the franchise, and director Sean S. Cunningham doesn’t have the skill as a director to make the film as suspenseful as future installments, but Friday the 13th is a true horror classic, anchored by an iconic performance from Betsy Palmer as Mrs. Voorhees.
It’s just not the best in its own franchise.
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3. Friday the 13th Part 2
After killing Pamela Voorhees and purporting that Alice’s final encounter at Crystal Lake with a pond scum Jason was merely a dream, Friday the 13th Part 2 says, “nah, just kidding!”
Bringing back Jason as someone that has been lurking in the woods all these years, Jason comes to wreak havoc on the new counselors at Camp Crystal Lake 5 years after the events of the first film. With a bag on his head and a single eye hole cut out, Jason runs around the camp like a ruthless redneck doing all the damage he can.
Part 2 has tighter direction from Steve Miner than Part 1, features better performances, and let’s face it–this one has Jason in it! Mask or no mask, we like watching Jason work!
And boy does he! Jason delivers some really great kills in Part 2, and he’s fun to watch, but one of the stars of the show here is the film’s Final Girl, Ginny, who has to be one of the smartest of all time. At one point in the film, Ginny asks some fellow counselors to think about “what if Jason is real?” and she thinks about how seeing his mother killed would affect him.
Once the killings start, Ginny finds herself running through the woods and eventually into Jason’s own shack, where she finds Jason’s shrine to his late mother, complete with her cable knit sweater and rotting decapitated head. In a moment of clarity, Ginny dons the sweater and acts like his mother, buying herself time.
A true scream queen (for one movie).
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2. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
You’d be hard-pressed to find a Friday the 13th fan that doesn’t have The Final Chapter in their top 5. Originally intended to actually be a final chapter, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is bursting at the seams with great slasher cinema.
The film introduces us to one of the franchise’s recurring characters, Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) who is your average 80s kid. But once everyone around him starts getting hacked to pieces by Jason, he delivers one of the all-time great finales in any horror movie and serves Jason up a dish best served cold.
The Final Chapter is one of the few Friday movies that really tries to do some legwork in building up its cast of supporting characters that are soon to meet their demise. Crispin Glover plays a huge dork who dances like an absolute animal and can never find the corkscrew (not a euphemism), and the script builds up a quite tender romance between two lovers before Jason obliterates them both.
It’s fun characters getting killed in fun ways by the serial killer we all love to root for in his swan song (before he is raised from the dead multiple times). You gotta love it.
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1. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
After 4 movies of watching Jason Voorhees kill teenagers (and the occasional adult) and a failed attempt to try and do something new, Part VI didn’t just bring back Jason Voorhees with a bang.
It set off the best film in the entire Friday franchise.
Tommy Jarvis, broken out of a mental institution, is hellbent on making sure that Jason Voorhees is dead. After traveling to the cemetery that contains his grave, Tommy digs it up in order to impale his heart with an iron spike. Unfortunately, right after impaling Jason, a lightning bolt hits the rod and brings Jason back to life, Frankenstein’s monster-style.
What ensues is hands down the most fun you’ll have watching a Friday the 13th movie. Jason is in full swing, killing left and right with anything and everything at his disposal. But while the kills here are still incredibly satisfying, the best thing about Jason Lives is that it is thoroughly entertaining between the kills.
Writer/director Tom McLoughlin makes this the most action-packed entry with car chases and shoot-outs, explosions and packs it with just the right amount of humor to make the film a blast without turning Jason himself into a joke.
It’s a blast of a film from start to finish, one of the most polished movies in the franchise, and the best Friday the 13th movie yet.
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Want more Friday the 13th goodness? Check out our Friday the 13th discussion episode of The Cinemast Podcast with Adam Mast and Dead by Daylight Twitch streamer, OllieOdinson!
