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Series overviewAlthough each entry in the series is unique, they share many similar qualities. The setting is consistently in either Camp Crystal Lake or the surrounding suburbs, with three entries in New York City, outer space, and even Elm Street. The victims are usually teenagers or college-aged and frequently partake in recreational drug use and pre-marital sex.
The filmsSpoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Friday the 13th (1980)Despite warnings by the superstitious locals of a "Death Curse" Steve Christy hires a group of young people to help him re-open Camp Crystal Lake. Camp Blood is the name given to the camp by local residents as a result of the camp's dark history of tragedy and murder. The innocent roam the area while being stalked by a dark figure in the shadows, and are murdered one by one by an unseen assassin. In the end, the killer turns out to be a woman named Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), who is seeking revenge for the accidental drowning of her physically deformed son Jason, whose death was the result of negligence on the part of the counselors. She is decapitated by the lone survivor, Alice Hardy (Adrienne King). Alice, while waiting for the police to arrive, takes a canoe out to the lake where she is dragged down by a deformed but very much alive Jason. A final scene in a hospital indicates that Jason's re-animated corpse was a hallucination. Kevin Bacon co-stars as an ill-fated counselor. Friday the 13th 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 demise from afar, Jason tracks down and kills the heroine of the first film and resumes his mother's work, hacking and slashing through numerous other victims at the nearby camp. Friday the 13th Part 3 3D (1982)In the third installment (filmed in 3-D), Jason acquired his trademark hockey mask, and machete. Jason here kills a group of teenagers and a motorcycle gang who are spending time at a farmhouse near a lake. The only survivor, Chris Higgins, (Dana Kimmel) stops Jason by wounding him with an axe blow to the head. As a result, she goes insane in one of the most surreal endings in the series. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)The fifth film picks up with a mentally troubled adult Tommy Jarvis 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 Part VI: 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. When the body is unearthed, Tommy is filled with rage and pulls off part of a nearby fence and stabs the body multiple times, leaving the pole erect in Jason's chest, only to have the pole struck by lightning, bringing Jason back to life. From here on, Jason is now a zombie (though many fans argue that Jason, after his "death" at Camp Crystal Lake, was never human to begin with). The film's use of humor made it slightly more popular with critics and many fans consider it the best in the series. Alice Cooper performs three songs for the movie. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)In this seventh outing 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" or "Carrie goes Camping" 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 Part VIII: 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 the last third of the film actually takes place in New York, and the majority of those sequences were filmed in Vancouver. The few brief scenes in Times Square are the only scenes actually filmed in New York. New Line Cinema buys the franchiseIn 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 1993s 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. 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. The road to Freddy vs. JasonThe 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 usually portrayed as. 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 while the series was at a 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." Jason X (2002)This movie begins in the near future. A team of government scientists at the Crystal Lake Research Facility has captured the notorious Jason Voorhees. Their plan is to freeze him in cryogenic suspension; but, as usual, things go horribly wrong, and Jason breaks free. A survivor of Jason's rampage lures him into the cryogenic chamber, but before she can escape, Jason mortally wounds her, and both are frozen in cryogenic suspension. Over 400 years later, on a contaminated, desolate planet Earth that has been abandoned for centuries, archaeologists discover the two frozen ancestors in the "ancient" underground remains of the Crystal Lake Research Facility. The lone survivor of the attack at the research facility centuries ago is unfrozen and revived. First presumed dead, Jason begins doing what he does best - silently stalking the crew, who fight for their lives as their numbers dwindle. Just when they think they have beat him, he becomes more powerful than ever. Freddy vs. Jason (2003)Image:Freddy Vs. Jason movie.jpg Film poster for Freddy vs. Jason (2003) One year 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. In actuality, Jason is being manipulated by Freddy Krueger to spread fear so that he can regain his powers, lost due to a fullscale-coverup that the parents of Elm Street orchestrated to ensure that Freddy was forgotten. But Jason will not stop killing Freddy's "children," and the two finally battle one another, ending the film with a fairly ambiguous image. Future filmsSeveral propositions for a sequel to Freddy vs. Jason have been proposed. Several of these involve additional characters from other horror franchises. The use of Bruce Campbell's Ash Williams character from the Evil Dead franchise had been considered, but this idea was halted when Evil Dead creator and director Sam Raimi decided against it. According to an interview with Englund from March of 2006, New Line Cinema has participated in talks with John Carpenter concerning the use of Michael Myers in a sequel. On February 14, 2006, according to The Hollywood Reporter, director and producer Michael Bay is scheduled to produce a remake of the original Friday the 13th film, produced by his production company Platinum Dunes. No script has been written nor actors cast.[1] According to Variety, the film will be directed by Jonathan Liebesman.[2]
Trivia
Television seriesIn 2003 official reports from Sean Cunningham stated a proposal to develop a television program based on the films[3] created by Geoff Garrett and Dan Farrands[4]. Entitled Crystal Lake Chronicles, the plot of the series would be focused on a new character, a continuing villain that's connected to Jason and a sort of puppet master of the town of Crystal Lake. The central characters would be a cast of young adults dealing with coming of age issues while living in the town. Cunningham has likened it to Smallville and Buffy the Vampire Slayer[5]. Jason Voorhees will have a presence, but only featured occasionally. There also hopes to feature guest appearances from some of the characters of the films.[5] Cunningham would be a producer and stated a desire to direct a few episodes.[4] DVDsParamount released the first eight films of the series on DVD, two at a time, between 1999 and 2002. The only supplement contained on the discs for the first six films was a single trailer. The last two films were "bare bones" discs. Also, the last half of the films (Parts V-VIII) were given new art covers, which many fans felt were inferior to the original one-sheet art. In 2003, news began to circulate of a boxset release of the eight Paramount films, which may have been as much inspired by fan demand as it was by the success of Freddy vs. Jason. When the boxset, titled Friday the 13th - From Crystal Lake to Manhattan, was released in October of 2004, disappointment took hold again as not only were the individual films still the cut versions, but the additional material did not feature much of what fans had hoped to see. While there was appreciation for so much bonus material, the uncut footage was very sparse compared with what is known to exist. Arrow in the Head expressed annoyance that many scenes were played alongside the theatrical versions [6]. New Line Cinema, however, has been very generous with their DVDs. Jason Goes to Hell, for example, carries both the R-rated and unrated director's cut versions in addition to scenes that were filmed for the edited television version. Freddy vs. Jason includes two discs' worth of bonus material. Jason X stands as the slimmest of the three, with only a commentary track, the theatrical trailer and two documentaries. BooksSix of the eleven films have been novelised: Friday the 13th, Part 2, Part 3 (twice by two different authors), Jason Lives, Jason X, and Freddy vs. Jason. It is worth noting that while Jason X was released before Freddy vs. Jason, it was not novelised until 2005, accompanied by a set of books from Black Flame that served as sequels to Jason X. They are The Experiment, Planet of the Beast, and Death Moon. They were released around the same time as four other original books: Church of the Divine Psychopath, Hell Lake, Hate-Kill-Repeat, and The Jason Strain. A fifth book, Carnival of Maniacs, was released in June 2006. Their place within the continuity of the films is not specified, although all of the covers feature Jason as seen in Jason X (pre-UberJason) and appear to be set before the events of the film. Hell Lake is specifically stated as having begun on Friday the 13th in January 2006, and reference is made in Hate-Kill-Repeat to Jason's confrontation with Tina Shepard. Additionally, the conclusion of the novel appears to lead into Jason's "death" at the hands of the FBI at the beginning of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. These are not the first books based on and independent of the continuity of the films. In 1994, Eric Morse wrote four young adult books: Mother's Day, Jason's Curse, The Carnival, and Road Trip. The books did not actually contain Jason himself but instead used Jason's evil life force to possess several people, with his hockey mask being the source of the power. In order of appearance:
Non-fiction:
Comic booksSince New Line Cinema's acquisition of the franchise, several Friday the 13th comic books, featuring Jason, have been published by Topps Comics and, most recently, Avatar Press, and WildStorm. Sources
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