Every Friday The 13th movie ranked from worst to best

Any “good” entry in the Friday The 13th franchise, at a minimum, has to feature inventive gore effects and kills, Jason Voorhees, and horny teens. Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning struggles with all of those elements. It has a copycat Jason, and even worse he’s a completely ordinary dude with no supernatural tendencies. And because the sequel came out during a time when censors were caving to pressure from parents’ groups about violence in horror films, the makers of Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning toned down the red stuff on-screen and chose to replace it with nudity and ill-advised sex scenes between mentally ill patients at a halfway house. Not surprisingly, the original Jason would returnfor the next film, Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.

Jason does, indeed, end up in the Big Apple here, but most of this movie takes place on a boat filled with partying high school seniors bound for New York. Despite the title, the majority of Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was filmed in Vancouver, with only one scene shot in Manhattan’s Times Square. The ending makes zero sense—Jason inexplicably transforms into a little a boy—and the film was the lowest-grossing entry in the franchise to date. Paramount abandoned Friday The 13th as a theatrical franchise after Part VIII’s disappointing performance, selling the rights to New Line Cinema.

In Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Jason is accidentally resurrected (this happens a lot) from his watery grave by Tina Shepard (Jennifer Banko), who has freaky telekinetic powers. Tina and Jason face off in a supernatural showdown that features some impressive makeup effects as we get our first really good look at what that hockey mask is covering up. Screenwriter Daryl Haney pitched a “Jason vs. Carrie” concept for this sequel, and Paramount agreed in attempt to raise the bar for the sagging franchise. After seven installments, Friday The 13th fatigue set in at a time when the fantastical Freddy Krueger and his A Nightmare On Elm Street series dominated the horror box office.

A new studio (New Line) takes over the franchise and misleads us again with that word “Final” in the title. In Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday, Jason is blown up at the beginning of this movie but his soul transfers from person to person until he is reborn in the corpse of his heretofore unheard of sister. When the sequel’s heroes use a magical sword to stab Jason and demons drag him down into Hell, Freddy Krueger’s razored glove comes up through the dirt and pulls down Jason’s hockey mask, too. Fans clamored for the next decade for Freddy and Jason to face off on-screen ... which would eventually happen.

Jason goes to space in Jason X, a ludicrous, futuristic sequel that is also the funniest film in the series. Ignoring the plot details of the previous eight movies, Jason X begins with a group of science students on an expedition with their professor to a long-abandoned poisoned Earth. They stumble across a cryogenically frozen Jason and take him on board their spaceship. When he thaws out, Jason schools the 2455 A.D. crowd 1980s style until he is blown apart by an android and unintentionally resurrected (again!) by the ship’s computer into a pumped-up, metallic Jason 2.0. He eventually is shot into space and crashes like a meteor onto Earth Two which, as luck would have it, seems to also be populated with horny teenagers. Jason X featured the final on-screen performance by Kane Hodder as Jason as well as David Cronenberg in a supporting role.

Friday The 13th Part III is the first Friday movie released theatrically in 3D and it’s also the first time that Jason covers his disfigured mug with the iconic hockey mask, which he takes from one of his teen victims. Jason hunts down Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmel) and her friends in Chris’ family cabin because apparently Chris encountered Jason once in the woods when she was younger and escaped. Chris shortens the reunion by putting an ax into Jason’s head. Friday The 13th Part III—which is available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Blu-ray 3D—was the first 3D movie to get a wide domestic release in theaters.

“He’s back,” sings Alice Cooper in the Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives theme song. Yes, Tommy (Thom Mathews)—who is still obsessing about the psychopath he killed in Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter—digs Jason up and stabs him with a long metal spear that, as luck would have it, doubles as a lightning rod and accidentally resurrects the unstoppable killer. Oops! This sequel, written and directed by Tom McLoughlin, is the first to lean into the potential humor of the series and the first to actually show children at the summer camp. See how they run!

2009’s Friday The 13th is a reimagining of the first four Friday films and introduces a new generation to the Camp Crystal Lake killer who—no joke—seems to be a pissed off pot farmer who is just as upset about copulating teens as his ’80s predecessor. This brutally effective reboot was produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes—the same company that remade The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Friday The 13th 2.0 features Supernatural star Jared Padalecki as a young man searching for his missing sister, whom Jason abducted.

Jason is all grown up in the 1981 sequel Friday The 13th Part 2, in which he tracks down and offs original survivor girl Alice (Adrienne King) in her home. Then it’s back to Crystal Lake where a new group of camp counselors are hooking up. This enrages Jason—an unwitting Reagan-era champion of abstinence and “Just Say No”—and he dons a burlap sack over his misshapen head and quickly carves his way through the teens. He meets his match in Ginny (Amy Steel), who takes advantage of Jason’s low IQ long enough to impersonate his mother and sink a machete into his shoulder. Friday The 13th Part 2 is notable for being the first movie in the franchise where Jason is the killer and for featuring Betsy Palmer reprising her role as Pamela Voorhees in a hallucination sequence.

Long in development and hinted at in Jason Goes To Hell, this popular face-off between Jason and dream demon Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) blended the mythologies of both the Friday The 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street series. When the titular bad boys finally go at each other in the bloody, over-the-top finale, it’s Camp Crystal Lake’s finest who seems to emerge the victor in Freddy Vs. Jason. Directed by Ronny Yu and starring Monica Keena, Kelly Rowland, and Jason Ritter, the 2003 monster mash-up demanded by fans serves as both the 11th film in the Friday The 13th franchise and the eighth film in the A Nightmare On Elm Street series. It is also notable for featuring the final on-screen performance of Englund as Freddy.

Jason Voorhees is not the killer in director Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday The 13th, a fact that got Drew Barrymore in a lot of trouble when quizzed by Ghostface in Scream. Instead, Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), Jason’s mother, is taking revenge on the new counselors reopening Camp Crystal Lake where, years earlier, little Jason drowned while the counselors were smooching. See all six degrees of young Kevin Bacon as one of the hapless and horny counselors before Alice (Adrienne King) beheads Mrs. Voorhees with her own machete, which resurrects Jason from his watery grave. This seminal 1980 slasher, inspired by the success of Halloween, features makeup effects by gore master Tom Savini. The only reason the original Friday The 13th doesn’t top this list is because the final confrontation between Pamela and Alice elicits more giggles than screams. However, a young Jason leaping out of the lake to pull Alice underwater in a dream sequence remains one of the best jump-scares in horror history.

Even though the title straight-up lies, Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter tops this list of the best Friday The 13th movies. Jason might have taken an ax to the head in the previous installment, but he rises again to terrorize a group of friends—including one played by a youthful Crispin Glover—renting a cabin on Crystal Lake. A 12-year-old boy, Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman), who is into making scary masks, dresses up as a young Jason and confuses the big lug long enough to sink a machete deep into Jason’s head. The fourth film in the Friday series still got skewered by critics, who just don’t get the genre, but fans made it so successful that Paramount couldn’t resist taking more stabs at it. Tom Savini, who did makeup effects on the first Friday The 13th, returned for The Final Chapter to finish off Jason, the maniac he helped create. Between 1980 and 1984, Savini’s sick makeup talent improved exponentially, resulting in The Final Chapter featuring some of the most impressive gore effects in the entire series. It’s that aspect, along with some tense chase sequences, and more talented young actors, that make Jason’s not-so-final rampage a cut above the rest.