Archive Photos // Getty Images Has the new Peacock TV prequel Crystal Lake sparked your curiosity about the Friday the 13th films? Fancy a marathon? There are so many movies about infamous fictional slasher Jason Voorhees and/or his mother. He’s been killed and resurrected again and again and again with increasingly ridiculous and supernatural obstacles. If he wasn’t so scary, you might feel sorry for everything he’s been through. To follow along, here’s how to watch the Friday the 13th movies and television shows in order.
The franchise has inspired video games and novels as well as films. Crystal Lake is technically not the first television series. However, I’m not including Friday the 13th: The Series (1987–1990) on this list because it’s not really connected to the movies. There’s nobody named Voorhees. There’s no Crystal Lake. There’s not even a hockey mask. So let’s stick to the canon, no matter what turns it takes!
The original slasher film about a masked man stalking the teenage camp counselors at a formerly abandoned summer camp on Crystal Lake. Friday the 13th was not only one of the first camp horror movies (camp like sleepaway, not camp like “that’s so camp”) but it also established a lot of the genre tropes that movies like Scary Movie and The Cabin in the Woods spoof.
The second movie in the franchise was the first to officially establish Jason Voorhees as the antagonist instead of his mother, Pamela Voorhees, who had more of a role in the first movie. It takes place only a couple of months after the original film and expands the lore of Crystal Lake.
The third film in the franchise was the first to officially introduce Jason’s hockey mask. Isn’t it interesting how this franchise’s iconography rolled out, one by one? Jason also starts this film injured from the events of the previous film. It is a very direct sequel.
Narrator voice: It was not the final chapter.
The fourth film introduces a nemesis for Jason, aka Tommy Jarvis (not to be confused with the Marvel characters Tommy and J.A.R.V.I.S.) played by Corey Feldman. They think Jason is dead at the beginning of this movie and the end of this movie. Guess what?
Same narrator voice: It was not a new beginning. One year later, the franchise returned like nothing even happened. Jason Voorhees is allegedly dead in this one, but Tommy is haunted by his memory and a copycat killer on a spree of his own. Or was it Jason all along? The twists. The turns.
We know he lives! It’s kind of his thing. The sixth film follows Tommy after he, spoiler alert, resurrected Jason Voorhees at the end of the previous film. It happens. This movie also gets explicitly supernatural in a way that the ones before it do not, and the ones after kinda must.
“New Blood” seems like a fun horror take on “The Next Generation” as a sequel titling convention. More of that, please! Sure enough, the new blood in question is a telekinetic girl named Tina who’s not unlike Carrie White . She accidentally frees Jason while learning how to use her powers. Do they square off, or become murdering besties? Only one way to find out...
It only took eight movies for Jason Voorhees to cross the Hudson River. What did he do next? Four years after The Muppets Take Manhattan , Jason arrived to defy death in even more bizarrely impossible ways. While also killing, of course.
“Evil has finally found a home,” reads the tagline for the film that almost ended the franchise a second time. It’s totally bonkers, involving FBI sting operations, cannibalism, bounty hunters, and a magical dagger. They really went out with a bang, and yet...
Nine years later, the franchise returned in what may be the most 2002 movie of all time. Where does Jason Voorhees go after Manhattan and Hell? Outer space and 400 years in the future, of course! Does this make canon sense? Absolutely not. Don’t worry about it.
For some reason, I thought this movie was made last century. The epic crossover event brings Jason down to Earth for a face-off against another ’80s slasher, the A Nightmare on Elm Street killer Freddy Krueger. It technically takes place “before” the events of Jason X . So if you want to watch in true chronological order instead of release order, flip ‘em.
Six years later it was time for a reboot. Don’t worry about where it fits into the already convoluted timeline. It technically takes place in 2008, the same year that Jason was cryogenically frozen in Jason X , but they’re rightfully not getting into all that. This is just a new, modern, lightly non-canon take on the Crystal Lake classic.
The new series is a different kind of reboot: an origin story for Pamela Voorhees and her son Jason. It takes place before the events of the first film. But you don’t really have to watch it first, you know? Choose your own adventure!
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Source: Entertainment
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