Jason movies aren’t supposed to be good. Heck, they weren’t even supposed to be about Jason. Back in the late 1970s, producer Sean S. Cunningham saw the financial success of Halloween and an opportunity to cash in himself. So he took out an ad for a movie called Friday the 13th , riffing on the holiday theme of the John Carpenter film.

Only later did he come up with the idea of a whodunnit, in which a killer begins menacing counselors trying to reopen a camp years after a youth named Jason Voorhees drowned there. As everyone now knows, that killer was Jason’s mother Pamela Voorhees, who wanted to prevent Camp Crystal Lake from over operating again. The shock ending of that film, in which Jason emerges from the water to grab a final girl, was only tacked on because Cunningham wan

See Full Page