The Friday the 13th franchise has had numerous changes over the 12 installments in the series but today I want to talk about the first three Fridays and how Jason went from a victim to one of the most famous killers in cinema history.
The original Friday the 13th was released in 1980, the film was basically a Halloween ripoff that turned out to be a surprise hit.
The film centers around camp counselors at Camp Crystal Lake who get killed off one by one until our main counselor, Alice, meets Pamela Voorhees, the woman responsible for the murders, and is killing the camp counselors because her deformed son Jason drowned in the lake in 1957.
After meeting Mrs. Voorhees, Alice tries to escape and ends up killing Pamela via decapitation by a machete.
The first of the Fridays introduced the many mainstays of the franchise, but interestingly enough, it didn’t introduce Jason as a killer; instead, his death was a motive for the killings.
After the hit Friday the 13th became, a sequel was released the following year in 1981.
Friday the 13th part two is notable for introducing a key bit of lore for the franchise, that being that Jason didn’t die in his drowning, or perhaps was resurrected shortly after, and he had been living off the land and locals around the lake and had seen his mother die in 1979 and is now killing people who come around Crystal Lake.
Part two carried a lot over from the original, such as filming locations and the characters Alice Hardy, Crazy Ralph, and Pamela Voorhees, with the former two being killed throughout the film and Pamela already being dead by the end of the first.
Part two marks the first time that Jason is the main killer in the series and is the first of many times Jason would be killed at the end of the movie with him getting a machete in the shoulder/chest by Ginny Fields, a camp counselor in training who, along with her friends, were attacked by Jason.
While Part Two didn’t do as well as the original, it did do well enough for another sequel, and in the following year in 1982, Friday the 13th Part Three (3D) was released, and with it Jason’s design would become a lot more like how we know it today.
Jason now has a bald head, like in the first film, instead of the long, red hair of part two. Jason also changes clothes from overalls and a blue, plaid shirt to gray pants and a green work shirt, and with the burlap sack he wore in part two being gone, Jason gets himself a new mask, a Detroit Red Wings hockey mask.
Part three is also the first film to deviate from the camp counselor roles from the first two films, with it instead being about a group of teenagers visiting a cabin near the lake with our final girl being Chris Higgins.
Chris’ friends are killed off until she has to fight Jason; he chases her for a while but is able to hang him from the barn. After Jason resurrects, he continues to chase Chris until he’s distracted by a victim he tried to kill earlier in the film. With Jason distracted, Chris grabs an axe and hits Jason in the head with it, thus leaving him dead, for now.
Part three was one of the most successful sequels to the original and is highly praised by fans, I think part three, while a tad overrated and sometimes being placed above Jason Lives and The Final Chapter, both films I prefer, does deserve a lot of credit for making Jason’s iconic design, A design that wouldn’t change much until New Blood’s design with more holes and discoloring to the clothes.
