I can’t believe that as a youngster, maybe 8 or 9 years old, when I first saw Friday The 13th for the first time I actually thought of it as a scary movie. Watching it again in my 30s, I was so bored and yawning as the killer – Jason’s mommy Pamela – went about killing all the camp counselors. Well the movie franchise is 12 movies long and I recently completed watching all 11 (only 3 of which I had seen since 2000 and remembered the story). The franchise mainly focuses on the fictional character Jason Voorhees, who drowned as a boy at Camp Crystal Lake due to the negligence of the camp staff. The camp is called as cursed and abandoned but decades later it is to be reopened again. Pamela  is determined to ensure that the camp does not reopen after her son Jason (Ari Lehman) drowned in the lake because two staff members who were supposed to be watching him were having sex. So she stalks and murders all the young counselors until only Alice is left. Alice is able to fend her off and is told the truth about Jason; she is able to get a machete and decapitate Pamela.

5 years later in Friday The 13th Part 2 Alice is killed in her apartment by Jason who is still alive and hideously disfigured so he covers his head with a white cloth. He apparently witnessed his mother being killed by Alice. Jason returns to Crystal Lake to guard it from all intruders. Five years later, a group of teenagers arrive at Crystal Lake to set up a new camp, but Jason murders them. The last girl alive, Ginny, runs into a desolate cabin in the woods in which she finds a shrine of sorts with Pamela’s head placed on a table. When Jason catches up to her, Ginny pretends to treat him as his mother, which distracts him long enough for her to slam a machete through Jason?s shoulder. Jason is left for dead as Ginny is taken away in an ambulance.

Friday The 13th Part 3 takes place immediately after; Jason removes the machete and wanders off into a household and kills the couple in them. He then goes to a bigger farm and hides in the barn, killing the young people who have come to spend a weekend at the lake, when they wander into the barn. Taking a hockey mask from a victim to hide his face, Jason leaves the barn to kill the rest of the group. Once again, it is a young woman, the sole survivor who eemingly kills Jason with an axe to his head, but the night?s events drive her into hysteria as the police take her away.

In Friday The 13th Part IV : The Final Chapter Jason’s body is taken to the morgue but he is still alive and kills the staff there before returning to Crystal Lake. A group of friends partying at a rented house becomes his latest victims. After going through a rampage he then turns his attention to the kids in the house next door, Trish and her young brother Tommy Jarvis. Having read articles about Jason, young Tommy shaves his head bald to look like Jason distracting him and kills him with a large knife.  As he embraces his sister, Tommy sees Jason’s fingers begin to move, loses control and begins hacking Jason repeatedly with the machete, while Trish screams his name. Tommy becomes disturbed and is later committed to an institute.

In Friday the 13th Part V : A New Beginning a grown up Tommy, who has always feared that Jason would one day return, is transferred to halfway home in the countryside. He begins to see Jason everywhere popping in here and there. As people in the woods are soon killed, it is feared that either Jason has indeed returned or that Tommy has taken his obsession to the next level and started imitating him. However it turn out that a man named Roy Burns used Jason’s persona to become a copycat killer. Tommy, supervisor Pam and a young boy named Reggie manage to defeat Roy. They eventually learn that Roy had a son who was murdered by one of the patients at the institution, triggering Roy to take on Jason’s likeness and kill everyone there. But at the end of the movie Tommy does wear Jason’s mask and is last seen standing behind Pam with a knife when she comes to visit him at the hospital.

The movie would later be considered retcon as it flopped and the makers felt that they needed Jason as the killer. And the franchise, as does Jason, takes on a supernatural element to it. So in Friday The 13h Part VI : Jason Lives Tommy goes to Jason’s grave one night along with a friend. Jason having been dead & buried for a many years, after Tommy killed him; but Tommy wants to cremate his remains. After digging up his grave and opening up the coffin to reveal a decaying corpse, in a bit of anger Tommy uses a metal rod to spear the body. A lightning storm just happens to be occurring on that night and Jason gets resurrected when a lightning bolt hits the rod. Jason kills the friend and Tommy escapes and tries to warn the local sheriff who locks him up on knowing  his history. Jason goes back to the camp and starts killing the new counselors one by one. With the help of Megan, a counselor, Tommy eventually chains Jason to a boulder that he tosses into the lake, where he leaves Jason to die.

In Friday The 13th Part VII : The New Blood Tina a 10 year old with telekinetic powers accidentally causes her father to drown when she angrily uses her powers on the pier where he father was standing. After a while, Tina a now troubled young woman resurrects Jason inadvertently when she tries to raise her father who drowned in the same crystal lake. Jason comes out again and yet again finds some horny teenagers who are partying in a house near to the lake. He starts killing them one by one until only Tina and a boy she likes Nick remains. Although they blow up Jason in the house, he still follows them out to lake. Using her powers, Tina finally resurrects her father (who looks none the worse for being dead and in a lake for all these years) who wraps Jason’s chains around him and pulls the killer back into the lake before Tina passes out.

Jason is resurrected again in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan when an electric underwater cable breaks and he comes out to immediately kill a couple in a boat and takes up a new hockey mask he finds in the boat. Jason then sneaks into a big boat carrying a bunch of high school students headed for New York City. He ofcourse starts offing the students in the boat until the few remaining blow up the boat. Thinking that Jason is dead they go into the city but Jason comes out of the water and stalks them. The two remaining survivors, Rennie and Sean, go into the sewers and finally attack Jason with toxic waste, much of his body melting as a result. After an ensuing flooding of the sewer that Rennie and Sean manage to avoid, all that is left of Jason is a young boy lying at the bottom of the sewer with a hockey mask on his face. How this is possible – no clue but as the two leave Jason’s mask floats in the sewer water ominously.

In Friday The 13th Part 9 : Jason Goes To Hell,  through an unexplained resurrection Jason is still alive, and is hunted by the FBI at Crystal Lake. He is blown to bits by the Feds with only his black heart remaining and taken to a morgue. In one of the most ridiculous plot lines ever, a coroner is hypnotized by Jason’s still beating heart and begins to eat it, causing himself to be possessed by the spirit of Jason. The coroner starts killing people and goes to Crystal Lake. We learn that only members of Jason’s bloodline can truly kill him and he will return to his old form if he is reborn possessing a member of his family. The only living relatives of Jason are his half-sister Diana Kimble, her daughter Jessica, and Stephanie, the infant daughter of Jessica. Jason’s heart, which grows into a snake-like creature towards the end and crawls into Diana’s dead body. Jason explodes through the floor in his classic form. As Jason prepares to kill Steven Jessica stabs him in the chest, releasing the tortured souls of Jason’s victims as large hands burst out of the ground and pull Jason into Hell. His mask is later pulled into hell by Freddy Krueger’s hands and we hear Freddy laughing as the movie ends.

Now Freddy vs Jason was supposed to come out next but got shelved for a while, so Jason X comes out. Unexplained as to how, Jason is back with us and is captured by the law. A scientist, Rowan Lafontaine, decides that cryonic suspension is the only method of stopping him, but Jason breaks free and kills the army personnel guarding him before he can be again imprisoned. Rowan lures him in and she traps him in a chamber but he ruptures the tank and freezes both himself and Rowan. 400 years pass and humanity has left Earth, which is now in ruins and now live on Earth 2, another planet in another solar system. A group of students with their professor arrive on Earth on a field trip and discover Rowan & Jason?s body and take it into space. Once his body is thawed, Jasn starts killing the people in the ship. He is seemingly killed, but is then resurrected via nanotechnology as a cyborg version of himself. As 3 of the remaining personnel, including Rowan, make their way to an escape pod, Jason is ejected into space and his body disintegrates as it approaches the atmosphere of Earth 2. His mask falls into a lake.

And now Freddy vs Jason, which is supposed to follow the 9th movie. A weakened Freddy realizes that he needs Jason to strike fear into the hearts of the residences of Spingwood have managed to forget him and he is no longer effective. So he resurrects and manipulates him into traveling to Springwood to cause panic and fear. However, while Jason succeeds in causing enough fear for Freddy to haunt the town again, he continues to intrude on Freddy’s territory and steal his potential victims. This ultimately sends the two monsters into a violent conflict. As a group of kids are killed, the remaining two survivors Lori and Will burn the gas tanks at the docks to blow both Freddy and Jason up. Lori picks up a machete and beheads an injred Freddy and throws the machete into the lake as a seemingly dead Jason sinks. However much later Jason rises from the water, carrying his machete and Freddy’s severed head, which smirks and winks before laughing maniacally at the audience, leaving the winner ambiguous.

Ah, thus ends a movie journey of 11 films of the Friday the 13th franchise. Ofcourse Michael Bay rebooted the franchise in 2009 with his version of Friday The 13th – which is actually better than most in the original series of movies (yeah surprisingly). Last I read a sequel to the reboot has been written but no there are no dates on when the movie is to be released.