While the Friday the 13th movies are infamous for always bringing back their masked villain, Jason Voorhees hasn’t died as many times as viewers might think. One of the most enduringly popular tropes in slasher movies, pioneered by franchises like Halloween and Friday the 13th, is the killer villain who is not quite dead. Although the masked murderer might have been shot repeatedly, stabbed, and, in some cases, even disfigured, unless they’ve been decapitated, a slasher villain always seems to reappear right at the end of the movie to prove that they are still alive and available to appear in a sequel.
While many recent slasher reboots avoid this cliché as the trope is so over-used, the Friday the 13th movies were made during the sub-genres 80s heyday. As such, viewers weren’t tired of seeing the slasher subgenre’s conventions played out repeatedly, so the Friday the 13th sequels could still utilize this infamous twist to keep Jason Voorhees coming back for yet another installment. Since many of the Friday the 13th movies ended with Jason revealing that he wasn’t really dead after all (despite how hard this may have been for viewers to believe), there are only a handful of movies in the series that killed him off for real.
Friday the 13th
The first Friday the 13th movie is also the first movie in the franchise to kill off Jason Voorhees. During a flashback scene narrated by his mother, he is pushed into Crystal Lake as a child, setting the franchise’s events in motion. Since (as Scream’s killer villains Stu and Billy noted) Jason isn’t the killer in the original Friday the 13th, he never appears again in the movie. Instead, his death is the catalyst that leads his mother to kill a pair of camp counselors, resulting in the closure of Camp Crystal Lake. When some young counselors try to reopen the camp decades later, Ms. Voorhees returns to continue killing a new generation of teens.
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
While Jason’s first onscreen appearance occurs in Friday the 13th, he didn't become the recognizable villain of the Friday the 13th series until Friday the 13th Part 2. However, that sequel ends without any confirmation that Jason is dead, as does its follow-up Friday the 13th Part III. It is not until the third sequel in the series, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, that Jason is finally killed off. The villain perishes when he is repeatedly hit in the face with a machete by a crazed young Tommy Wallace, and this death lasts at least one outing. However, he is revived by a conveniently timed bolt of lightning in the appropriately-titled Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives.
Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday
Jason’s most brutal death comes in the campy sequel Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday, which took the goofy self-aware comedy of Jason Lives and cranked it up a notch. In this, the ninth Friday the 13th movie, Jason is blasted to shreds by the FBI after the organization stages a setup to entrap the hulking murderer. After the embarrassing, unintentionally funny Friday the 13th Part VII, Jason Goes To Hell used meta humor to liven up the tired formula of the series. This approach works best in the opening scene, where a helpless teenage girl fleeing from Jason turns out to be a trained FBI agent posing as a camp counselor to act as bait.
Unfortunately, this sense of playful fun doesn’t extend to the rest of the sequel’s story, which goes to some absurd lengths to get Jason up and killing again without technically raising him from the dead. Since Voorhees is profoundly, definitively dead after being blown to pieces by the FBI, Jason Goes To Hell sees his spirit starts possessing people after his death and the sequel becomes a body-hopping horror as a result. This approach deprives viewers of seeing Jason himself for much of the movie, but it does eventually result in a cameo from Nightmare On Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger that sets up the second Jason death in the same sequel.
Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (Again)
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At the end of Jason Goes To Hell, Jason is stabbed through the heart with a Kandarian dagger and then dragged to hell by the arms of unseen demons (and one very recognizable razor-fingered glove). This gag was intended to set up the next outing of the franchise, the long-awaited showdown between Freddy Krueger and Jason. However, messy battles over movie rights resulted in both franchises producing numerous sequels before this crossover happened. Without a fellow slasher villain to face off against, Jason Voorhees instead took the only other option that was left for an over-exposed horror franchise antagonist and jetted off to space where his next two onscreen deaths occurred.
Jason X
In the campy space-set slasher Jason X, Jason spends much of the movie’s runtime cutting a bloody swathe through the crew of a futuristic spaceship. Eventually, he is blown up with a rocket launcher but, although this is a confirmed Jason Voorhees death, it is also the most quickly overridden death in the franchise. Seconds after being blown to bits (again), Jason’s body is restored and improved by cybernetic additions, creating the titular Jason X. A cyborg version of the infamous killer, Jason X adds about twenty minutes to the movie’s runtime before he is once again killed, this time for good.
Jason X (Again)
Jason X’s second death is also currently the canonical end of the Jason Voorhees saga. While Jason Voorhees took on many forms over the franchise, none of the sequels are set after the events of Jason X. Therefore, until the sci-fi horror comedy receives a sequel, it is safe to assume that Jason remains where he was at the end of Jason X, burnt up in the atmosphere while on the way to Earth 2. Jason Voorhees is incinerated on his way through Earth’s atmosphere during the sequel’s closing scene, with only his charred mask making it to the planet. With that, the Friday the 13th villain was finally, permanently, laid to rest (for now.)