Despite the title of the popular slasher franchise, Jason Voorhees has only killed exactly thirteen victims in two of the Friday the 13th movies. Released in 1980, the original Friday the 13th was a slasher set at the remote summer camp Camp Crystal Lake. A sleeper hit for director Sean S. Cunningham, the movie took the teen slasher conceit of John Carpenter’s then-recent hit Halloween and added a Giallo-inspired whodunit element to the story. The twist ending of the original introduced the presumed-dead son of the movie’s killer Pamela to the franchise, and in the years that followed, Jason Voorhees would go from being a last-minute jump scare to a horror icon.
As recognizable as A Nightmare On Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger or Halloween’s Michael Myers, Jason has cut a bloody swathe through countless interchangeable teens in Friday the 13th Part 2, Friday the 13th Part 3 - wherein Jason found his iconic hockey mask - and many more sequels. These later Friday the 13th installments also included a face-off against Freddy Krueger, a space-set outing, and eventually a self-serious, edgy remake in the late ‘00s.
2009’s Friday the 13th was a passable reboot for the series that earned mixed reviews but fared better than many slasher re-dos of that era, like the forgettable Sorority Row. Moreover, this Friday the 13th was notable in another regard as, like 1984's The Final Chapter before it, the remake is one of only two Friday the 13th movies wherein Jason actually kills thirteen victims onscreen during the film’s action.
The fourth film - the deceptively titled Final Chapter - and the 2009 remake both have a title-appropriate kill count of thirteen, but like the Halloween movies, the body count of the other sequels varies wildly. Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday sees the title character rack up a whopping 25 kills, easily besting the rest of the series, while Friday the 13th Part 2’s comparatively paltry count of ten victims makes it the lowest number of kills in the series to date. Interestingly, though, this doesn’t mean Part 2 is a less bloody outing, as the film earned the ire of the MPAA for featuring some intensely gruesome deaths. However, even the bloodiest moments of Part 2 paled in comparison to the brutal uncut version of Friday the 13th: The New Blood, which was unfortunately lost after the film was edited down for a sanitized cinema release.
In terms of memorable kills, 2009’s remake has the edge over Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter - but not by a lot. The former boasts a one-two punch of an arrow through the eye and a subsequent motorboat to the head as its goriest kills and includes a trio of impalements on a railroad spike, a deer antler, and a poker. In comparison, The Final Chapter does memorably include Crispin Glover’s Jimmy being stabbed with a corkscrew before he’s finished off with a meat cleaver to the face and Paul receiving a speargun to a bad place to get a speargun. It was a deliberate move on the part of the screenwriters to add thirteen kills to the Friday The 13th remake as a nod to fans, and it will be interesting to see if the eventual next movie - which will be the thirteen overall - sticks to this number.