Before Friday the 13th became a franchise, the success of the first film was a complete surprise to its producers. Today, it's hard to think of the slasher flick craze of the 1980s and not immediately think of Friday the 13th; from promiscuous teenagers getting attacked with machetes to the hockey-masked Jason Voorhees himself, the franchise is iconic within the genre and helped usher in an entire decade of low-budget, exploitative horror films that still have a massive cult following today.
The original Friday the 13th tells the simple yet engrossing story of a group of camp counselors preparing for a summer of fun at the secluded Camp Crystal Lake, only to be killed off one by one as a mysterious slasher stalks them. In the end, the murderer is revealed to be the deranged Pamela Voorhees, whose son Jason had drowned in the lake decades earlier. By the time Pamela is finally defeated, only one counselor — the resourceful and brave Alice — has survived her rampage.
The film was produced on an incredibly small budget and shot very quickly by director Sean S. Cunningham over the course of only a few weeks. When the film opened to huge box office numbers and became an overnight hit, its success caught Cunningham, Paramount Pictures, and the rest of the movie's production team completely off guard. The reasoning behind their shock was simple: they hadn't made Friday the 13th with the intent of it being a hit, but instead saw it as a way to pass the time before moving onto another hoped-for project.
According to an interview in Esquire, the hit slasher film was intended as filler work. Two years before working on Friday the 13th, Sean S. Cunningham and his filmmaking team had collaborated on a low-budget comedy film called Manny's Orphans. The film was a modest hit at the box office, and Cunningham hoped that its success might allow him and his collaborators to turn the film into a full franchise. However, the wait for approval to begin production on future Manny's Orphans sequels ended up being longer than expected. In order to keep his crew together and stay busy, Cunningham conceived of a quick and easy project that could be filmed with minimal effort: a slasher movie set at a summer camp.
"We were trying to stay employed," Cunningham remembers in the Esquire intereview. "It was really meant, in our minds, as just a filler." In other words, Cunningham produced the first Friday the 13th with no ambition of it being a success, nor any foresight that it could become a franchise of its own. However, the incredible reception the film received changed all of that, and redirected Cunningham's attentions toward a film, a genre, and ultimately a series that he never expected would happen: the Friday The 13th franchise.