A "Friday the 13th" Chronology Quiz

Releasing in 1980, the first "Friday the 13th" wasn't mold-breaking or genre-defining by any means; no one really anticipated it having the staying power it did as slasher films, and horror films in general, only really started kicking into high gear during the rest of the 80s. The movie turned out to be very popular, at least in terms of box office earnings. And just like "Halloween" (1978) before it, the original intent (to make it the first in an anthology) fell by the wayside in favour of leveraging a story and a character that would make bank.

The first "Friday the 13th" features the reopening of Camp Crystal Lake, closed since a drowning in the late 1950s shuttered the place. What follows is a massacre in which the new crop of counsellors meet with a series of unfortunate ends, all at the hands of a mysterious killer. At the end of the movie, the last surviving character, Alice, discovers that the killer is actually Mrs. Voorhees, the mother of the drowned child, before she beheads her next to the lake.

Releasing less than a year after the first film, "Friday the 13th Part 2" (1981) picked up only a couple months after the events of its predecessor with a cold open that saw the final fate of Alice, the sole survivor, at the hands of a new killer. When Alice opens her fridge and finds the decapitated head of Mrs. Voorhees waiting for her, she's killed by someone in her apartment and the story moves onward, back to Crystal Lake, several years later.

"Part 2" doesn't reinvent the wheel. Instead, it puts a group of counsellors-in-training into a facility on what used to be Camp Crystal Lake's grounds, only to put them in harm's way when the actual Jason Voorhees proves to have never drowned in the lake. He gets away, in this one, scot-free.

This sequel made about 40% of the original film's box office earnings, but it was enough for the studio to keep going. What this one did do was amp up the violence, creating a killer whose scenes mimicked those being see in horror movies from overseas (particularly Italy). Notably, "Part 2" was nearly given an X-rating.

Turning around the diminishing box office returns of "Part 2", "Friday the 13th Part III" (yes, Roman numerals now) took place almost immediately after the earlier storyline, returning to the shores of Camp Crystal Lake as a group of hapless young people headed out to a cabin getaway only to become the next unwitting victims of serial murderer Jason Voorhees, now new-and-improved because he's donned a hockey mask left behind by one of the victims. The mask would follow into nearly all subsequent films in some way or another.

Releasing in 3D, "Part III" was intended to close out the trilogy but the series' success necessitated a year's break before it was ultimately picked up again, partly because the producers wanted to end the whole thing and avoid bringing it back. They failed.

"Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter", the fourth film in the series, appeared in theatres in 1984 and it was (surprise) not the final chapter, even if producers really wanted it to be. As slasher horror took a downswing in the mid-1980s, it appeared "Friday the 13th" was to be a casualty, especially with "Halloween" also going on hiatus until the 1990s at that point. The catch is that New Line Cinema would see success, also in 1984, with "A Nightmare on Elm Street", keeping people in seats for horror franchises.

"The Final Chapter" featured the return of Jason Voorhees who, awakening in the morgue, wandered back to Crystal Lake, killing all along the route only to be foiled by Corey Feldman, playing the role of a young Tommy Jarvis.

It took eleven months before the next movie came out.

"Friday the 13th: A New Beginning" is unlike the other movies in the series thus far because while it features Jason Voorhees, the movie puts the idea across that Jason is nothing more than the manifestation of trauma in a now-grown-up Tommy Jarvis (formerly played by Corey Feldman, but now played by John Shepherd). Instead, by the end of the movie, it appears that Jarvis is the killer; he dons a hockey mask and everything.

Releasing in 1985, this attempt to bring the story back around wasn't exactly well-received. It made less than the earlier films in the series and was poorly-regarded despite taking its violence to a more grisly extreme. Director Danny Steinmann never made another film after this one, and the plot was somewhat retconned going into movie six. Oh well.

"Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives" is honest in one regard: Jason Voorhees was dead at some point or another, likely at the end of Part IV when Tommy Jarvis kept stabbing him and started a life-long mental health nightmare. This sixth film, releasing in 1986, saw him trying to find closure by first digging up the corpse of Jason Voorhees (note: whoever gave that man a gravestone is crazy) and then by accidentally impaling him with a large, metal rod and having him struck by lightening, basically Frankensteining him to life as some sort of unstoppable, corpse-like killing machine.

The remainder of the film takes place at Camp Forest Green, the former Camp Crystal Lake, where people have reopened the camp. It's the classic "nothing will happen at THIS Jurassic Park" hubris.

Interestingly, it's one of the better-reviewed films of the franchise.

1988's "Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood" seems to do away with any pretence at realism, understanding that Jason Voorhees, by this point, is just there to dispatch people with reckless abandon, brute force, and the occasional silly means (a party horn to the face?). More than this, the film frequently features Jason, once terrified of the water, constantly in and out of the lake. He brings back his hydrophobia in a big way in time for the next film.

In the meantime, while Tommy Jarvis was able to chain Jason to the lakebed in "Jason Lives", it's psychic girl Tina Shepard who brings him back in a surprising outburst of her own making, accidentally resurrecting Jason while the neighbours have their own crazy party at a cabin on the shores of Camp Crystal Lake.

Ultimately, she defeats Jason, bringing him back down into the water, using the resurrected corpse of her own father, who also happened to drown in the same lake a decade earlier. People should really move away.

While certainly the most baffling of the "Friday the 13th" movies, the 1989 film "Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan" is also the most camp. Taking place almost entirely on a cruise ship occupied by a graduating high school class, it follows Jason, awakened by electrical charges from a houseboat, as he grabs hold of a cruise ship, starts murdering all over again, and heads with the terrified passengers all the way to New York City, chasing them through the docks to Times Square and, eventually, the sewers.

Jason is only ever really in anywhere that looks and feels like 1989 New York City when he walks through Times Square for about three minutes, but it hardly matters. It was notably the lowest-grossing and lowest-scored film, by critics, in the whole series.

It would take four years after Jason took Manhattan before he would return for another 'final' (i.e. not final) outing in "Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday", which had Jason returning, in some way, to Crystal Lake only to be caught out by the FBI. You'd think that would spell somewhat of an end for the immortal killer, but it only meant that his spirit was able to possess people, turning them into Jasons of their own. The only way anyone can stop him is with some sort of magic dagger, which makes a world of sense, I guess.

The film, released in 1993, ends with Jason's mask being pulled into Hell by Freddy Krueger's glove - achievable due to New Line's acquisition of the "Friday the 13th" brand at the time. But they wouldn't come around to making "Freddy vs. Jason" until 2003. And before they did, they had to go further.

Not even, really, the 'final frontier', "Jason X", released at long last in 2002, transported Jason from Camp Crystal Lake to a futuristic cryogenic lab and then into the future and into space, resurrecting him as some sort of unstoppable cyborg several centuries into a distant era. If you thought Jason was unstoppable before...he still is. He manages to withstand cryo-freezing and time to wreak havoc on a space ship and then, when he's brought down by a warrior android, he happens to get super-charged by liquid metal, only to continue his rampage.

It's not a particularly good entry in the series, but it's what people got after nearly ten years of waiting after "Jason Goes to Hell". Fortunately, it took only a year and a half before Jason returned in the showdown fans clamoured for, "Freddy vs. Jason", which hit theatres in 2003.