Friday The 13th: The 10 Most Shocking Plot Twists In The Franchise

For many horror fans and movie buffs, the Friday The 13th franchise has epitomized the slasher genre with bloody kills, horny teens, and surprising reveals. Many fans anxiously wait for the return of Jason Voorhees to the big screen (sooner rather than later now that the rights to the Friday franchise have been settled), so they can see the hockey-masked and machete-wielding killer back in action.

The franchise has had more than its fair share of shocking twists and storyline curveballs that are worth revisiting while fans bide their time until the return of Jason.

10 Pamela Voorhees is the original killer – Friday The 13th (1980)

While the original Friday The 13th film started the Jason Voorhees slasher storyline, most of the film shows the kills from an unknown first-person perspective. The end reveals the killer as Jason’s mother Pamela Voorhees, avenging the drowning “death” of her son. Being the first film in the franchise, the expectations of Jason as the iconic killer were not established yet, but that didn’t make the reveal of a supposedly sweet old lady as the killer any less surprising, mostly due to the fact that the audience only meets Pamela and learns her story and motivation mere minutes before she is revealed as the killer, and fights final girl Alice.

9 Lake jump scare – Friday The 13th (1980)

In what soon became a trope for the franchise, the original Friday The 13th film ends with a completely unexpected jump scare. When final girl Alice Hardy wakes up in a boat on Crystal Lake, she is suddenly pulled into the water by the supposedly dead boy, Jason Voorhees, before revealing it was just a dream. The jump scare completely caught first-time viewers off guard, and probably scared more than a few from ever canoeing in lakes again. This jump scare/dream sequence ending would be reused in plenty of the following Friday The 13th films, to the point where audiences expected it. However, by Friday The 13th: The New Blood, the trope had been overplayed and while they filmed the iconic lake jump scare for The New Blood, they wisely decided not to use it.

8 Alice Hardy’s death – Friday The 13th: Part II

A unique aspect of the first few Friday The 13th films is that they each pick up almost exactly where the previous film left off. In the first few minutes of Friday The 13th: Part II, we see the original final girl Alice Hardy struggling to cope after her recent trauma, before she is brutally killed with an ice pick by Jason. For many viewers either expecting a continuation of Alice’s story or believing in the near-invulnerability of horror movie final girls, her sudden and brutal death was a shocking start to the second film that dashed their hopes. Alice’s death also marked the first kill that Jason Voorhees himself commits in the franchise, although we do not learn it’s him until later in the film.

7 Jason getting his mask – Friday The 13th: Part III

While this is an established fact for most diehard fans, it might surprise most viewers that Jason Voorhees doesn’t actually acquire his iconic hockey mask until Friday The 13th: Part III, after killing a camper who was wearing it. While this twist wouldn’t exactly shock anyone who was watching Part III when it came out in 1982, a new viewer who is aware of the character might be surprised to find Jason as an unmasked killer until this entry into the franchise. For longtime fans, the bigger shock might be that the mask used was actually a replica of a real hockey goalie mask for the 1970 Detroit Red Wings.

6 Rob the hitchhiker is hunting Jason – Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter

Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter introduces fans to a minor character, Rob, a hitchhiker who is picked up by the Jarvis family. He says and does some suspicious things, but it’s a red herring, as Rob reveals his sister Sandra was one of the counselors killed in Part II, and he’s seeking revenge.

For viewers who had seen the first film, they might have expected another attempt at a Friday film that didn’t have Jason as the killer, but they would be even more surprised to learn that the assumed killer was actually just some guy trying to get revenge one of the scariest slasher/killers in modern pop culture.

5 Jason is killed – Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter

As its namesake suggests, Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter was intended to wrap up the franchise. While this was never likely to fully transpire, the finale of the film did see the main antagonist Jason actually die after Tommy Jarvis kills him with his own machete. To see such an iconic character “perish” might have surprised some viewers, as the popularity and value of the franchise was obvious at this point, but as we find out in later films, this is not the last time we will see Jason Voorhees (nor is it the last time he “dies”).

4 Jason wasn’t the killer – Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

When viewers went to go see Friday the 13th: A New Beginning in 1985, most now had the expectation of seeing the franchise poster boy Jason, even when the previous film ended with his death. But while the killer wears a hockey mask, uses Jason’s iconic weapon, and kills just about everyone in the film, the only appearance Jason makes in A New Beginning is in the hallucinations of Tommy Jarvis. The reveal of Roy Burns the paramedic as the actual killer might have disappointed some fans, but it definitely surprised most, even when the original movie notoriously didn’t have Jason as the killer either.

3 Jason resurrects as a superhuman – Friday the 13th: Jason Lives

It probably came as no surprise to viewers that Jason Voorhees came back to life in the film titled, Friday the 13th: Jason Lives. But when Jason comes back to life, he’s clearly changed. What was once a relentless and brutal killer, yet human, Jason now resurrects as more of an action-star superhuman, taking shotgun blasts, getting burned and drowned, and getting struck with a boat propeller.

This shift into an unstoppable zombie surprised longtime fans who were used to the slower, hulking, human Jason, a shift that likely also had to do with the change in the stuntmen playing Jason, moving from the older Ted White to the younger and more fit C.J. Graham, and eventually Kane Hodder.

2 Tina Shepard’s father returns – Friday The 13th: The New Blood

The New Blood, one of the more underrated films in the franchise, introduces Tina Shepard, the final girl with telekinetic powers who becomes one of Jason’s more worthy opponents. In the final showdown between Tina and Jason, she uses her telekinetic powers to briefly resurrect her deceased father, who leaps up through the dock to grab Jason and drag him back to the depths. The shock return of a nearly-forgotten and unpleasant side character was probably the last thing that viewers expected to take down Jason and save the day, and viewers were probably even more surprised to see Tina’s father looking relatively unchanged after being dead and underwater for years.

1 Jason is killed (again), this time by the FBI – Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday

By the time Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday came out in 1993, the franchise had lost a bit of its luster, and its financial pull. The convoluted storyline and attempts at experimentation had been hit-or-miss, so when The Final Friday began with Jason chasing after a scantily-clad woman back at Crystal Lake, many fans thought the franchise had gone back to it’s roots. However, viewers were in for a surprise when it’s revealed that the woman he is chasing is actually an undercover FBI agent luring him into a trap of SWAT gunfire and explosions. With all of his mass killings, Jason had surprisingly not yet been pursued by the larger governmental authorities, so it was definitely shocking (and maybe satisfying) for viewers to see Jason get his comeuppance through a full-scale coordinated military assault on the nearly-superhuman killer.

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