Every Friday The 13th Movie Ending Explained

Any long-running franchise is going to have a few narrative dead ends and bits of discarded continuity, especially if it frequently changes hands between production teams. But as fans, we love trying to make sense out of jumbled series continuity — and with "Friday the 13th," that's not just a labor of love: It's also a lot of fun. So we wanted to look at each entry in the series and talk about how each of the movies ended ... and how the promises implied by those final scenes did and didn't get fulfilled as the franchise went on.

Plus, the "Friday the 13th" movies have a gift for unsettling and memorable endings, and it's time to see those final acts — and even final images — get their due. So let's revisit the spooky, gory, and sometimes goofy adventures of the slasher genre's favorite summer camp killer. It may have been a while since the last entry in the series, but let's be real: "Friday the 13th" will never die.

The ending of "Friday the 13th Part 2" also opts for a final fakeout scare. Just when it seems like Ginny (Amy Steel) and Paul (John Furey) are safe — and even reunited with the movie's adorable dog — Jason crashes into the cabin. But it's really just a psychologically shattered Ginny's imagination: She's actually on her way to the hospital.

The more interesting part of the "Part 2" ending comes with the reveal that Jason has vanished. "The killer isn't really dead" is a pretty standard slasher element, so we want to focus on the fact that Jason seems to have left his mother's severed head behind. In the space of a single movie, he's gone from keeping a shrine to his dead mother to being able to walk away from her completely — maybe because Ginny used his mother's image against him and he almost died because of it. Jason's not getting fooled again. After this, while he'll continue to remember his mother, he won't build any more creepy shrines ... at least not until the 2009 remake.

"Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter" has such a strong ending that "Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers" would effectively redo it just a few years later. Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) disguises himself to look like the young, drowned Jason, taking Jason off guard long enough for Tommy and his sister, Trish (Kimberly Beck), to attack him. But killing Jason doesn't do as much good as you would think. Tommy immediately loses himself to a kind of berserker frenzy, repeatedly chopping away at Jason in a way that clearly disturbs Trish. And when the two siblings are reunited in the hospital, the camera holds on Tommy's expression as they hug. This is a kid who is very much not okay.

To be fair, no one would be, after everything he's been through. But while previous "Friday" movies have alluded to the surviving characters' trauma, "The Final Chapter" goes the extra mile with that last shot of Tommy: It implies that Jason has either possessed Tommy or put him through an experience so harrowing that Tommy himself could become a killer in the future. After all, plenty of classic slasher villains start out with some real suffering or grievance...

The movies would never quite commit to "Tommy as killer," but Tommy would return for two more sequels — and he'd have to deal with the other characters suspecting exactly what the end of "The Final Chapter" suggests.

The "Friday the 13th" franchise had teetered on the verge of turning supernatural before, and with "Jason Lives," it finally takes the leap once and for all. Via a poorly timed stroke of lightning and a fence post to the chest, Tommy Jarvis (Thom Mathews) accidentally resurrects a decomposing Jason — and the end of the movie makes it clear that now that he's back, Jason plans to stick around. He may have been hard to kill in the past, but from now on, it will be almost impossible. Most of the time, the best the other characters can hope for is to temporarily contain him — and "Jason Lives" shows us how it's done. 

Tommy and Megan (Jennifer Cooke) weigh Jason down with chains and a boulder and sink him to the bottom of Crystal Lake. He's still alive down there — we see his eyes move — but he's stuck. He's out of the way, and even though he can no longer really drown, the symmetry of imprisoning him in the lake has its own narrative power. From now on, getting Jason back underwater will serve as one of the new default ways to "kill" him.

In "Jason Takes Manhattan," Rennie (Jensen Daggett) and Sean (Scott Reeves) get an unexpected ally in their fight against graduation-trip-ruiner Jason: the New York City sewer system. Apparently, in the "Friday the 13th" universe, the city floods the sewers with toxic waste every night. We'd suggest that this is generally a bad idea ... unless you have Jason Voorhees in your sewers, in which case: Proceed.

The result is one of Jason's best "deaths" in the franchise, as the sight of all the toxic waste rushing towards him makes him start to physically regress back to his own experience drowning in Crystal Lake. By the time it all washes over him, Rennie and Sean see that he's actually turned back into a drowned child. It lends the scene an unusual amount of pathos for a slasher villain death, reminding us that Jason's story started out as a tragedy. It also carries over the lesson of "The New Blood": If you want to take out Jason, it's helpful to have a mind-boggling amount of force on your side.

In the ongoing debate about whether or not Jason really died as a child, the ending of "Jason Takes Manhattan" is definitely evidence that we can put in the "really died" column. His fatal regression in the sewers makes the most sense if it's taking him back to an early death rather than just a traumatic event.

There are plenty of "Friday the 13th" sequel hooks that the franchise doesn't follow up on, but the wildest one comes along in "Jason X." If new movies had directly followed this up, we would have seen the new cyborg Jason — also known as Uber Jason — rampaging around Earth 2 in the 25th century. And while the idea of Jason getting a new lease on unlife via falling out of space into another planet's lake is a fun one, we're not surprised that the series soon went back to our world and time. "Jason X" is a goofily fun diversion from the rest of the franchise, but it was never likely to set a new pattern.

All of this makes "Jason X" the biggest outlier in the series. From its beginning — featuring Jason being cryogenically frozen — to its Earth 2 ending, the story here is essentially detached from the other movies. Like the eventual remake, it basically sets up an alternate continuity.

The 2009 "Friday the 13th" remake keeps its ending simple. In an homage to the earlier movies, we get one last scare involving Jason grabbing the Final Girl — here, he explodes up through the dock — but we also get a hint as to where the series could have gone from here. By the end of the remake, we may already have an out-and-out supernatural Jason.

To be fair, slasher villains have a gift for coming back from seemingly fatal blows. But there are two reasons we think Jason is officially undead here. For starters, there's an actual delay between him taking a machete to the chest and his body being dumped in the lake — plenty of time for him to die from his wounds. We can't picture him lying there unconscious for hours and then suddenly having the strength to burst through the dock.

But more importantly, the "Friday the 13th" remake tries to keep Jason's personal history pretty straightforward. It offers up a clear chronology — definitively answering, for example, what happened between Jason's childhood and adulthood — and it mostly plays by the rules of the real world. So when it doesn't – when its killer suddenly surges back to life — it seems fair to assume that's because the rules themselves are being broken. If the franchise had gone on from here, we probably would have seen a slightly waterlogged, mildly decomposing Jason who's an unstoppable undead killing machine ... this time with a much clearer origin story.