7 Friday The 13th Sequels That Almost Happened
2. Friday The 13th The Anthology Series
Although Jason and his hockey mask are very much the face of Friday the 13th, he wasn't the killer in the original film, as fans of the series will be well aware.
That responsibility fell to his mother Pamela Voorhees, with Jason only entering the family business from Part II onward, but that wasn't the original plan.
Friday the 13th's twist ending, in which a young zombie Jason attacks Alice on the lake, was supposed to be a dream sequence merely designed to riff on Carrie and give the audience a cheap scare. It was never intended to be a sequel setup.
The premise of the original film had Jason well and truly dead, and when the studio ordered a sequel after it proved a surprise box office hit, the vision was to set Friday the 13th up as an anthology series of horror films, telling a different story each time.
External pressure from the uncredited East Coast financial backers of the franchise, headed by Phil Scuderi, was the driving force behind Jason becoming the series' killer in Part II, and it's a move that certainly paid off in box office bucks.
If you want to know how a Jason-free Friday the 13th Part II would have turned out, take a look at the Michael Myers-less Halloween III, a black sheep in the series which forced the studio to swiftly return to basics.