Every Friday The 13th Film Ranked From Worst To Best

By his own admission, producer/director Sean S Cunningham did not go into the original Friday the 13th with especially high expectations. He was but one among literally dozens, if not hundreds of filmmakers rushing to cash in on the slasher movie trend in the wake of John Carpenter's Halloween.

However, Cunningham had the smarts and the means to enlist Tom Savini - a red-hot make-up FX artist off the back of 1979's Dawn of the Dead - to give his film eye-opening, retch-inducing kills that would bother the censors and excite the kids.

The addition of graphic gore, notable by its absence in Halloween, ensured that Friday the 13th really stood apart. This, hand-in-hand with a punchy, pacy approach, delivering kills at regular intervals to keep the audience from losing interest, established the formula that would ensure the franchise's endurance.

Of course, the original Friday the 13th also stands apart insofar as the kills are shot entirely in POV, with the killer's identity remaining a mystery until the final scenes - when it is revealed that Betsy Palmer's Pamela Voorhees, a dowdy-looking middle aged woman and mother of the drowned child Jason, is slaying the new counsellors of Camp Crystal Lake in a psychotic act of revenge.

We can debate whether the gender of the killer is grounds to suggest that Friday the 13th, and the series that followed, is in any sense inherently feminist - but there's no debating that it's a whole lot of fun regardless.