Despite being generally eviscerated by critics, the original was a surprise hit — it remains influential to this day. This low-budget “Halloween rip-off” grossed nearly $60 million at the box office, helped solidify the slasher genre, and launched an impromptu sequel into immediate production. Friday the 13th Part 2 is mostly forgotten today — and it’s honestly a pretty forgettable movie — but 45 years after its May 1, 1981 debut, the sequel slasher’s greatest legacy is the ways it transformed Jason’s story from a one-off horror hit into one of the greatest franchises in scary-movie history.
Like its predecessor, Friday the 13th Part 2 was not a critic’s pick (recommend reading: Roger Ebert’s delightfully scathing contemporary review), but it would largely define the franchise’s tone going forward. While the original film featured the shocking twist that the killer was actually Pamela Vorhees and not her dead son Jason, Part 2 is emphatically twist-free. Instead, it focuses on wanton violence with a side of mommy issues. Thus, Friday the 13th, as we know it today, was born.
Five years after the events of the original film, Paul Holt has opened a school for camp counselors on the shore of Crystal Lake. After divulging the sordid tale of the killings at Camp Crystal Lake, he assures everyone that the old camp is closed and there is definitely no boogeyman living in the woods waiting to kill them. Well, that’s where Paul has things wrong — it doesn’t take long before counselors are picked off one by one. In the end, Paul and his assistant Ginny must face the burlap-sack-wearing killer alone.
If you’ve seen Randy in Scream listing off the “rules” to surviving a horror film, then you already have a pretty good idea of the tropes at play in Friday the 13th Part 2. Sexual activity leads to slaughter, saying “I’ll be right back” means imminent death, and so on. Randy’s monologue, in turn, reiterates much of the main talking points in the opening chapter of Carol J. Clover’s 1992 Men, Women, and Chainsaws, known for introducing the term “final girl.” In either case, the “rules” directly reference the Friday the 13th films.
Of course, none of those tropes existed back in 1981, and it’s thanks to moves like this one that Wes Craven could riff on them 15 years later in Scream.
It may go without saying that Part 2 is not a sentimental film. The original concludes with a badly decomposed Jason yanking sole survivor Alice down into the depths of Crystal Lake. In Part 2, she is shown to be suffering from terrible PTSD not long after the events of Part 1. With little fanfare, she is then killed by an unseen intruder wielding an ice pick, and that’s all she wrote. With the core cast now completely dead, the movie moves on to its next group of clueless victims.
Part 2 might not tell us anything the original didn’t, but it redirects the lore in some significant ways. First off, we learn that Jason was resurrected after his drowning, and he’s been lurking the grounds of Crystal Lake ever since. We are also introduced to our new “final girl,” Ginny, who is much scrappier and more resourceful than most other characters we’ll meet in the franchise. A jarring sequence late in the film shows her taking on Pamela Vorhees mannerisms to confuse Jason. Her intuitive understanding of the killer’s motives is what establishes him as a lost boy who simply misses his mother. This allows her to outsmart him when it counts.
Though Pamela may have been the original killer, Jason’s unique pathos is ultimately what came to define the franchise. That begins, not with the first film, but its sequel. That, combined with tried-and-true hack-’em-up slasher clichés, ultimately made this often derided horror sequel into a bona fide classic with time. Happy 45th, Friday the 13th Part 2, the years have been kind to you.
