OMG Horror.com

Around these parts, Friday the 13th is akin to a national holiday. As such, OMGHorror has decided to compile a tribute of sorts, a celebratory tip-of-the cap to all of our favorite maniacally mute hockey masked psychopath, Mr. Voorhees (or in the case of the original, Mrs. Voorhees). The following is a film by film retrospective of Jason's most memorably morbid murders. Now that's not to say they are our personal favorites, or even the most repugnantly graphic, these are simply the fatalities that tend to stick out the most when reminiscing over each film days, months, even years later. So happy Friday 13th to all, we hope you enjoy!

Freddy vs. Jason (2003) - In the greatly anticipated and mega box-office smash Freddy vs. Jason, anyone looking for an exorbitant body count was certainly not disappointed. But in our eyes, the cake taker goes to one of Voorhees' early kills (maybe even his first). Upon stalking a suburban house, Jason climbs the stairs to find a helpless half-clad dude on a bed. What does he do? Jason jousts a large machete several times into the kid's back as he lies face down. The blade goes through the mattress with each plunge, so much so that we see the kid's gorily punctured heart drop through the bed onto the ground. Not done however, Jason then grips the bed and abruptly snaps it in half; the kid squeals his life away as his back has just been folded like a lawn chair.

Jason X (2001) - This is an easy one! As Jason extends his reign of terror to the cosmos, it's a delight to see him imagine or reinvent new ways to dispose of mere mortals. Here, in one of the all time best Voorhees' murders, Jason sneaks up on a hot blonde, viciously grabs and pulls her across a space station, finally dumping the poor girl's head into a sink of liquid nitrogen. Her face instantly freezes, and when Jason reemerges the girl's head, he brutally shatters her face on a countertop, her pretty and petrified punum exploding into smithereens. Frozen blood morsels dissipate into a zero gravity atmosphere. Such a cool, original way to die, and it must be said that the acting by Kristi Angus is really what makes the scene so powerful.

Jason Goes to Hell (1993) - Since Jason as we know him barely even shows up in this film, we almost nixed this installment entirely. In a weird body-snatching twist, Voorhees' maleficent spirit gets passed on to each body of the last one murdered. It isn't until the denouement that Mr. Goalie shows up in full, the way we all love him. That being said, there's a decent scene in the beginning where a doctor becomes possessed and for some ungodly reason decides to eat Jason's swollen and blackened heart. He rips it out of his chest (Voorhees on a medical table), and gorges into it like an animalistic Cro-Magnon, blood oozing. Not only does this serve as the impetus behind Jason's reinvigorated death march, it's a pretty graphic piece of horror raunch, although like most on our list, cut severely by the MPAA.

Friday the 13th part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) - While hyper-animated and no doubt humorous, this was a pretty simple choice as well. When Voorhees finally makes his way to The Apple (after two-thirds of the flick set on a cruiser), he wastes no time getting acquainted with the city's gothic architecture. In fact, he finds himself on a rooftop squaring off with a hardened inner-city pugilist with a greasy '89 Gheri curl. After taking more shots to the face and navel than Jenna Jameson; Voorhees demonstrates his brute strength by literally knocking homeboy's block off. That's right, he takes one swing and decapitates the dude, sailing his head-piece adrift into the night wind. The boxer's body folds to the mat; Jason obdurately strolls on about his business.

Friday the 13th part VII: The New Blood (1988) - I don't know how it could get much better than this one. In the most heavily excised incarnation of the series, practically every death scene has been trimmed down or simply been relegated to cut-away, reaction shot violence. But anyone who has seen the sleeping bag fatality will always remember it. When Jason rolls up on an innocent camper who tries to hide in her zipped up sleeping bag, he slowly drags her out of the tent, picks up the bag and savagely slams it against a tree trunk many times over. He tries to chop down the tree Paul Bunyun style with the poor girl's cloaked enfeebled body. Hilarious, disturbing, ingenious, this is actually one of our favorite all time Voorhees' disposals.

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) - Jason Lives is actually a rather underrated Jason flick. In fact, until Jason X, part 6 contained the highest body count (18) that Mr. Mask has offered us in one single outing. This was partly inflated by our next pick, which could have gone to a handful of scenes to be honest. As it is, the triple decapitation scene is good enough to find coveted top spot. Skulking through the woods, Jason happens upon a triumvirate of goofed out paint-ballers in ridiculous goggles. Dropping from a tree branch apparently, Voorhees stuns the trio before loping one smooth swipe of a machete across the necks of all three victims (two male, one female), chopping their precious little heads into the mud. The MPAA made severe cuts, sadly, to see it in all its bloody glory would have made it that much better.

Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985) - Actually, we find this flick offensive and utterly lacking in anything that even remotely resembles a legitimate Voorhees voyage. That being said, we're going back to Jason Lives since it kicks so much ass. After spearing a dude in the gut and tossing him over his shoulder like a rag-doll, Voorhees goes after the dude's lady. She slips and stumbles into a puddle (a slasher film staple), and suddenly Jason lands into the frame, his feet straddling the girl's head, and WHAMMM...Jason lances the spear through the girl's face. We cut to a wide angle, all we see is Jason standing over a murky puddle, the spear erect from the ground as it lays buried in the girl's dome. Air bubbles aplenty nutate!

Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984) - As if we need reasons outside the fact the flick stars a prepubescent Corey Feldman and virginal Crispin Glover to consider this one of the better Fridays. We don't, but the fatalities in this picture are impressive just the same. Quite contentious really, it wasn't that easy to deliberate which in this film should be recognized. In the end though, we figured the primitive pain of a simple face squashing would suffice. When a Jared Leto clone scrubs down in a shower, Voorhees quietly creeps in completely unarmed. Leto boy jokes about soap dropping and soon Jason rips the curtain away, one-handedly squeezes the dude's face against porcelain tile, dots of blood speckle his toes, and when we pan up, Jason has reduced the dude's face into a gory mass of eviscerated pulp, black blood leaking. Gnarly!

Friday the 13th part III: 3-D (1982) - In the aggregate, part three of the Friday series just might have the all around best death scenes. That being said, the most memorable from the flick is quite an easy one to discern. When Voorhees roams the night looking for fresh blood, he gets a little more high-tech than the better part of his knife/axe-wielding escapades. Here, Jason finds himself on a dock, peering over a helpless female victim wading waste deep in Crystal Lake. The girl spots Jason from afar, believes it to be prankster friend Shelly, and before she knows it, Voorhees darts a harpoon right into the girl's eye socket from about 50 feet away. Shot in 3-D, the harpoon jets right at us before gouging the girl's peeper. It's a fun scene, made even better by the way Jason tosses the harpoon gun aside, angrily walking away as if he missed his target.

Friday the 13th part II (1981) - A pre-hockey masked Jason makes his screen debut in this 1981 sequel to the original. In fact, Jason doesn't even rock the hockey mask until part three, here he sports a nasty burlap sack over his face, not unlike the ring leader in The Strangers, but is actually modeled after the killer in a '70s flick called The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Here, Voorhees exhibits perhaps his least amount of clemency in our next memorable murder. When the rains fall and a bunch of councilors separate, Jason wastes little time going right after the most indefensible. What does he do? He viciously hacks a machete horizontally across the face of a wheel-chair bound paraplegic, mercilessly flailing the man backwards down a flight of stairs in the rain. Here's a cripple about to close the deal with some willing broad, and Jason sullies it all with a sadistic, entertaining and ultimately fatal bout of cock-blockage.

Friday the 13th (1980) - Six degrees of Kevin Bacon time! Anyone in the know not, the killer in the original Friday the 13th is Jason's disgruntled mother, Pamela. Now, unless Betsy Palmer (Pamela) is a tranny in real life, there's no way the murder scenes were filmed with a woman's POV because at times the killer has more hair on their knuckles than Alf. Just the same, our next and final salient death sequence actually became impeded by technical difficulties, and all world make-up man Tom Savini had to think on the fly. The result is truly on of the best Friday fatalities, still holding up extremely well today almost thirty years later. The scene? While lying in bed, post-coitus, Kevin Bacon's character is brutally incised with an arrow from under the bed, the tip pierces his nape and carves through his throat, dark blood bubbling over as he chokes his life away.

Be sure to peep the clip below, as it has the greater bulk of the fatalities we just enumerated, with a little extra thrown in. Happy Friday the 13th all, have a safe one!

• << prev
• next >>