Every Friday The 13th movie ranked from worst to best

“He’s back,” sings Alice Cooper in the theme song. Yes, Tommy (Thom Mathews)—who is still obsessing about the psychopath he killed in Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter—digs Jason up and stabs him with a long metal spear that, as luck would have it, doubles as a lightning rod and accidentally resurrects the unstoppable killer. Oops! This sequel, written and directed by Tom McLoughlin, is the first to lean into the potential humor of the series and the first to actually show children at the summer camp. See how they run!

2009’s is a reimagining of the first four Friday films and introduces a new generation to the Camp Crystal Lake killer who—no joke—seems to be a pissed off pot farmer who is just as upset about copulating teens as his ’80s predecessor. This brutally effective reboot was produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes—the same company that remade The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Friday The 13th 2.0 features Supernatural star Jared Padalecki as a young man searching for his missing sister, whom Jason abducted.

Jason is all grown up in the 1981 sequel in which he tracks down and offs original survivor girl Alice (Adrienne King) in her home. Then it’s back to Crystal Lake where a new group of camp counselors are hooking up. This enrages Jason—an unwitting Reagan-era champion of abstinence and “Just Say No”—and he dons a burlap sack over his misshapen head and quickly carves his way through the teens. He meets his match in Ginny (Amy Steel), who takes advantage of Jason’s low IQ long enough to impersonate his mother and sink a machete into his shoulder. Friday The 13th Part 2 is notable for being the first movie in the franchise where Jason is the killer and for featuring Betsy Palmer reprising her role as Pamela Voorhees in a hallucination sequence.

Long in development and hinted at in Jason Goes To Hell, this popular face-off between Jason and dream demon Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) blended the mythologies of both the Friday The 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street series. When the titular bad boys finally go at each other in the bloody, over-the-top finale, it’s Camp Crystal Lake’s finest who seems to emerge the victor in . Directed by Ronny Yu and starring Monica Keena, Kelly Rowland, and Jason Ritter, the 2003 monster mash-up demanded by fans serves as both the 11th film in the Friday The 13th franchise and the eighth film in the A Nightmare On Elm Street series. It is also notable for featuring the final on-screen performance of Englund as Freddy.

Jason Voorhees is not the killer in director Sean S. Cunningham’s , a fact that got Drew Barrymore in a lot of trouble when quizzed by Ghostface in Scream. Instead, Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), Jason’s mother, is taking revenge on the new counselors reopening Camp Crystal Lake where, years earlier, little Jason drowned while the counselors were smooching. See all six degrees of young Kevin Bacon as one of the hapless and horny counselors before Alice (Adrienne King) beheads Mrs. Voorhees with her own machete, which resurrects Jason from his watery grave. This seminal 1980 slasher, inspired by the success of Halloween, features makeup effects by gore master Tom Savini. The only reason the original Friday The 13th doesn’t top this list is because the final confrontation between Pamela and Alice elicits more giggles than screams. However, a young Jason leaping out of the lake to pull Alice underwater in a dream sequence remains one of the best jump-scares in horror history.

Even though the title straight-up lies, tops this list of the best Friday The 13th movies. Jason might have taken an ax to the head in the previous installment, but he rises again to terrorize a group of friends—including one played by a youthful Crispin Glover—renting a cabin on Crystal Lake. A 12-year-old boy, Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman), who is into making scary masks, dresses up as a young Jason and confuses the big lug long enough to sink a machete deep into Jason’s head. The fourth film in the Friday series still got skewered by critics, who just don’t get the genre, but fans made it so successful that Paramount couldn’t resist taking more stabs at it. Tom Savini, who did makeup effects on the first Friday The 13th, returned for The Final Chapter to finish off Jason, the maniac he helped create. Between 1980 and 1984, Savini’s sick makeup talent improved exponentially, resulting in The Final Chapter featuring some of the most impressive gore effects in the entire series. It’s that aspect, along with some tense chase sequences, and more talented young actors, that make Jason’s not-so-final rampage a cut above the rest.