The Cherry Hill Chainsaw Massacre

In the climactic confrontation of Friday the 13th Part 3 , Chris Higgins buried an axe in the right side of Jason Voorhees' skull. Following a next-morning chase that's revealed to be nothing more than a nightmare, the final shot of Jason is of his body lying lifelessly in the barn, the axe still protruding from his skull. If this were intended as the final chapter of a trilogy, it would have made for a definitive conclusion. But where would the fun have been in that? Jason, after securing his official wardrobe, in particular the goaltender mask stolen from Shelly Finkelstein, had already established himself as a horror icon, and there's too much money to be gained from the boatloads of teenagers who come flocking to the theater on Friday nights to witness the beheadings, impalements, and eviscerations of their fellow onscreen teenagers. At six future sequels, a crossover with the equally iconic Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, a remake, and now an impending prequel serie...

The ending of Friday the 13th Part 2  is somewhat ambiguous. After driving a machete into the shoulder of her assailant, the undead and pillow-cased Jason Voorhees, final girl Ginny Field escaped the woods of Crystal Lake with her final-boy boyfriend, Paul Holt, by her side. However, after returning to a cabin, a still-alive (and now unmasked) Jason suddenly came crashing through a window and grabbed a screaming Ginny, pulling her out. The following morning, an ambulance carried Ginny to safety on a stretcher, but Paul was nowhere in sight, leaving Ginny to call out his name in panic. Was he killed or already taken to a hospital? His fate is left uncertain.  In continuing the story for a third go-around, two potential drafts were conceived and subsequently dropped: one sounds like it would have been a rip-off of Rick Rosenthal's Halloween 2 , in which Ginny is confined to a psychiatric hospital, and Jason, having naturally recovered from his shoulder injury, tracks her down, s...

In mid-1980, the slasher subgenre was in full swing, and it came equipped with a handful of motifs: each new entry featured a silent serial killer whose identity was shielded by a mask, they wielded a bladed weapon, targeted their victims over the course of a holiday, and did so typically at a party at which an abundance of sexually active, hard-drinking teenagers gathered at once like moths drawn to light. The movie that popularized these tropes, minus the party aspect, was John Carpenter and Debra Hill's Halloween in 1978, in which a 21-year-old mental patient escapes from an asylum to which he was committed at the age of six for the murder of his older sister on Halloween night and returns to his hometown on the 15th anniversary to stalk and murder a group of teenage babysitters. Two years later, writer Victor Miller and director Sean Cunningham adopted the most integral ingredients of Halloween 's critical and commercial success while upping the ante for Friday the 13th vi...