The main part of Part 2 (1981) takes place five years after the first film, with the opening of another camp. The events take place over a couple of days, with no clear indication of which day it is. Part 3 (1982) begins the day that Part 2 ends and spans through the next evening, ending when Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell) seemingly kills Jason in a barn. The fourth film, The Final Chapter (1984), begins the following morning and seems to only take place across a day. Which day? We’re not sure, but even if it’s Friday the 13th, that means Part 2 and Part 3 take place Tuesday the tenth through Thursday the 12th.
And now things really get messy. A New Beginning (1985) jumps ahead another five years to 1989, to find Jason’s killer Tommy Jarvis (played by Corey Feldman in The Final Chapter, now by John Shepherd) in a youth home. The events of the film cover a few days, but we can assume that the main murders—committed by some random ambulance driver named Roy (Dick Wieand), pretending to be Jason—take place on Friday the 13th. The same must be true of the events of Jason Lives! (1986), which occur a year after the previous film, despite the fact that Tommy Jarvis is now played by Thom Mathews.
At the end of Jason Lives!, Tommy and Megan (Jennifer Cooke) trap Jason at the bottom of Crystal Lake. The New Blood (1988) happens seven years later in 1997, when telekinetic Tina Shepard (Lar Park Lincoln) uses her powers to accidentally free Jason, setting him off on a murder rampage. Tina’s powers summon the ghost of her father to drag Jason back to the bottom of the lake. At some point, the anchor from a yacht traveling from Crystal Lake to New York City somehow electrifies Jason’s corpse and brings it back to life. We’re not even sure of the year at this point, but let’s just say it’s 1998, since Jason Takes Manhattan released in 1989.
After the disappointing returns on Jason Takes Manhattan Paramount sold the franchise to New Line Cinema, which means we can finally fix the timeline with a reboot. Right?
New Fridays, Same Problems
Wrong!
New Line Cinema released its first entry in the franchise, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday in 1993—five years before the previous movie takes place. But given that the New Line movies have no overt connections to their predecessors made by Paramount, we could say that Jason Goes to Hell acts as a soft reboot, and that the movie takes place in 1993.
