After the phenomenal success of Halloween in 1978, a self-confessed “ripoff” was hastily conceived and fast tracked into movie theaters, leading to the May 9, 1980, release of Friday the 13th. Although only bearing a few of the trademarks that would ultimately come to define the movie series – most notably missing from this initial outing was the central slasher villain of Jason Voorhees, along with his now-legendary hockey mask, which would take even longer to materialize – it would establish the foundations for a durable horror property that continues to this day, 45 years later.

Indeed, Friday in 2025 is poised to expand to even further fields under the new unifying banner of Jason Universe, a concerted multi-platform, multimedia initiative that will encompass a newfound (if oft-delayed) prequel television series for NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service, a possible reboot on the big screen, new releases within the realms of gaming and collectibles, and, of course, immersive experiences – which just so happens to include Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando and Hollywood. Overall, it’s been promised that this new slate will redefine the slasher genre itself, fueling the franchise’s growth for the next four-and-a-half decades.

(The 45th anniversary logo was just debuted last month, for the initial film’s big birthday, featuring a newly redesigned mask and original music written by Harry Manfredini, the original composer for most of the films.)

No one, of course, can predict just how this grand future will play out, but we can certainly take stock of where we’ve been – and what’s in store for Jason’s present at Universal Orlando Resort when he returns this fall.

What is the history of Friday the 13th, the movie (and television) series?

In the late 1970s, filmmaker Sean S. Cunningham was running out of money, having scrapped by with industrial films, commercials, softcore porn, and, finally, two wholesome, family-friendly films that were trending at the end of that decade but which completely bombed. Desperate to stay afloat, he pitched doing a direct copycat of John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween, using a title he had stored in the back of his mind and a one-page ad in the industry trade publication Variety, touting the imminent start of production on “the most terrifying film ever made” to, essentially, fish for financing.

The result was the first Friday the 13th, a movie which took place at Camp Crystal Lake, a long-dormant summer camp that was set to reopen for the first time since the late ‘50s, when a pair of tragedies occured: the drowning of a young boy, named Jason, thanks to the negligence of the teenage camp counselors (who were busy engaging in, uh, extracurricular activities), and the subsequent murder of a pair of those supervisors (taken in revenge for the youth’s death). The tragic history, naturally, repeats itself, with the fresh crop of college-aged counselors being stalked and picked off one by one in an effort to keep the campgrounds abandoned – not by the hulking, supernatural figure of a hockey mask-touting slasher, but, rather, by his mother, Pamela Voorhees, a middle-aged and unassuming woman who is still hellbent on her revenge, all these years later.

Paramount Pictures took a chance on the bootstrap production, becoming the first major studio to distribute an independent film in the country, and it paid off in spades for them, thanks chiefly to their decision to give it a wide release and mercilessly market it – a first for the then-still-niche horror genre. Almost literally overnight, a whole swath of imitators flooded movie theaters, and the company, eager to not be outplayed at their own game, demanded a sequel be ready for the following year (Friday the 13th, Part 2, in fact, dropped within twelve months of its predecessor’s debut). This, in turn, unsurprisingly, beget even more cinematic outings, and in order to keep feeding the formula of gory kills and scantily clad teenage victims, the filmmakers elected to create an imposing, larger-than-life villain directly in the mold of Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or, of course, Michael Myers from Halloween: Jason Voorhees, the long-believed-to-be-dead child from the original flick, in grown-up, disfigured form, though it wouldn’t be until Part III that he donned his iconic hockey mask (in Part 2, the suddenly resurrected figure wore a burlap sack over his misshapen face, cutting out just one hole for an eye to peer through).

(One particularly delicious nugget from Friday the 13th’s production is the creators’ own repeated admission over the decades that the “twist” of Jason still being alive makes absolutely no sense. How did he survive all by himself out in a shack in the middle of the woods next to Camp Crystal Lake? How come he never sought out his traumatized mother? Why had no one seen him over the course of 23 years? His papered-over introduction was more than enough for Paramount, however, and it has, obviously, resulted in one of the most recognizable – and long-lived – villains in film history.)

As the years stretched on and the studio’s demand for updated installments never waned, there were repeated attempts by the cast and crew to tinker with the property and keep it fresh: ending the series by killing, once and for all, Jason; introducing a new hockey mask-wearing murderer; moving the setting from the sleepy New Jersey backwoods to downtown Manhattan or, even, outer space, in the far future; crossing the slasher over with another titanic horror figure, Freddy Krueger. All roads eventually and inevitably returned everyone back to page one, with Jason resolutely driving the narrative and gory action, a situation which moved from being metaphorical to literal when the decision was made, in 2009, to reboot the franchise. Even though all the various parties – of which, by this time, there were several, as the cinematic rights to everything from individual characters to the Friday the 13th title itself kept getting ever-more-entangled – were interested in extending this remake into a new series of its own (there was even talk of pushing the IP into the brand-new territory of the found-footage subgenre), it never came to fruition, initially thanks to the economic setbacks of the Great Recession of the late aughts and early teens, and subsequently to constant behind-the-scenes legal wrangling.

The court cases only ended within the last few years, which has allowed the Jason Universe program to gear up – and which has allowed for the brand-new medium of television to enter the storytelling picture. Despite flirting with the possibility of a TV-series extension of the film property starting all the way back in the ‘80s (when, indeed, a show called Friday the 13th: The Series aired, despite its three seasons having nothing to do with its namesake whatsoever [the main producer of the movies, who was one of the driving forces behind the show, thought name recognition far outweighed any narrative considerations]), nothing ever progressed past the pilot stage – until NBCUniversal stepped into the breach, eager to find new, exclusive programming for its relatively new streaming platform, Peacock. Produced in conjunction with famed horror studio A24, Crystal Lake is currently filming after years of delays and other developmental hang-ups of its own (the show was originally announced all the way back in October of 2022). Still, all that’s known of the “expanded prequel” is that Pamela Voorhees will be the lead, with this younger version of the character being described as:

A mother who had given up a singing career to raise a special-needs child and takes a dark turn when she loses her son.

How much of this will color within the lines of the movies’ continuity, allowing certain plot holes to potentially be filled in, and how much will actively retcon that lore remains to be seen – as does a premiere date, though sometime in 2026 seems likely.

What is the history of Friday the 13th at Halloween Horror Nights Orlando?

The history of Friday the 13th at Universal Orlando Resort’s Halloween Horror Nights is almost exactly identical to that of another long-lived and highly influential property, The Exorcist: unofficial appearances at first, in both haunted houses and various shows (primarily the satirical Bill & Ted’s Excellent Halloween Adventure), beginning all the way back in 1992, only the event’s second year. This early stretch essentially culminated in the 2003 haunt All Nite Die-In, which thrust guests into a deserted drive-in theater that showed nothing but slasher flicks; this premise was used as a framing device that then allowed the designers to stitch together a series of scenes that were inspired by four of the biggest franchises in horror, including, of course, Friday and, ironically, Halloween (the other two, in case you were curious, were The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street).

It wasn’t until 2007 that a standalone maze was dedicated exclusively to Friday the 13th, and to mark the occasion, Universal concocted a novel angle that would unify, to one degree or another, all 11 of the initial cinematic entries (the reboot was still two years away) – called Friday the 13th: Camp Blood (a nod to the original title of the original movie), it posited that a new camp, Packanack, had been erected on the site of the original Camp Crystal Lake, and on the titular day, all the rookie counselors would have to undergo a hazing ritual of entering an old barn where a number of the “dusty artifacts” of the infamous events were put on macabre display. This, of course, made for the perfect opportunity for Jason, in various incarnations from his various appearances, to show up and engage in a new round of bloodletting, his favorite pastime. (The haunt’s creators even managed to sneak Pamela, his mother, into the proceedings, just to ensure that every killer from every chapter was represented.)

The only other house to brandish the IP – up until now, of course – similarly employed a fresh take on older source material: although 2015’s Freddy vs. Jason may have shared the same name as the 2003 crossover film, it was an original undertaking, with roughly the first third of the experience devoted to Freddy Krueger, the second to Jason Voorhees (albeit with a quick appearance by each in the other’s portion), and the final section given over to an all-out bout between the two horror legends.
And complementing the haunted house that year was a scare zone that actually served as a sequel to All Nite Die-In from over a decade earlier: dubbed All Nite Die-In: Double Feature, it showed clips from a whole slew of horror classics on a drive-in movie theater’s screen while scareactor versions of the iconic characters roamed the streets. Freddy vs. Jason was featured here, accompanied, of course, by Mr. Voorhees himself (and Mr. Krueger, naturally).

What is Jason Universe at Halloween Horror Nights 2025?

As promised over the past 13 months, the newly launched Jason Universe program is being taken to the domain of haunted houses – officially dubbed Jason Un1v3rse, Universal says only that it will:

Take Halloween Horror Nights guests on a vengeance tour throughout the summer camp to see where it all began, from the creaking floorboards of Jason’s ramshackle cabin to the decaying main lodge and the eerie forest that offers no refuge for his victims. Around every corner, fans will be inundated with infamous killer moments from Jason’s heinous homicidal career as he taunts and stalks his victims who learn too late that the legend is real.

The teaser accompanying today’s announcement features the newly debuted redesign of Jason Voorhees for this new universe, which brandishes an updated hockey mask (with 13 holes) and which was designed with the help of special effects legend Greg Nicotero (who’s helped lend a creative voice to Horror Nights itself over the years, as well). It would seem that all of the slasher’s traditional locales from the past 45 years will similarly get a sprucing-up, which means this new undertaking might be something of a parallel to the recent spate of Universal Monsters mazes that has graced Horror Nights from 2019 up until the present-day – modern reimaginings of the classic horror figures, these new experiences have sometimes adapted previous films and sometimes have told completely original narratives.

In the absence of any substantive details, this comparison might be the best example of what to possibly expect when Jason returns to Universal Studios Florida for the first time in ten years.

Friday the 13th joins Fallout and Five Nights at Freddy’s at Halloween Horror Nights 34, which runs for 48 event nights, from August 29 through November 2.

For even more in-depth historical analysis like this, be sure to check out Horrors Untold, the unofficial, comprehensive guide to HHN Orlando.

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