The Friday the 13th movies' timeline doesn't make sense. The 1980 original reveals that Pamela Voorhees is killing camp counselors to avenge her son, who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake years earlier. Yet most of the subsequent sequels depict Jason — who should be dead — avenging her death by killing even more counselors.
In-universe, there is a five-year gap between the original Friday the 13th and Jason Voorhees seemingly dead for good, then each of his revivals occurs less than a day after the last. During this one week, Jason is stabbed in the shoulder with a machete, he's stabbed in the head with an ax, and he has his head hacked to pieces by Tommy Jarvis, but it is only the last of these events that incapacitate him for more than a day.
Why Friday the 13th’s Sequels Are Set So Close Together
The reason that three Friday the 13th movies are set so close together has less to do with creative inspiration and more to do with financial benefit. Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter was able to reuse sets from Friday the 13th Part III for its opening scenes because the sequel took place so soon after its predecessor, allowing producers to make an even bigger profit off the already-cheap series. The Friday the 13th franchise could have just continued in this vein because even though the sequels received terrible reviews, they were massively financially successful and earned back over 10 times their budgets.
Where Friday the 13th’s Timeline Went Wrong
The main reason that the Friday the 13th timeline doesn’t make sense comes down to the rushed production of the movies. While there hasn’t been a new installment in the series for over a decade as of 2022, in the early 1980s, the Friday the 13th franchise cranked out a new outing every year without fail. This pace resulted in some surreal plot holes, like the nonsensical "all just a dream" twist ending of Friday the 13th Part III and, of course, the fact that three of the franchise’s sequels take place over the course of the same week. This trend ended after Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter, but what followed was no less messy.
The aptly titled Friday the 13th: A New Beginning opted not to continue the trend. Instead, this fifth installment jumped ahead several years to focus on Tommy Jarvis, the surviving hero of Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter. The plan was to make Jason less central to the Friday the 13th franchise, but this approach failed to win over critics or general audiences. proved unsuccessful compared to its predecessors, resulting in the next sequel immediately reviving Jason again. By then, the franchise had been through two time jumps, meaning none of the later Friday the 13th movies were crammed as close together as the first three sequels in the franchise chronology.
