Jason Voorhees has killed a lot of people. Some of them had it coming.
The hockey mask-wearing, machete wielding star of the Friday the 13th film series sometimes finds himself on the right side of the scales of justice, even if his methods are gruesome and completely devoid of checks and balances.
In the list below you will find 13 slimy, bullying, creepy or just plain annoying Friday the 13th characters whose violent demises had moviegoers cheering and clapping. We're leaving Jason's mom Mrs. Voorhees and Roy Burns, the actual villains of the original 1980 film and 1985's Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, respectively, off the list since it wasn't Jason that killed them.
Would-Be Arsonist Biker Gang
Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
When a couple of teenagers vacationing at their friends' family ranch head into town for supplies, they are needlessly messed with by three very corny looking bikers. After one of the teenagers accidentally and then intentionally runs over their tormentor's bikes while trying to escape, the gang follows them home and begins to set the family barn on vacation. Unfortunately for them this is all taking place right near Crystal Lake, and Jason has been hiding out in that same barn. He dispatches the trio in a variety of ways that looked a lot better when the movie was originally released in 3D.
With Jason wrongly presumed dead after the events of Part III, his body is lying on a table in the morgue at a local hospital. Instead of working on the corpse, coroner Axel Burns is much more interested in ogling the girls in aerobics videos and smugly hitting on Nurse Morgan, who somehow succumbs to his "charms" for a romantic encounter that is mercifully interrupted when Jason's seemingly lifeless hand falls onto her. Morgan comes to her senses and leaves Burns, who returns to his exercise tapes until Jason comes to life and saws his creepy little head off.
OK this will be a bit controversial. A case can be made that the Sheriff Mike Garris from arguably the best Friday the 13th movie, while undeniably kind of a jerk, was just trying to do his job while repeatedly ignoring the repeated warnings and pleas from the recently institutionalized Tommy Jarvis. After all, Tommy's tale - that he had accidentally re-animated Jason, and that it was the masked killer, not Tommy who was responsible for the town's latest murder spree - was a bit hard to swallow. But if the sheriff had just listened to his own daughter, who insisted she was with Tommy at the time of several of the murders (or at least checked out Tommy's story a bit better) he could have saved several lives, including his own. Instead he realized the truth far too late, but did the honorable thing by taking on the monster bare-handed to buy his daughter time to escape.
There's not a lot of backstory needed here. But if we were trapped in the Winnebago with the chatty, over-caffeinated and very annoying Cort Andrews - and he kept talking while we were trying to listen to Alice Cooper - we would have prayed for Jason to come along even sooner than he does here.
Upon learning that his teenage patient Tina Shepard has powerful telekinetic abilities, Dr. Chris Crews begins experimenting on her, using verbal assaults to try and active and even control her Carrie-like powers. One such session leads directly to the re-animation of our hockey-mask wearing mass murderer Jason. To make things worse, Dr. Crews later shoves Tina's mother between himself and Jason, letting her die in order to buy himself a few more seconds of running, groveling life before Jason catches up to him with a tree saw.
Dr. Crew isn't the only one giving Tina headaches in The New Blood. She's also got to contend with the wealthy and snooty Melissa Paur, whose attempts to seduce Nick Rogers are unwittingly blocked by his crush on Tina. After coercing her friend to dress like a mental patient to mock Tina's time in an asylum, she seduces another man in a failed attempt to make Nick jealous. Fed up with not getting her way, Tina decides to take her ball and go home. But when she opens the door there's a certain man in a mask waiting for her...
After good girl Rennie Wickham accidentally wanders into prom queen Tamara Mason snorting cocaine on a high school boat trip, Mason wrongly accuses her of being a narc, and pushes her overboard, despite knowing Rennie's afraid of the water. Tamara later tries to blackmail her professor by turning up in his room in her underwear and seducing him. He (eventually) pushes her away, but not before the A/V club nerd she recruited has the compromising encounter caught on video. Luckily, shortly thereafter Jason acts as an unwitting agent of justice, stabbing Tamara with a big piece of a broken mirror.
Amazingly, Rennie's night gets even worse after she escapes from the boat where she was being tormented by both Jason and Tamara. Once she reaches land in New York City she's kindapped by a pair of drug addicts who inject her with (guessing heroin?) before one attempts to rape her. In an uncommonly and most likely unintentional heroic moment, Jason turns up and delivers some extremely bloody street violence to the two thugs, allowing Rennie to temporarily evade his pursuit.
News-Planting, Corpse-Stealing TV Reporter Robert Campbell
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
After his body is blown to bits at the start of 1993's Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, our favorite bad guy's still-beating heart (naturally) becomes capable of possessing other bodies, helping his soul take over a new victim whenever it suits his needs. When he leaves, the used-up bodies melt to death like a fast-burning candle. If anyone deserves this fate here it's TV reporter Robert Campbell, who tries to capitalize on Jason's latest rampage by stealing one of his victims bodies from the morgue, to "spice up" the story. After getting all the murderous use he can out of Campbell's body, Jason's heart, which as you probably already assumed has transformed into some kind of demonic infant, bursts out of his neck.
After establishing himself as the kind of teacher who happily trades good grades for sexual favors, the debt-ridden Professor Lowe takes on a role reminiscent of Paul Reiser's Aliens corporate weasel Carter J. Burke, putting the chance for personal profit ahead of the safety of his students by allowing Jason - who has been frozen for over 450 years - to be thawed out on a spaceship. What could go wrong? Lowe finds out pretty quickly in 2001's Jason X, after rather ridiculously attempting to bargain for his life with promises of fame and forture.
After bullying the nerdy Charlie Linderman by forcing him to chug tons of beer against his will at a rave held in a (highly flammable) cornfield, the oafish jock Shack and his unnamed jerk friend find a nice quiet spot to drink grain alcohol and smoke weed. When Jason shows up they are unimpressed, calling him Jethro and asking, "why don't you go find yourself a pig to f---?" The nameless guy gets the involuntary Exorcist head-spinning treatment immediately, and although Shack rather creatively uses the grain alcohol to set Jason on fire, all it buys him is a few seconds and the honor of being the subject of one of the most impressive kills in the franchise's history.
As if killing 20 children as a mortal, then coming back as a ghost to murder countless more in their sleep wasn't enough reason for people to root for Freddy Kreuger's death - and somehow it wasn't, as his jokes and creative murder methods made him a fan favorite for much of the '80s - the razor-gloved madmen seals his own fate by attempting to manipulate Jason Voorhees. Banished to hell, all but forgotten and powerless over the town he usually haunts, Freddy re-animates Jason and sends him to terrorize Springwood, so that he can feed off the city's fear and return to kill again. With a big assist from the movie's hero Lori, Freddy is dragged into the real world, impaled with his own razor glove and then decapitated with Jason's machete.
With a face, haircut and snobby attitude straight out of John Hughes' "rich kid / jerk boyfriend" playbook, Trent Sutton is the perfect secondary bad guy in 2009's Friday the 13th reboot. He's ude to strangers, unwilling to share with his friends, and falsely accuses his girlfriend of cheating on him - when in fact he's the one having sex with her best friend. And of course he refuses to believe the people who know Jason is once again on the loose, slowing down their attempts to save themselves. Jason dispatches him very violently with some unwitting help from a tow truck driver.