Friday The 13th: Every Character Who Survived Jason Voorhees

Jason Voorhees racked up an enormous body count over the course of his long cinematic career, but there were Friday the 13th survivors that show he isn’t as powerful as he might think. When it comes to killing, Jason is definitely in the upper echelons of the horror genre, a truly formidable practitioner of the murdering arts. Spurred on by his mother’s death via decapitation, Jason is happy to make use of any conceivable object that might happen to be around when he encounters prey, most famously wielding a machete. Jason takes his job seriously, and no one who comes near Camp Crystal Lake is ever really safe.

Despite being a hulking beast, Jason is extremely sneaky, often popping up with stabbing implements in hand with absolutely no warning. This only gets more pronounced after he is resurrected as a zombie, leading to situations where the only realistic explanation is that Jason can teleport. Still, not everyone falls to Jason’s assault. In almost every Friday the 13th entry, at least one character survives, living to pass along the Jason legend. Of course, if a character survives one film but comes back to die in the next, they no longer count as Friday the 13th survivors, like Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) or Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney).

Ginny Field

Friday The 13th Part 2

…one of the best Final Girls in the entire franchise.

The first Friday the 13th movie didn’t include Jason Voorhees. While the first movie in the long-running horror franchise begins the legend of Jason, the real villain of the movie is his mother instead. He doesn’t become the villain of the franchise until the second movie. That means the first Final Girl to survive an actual Jason attack is Ginny Field in Friday the 13th Part 2.

She not only survived Jason’s attack, but she is one of the best Final Girls in the entire franchise. She is strong, independent, and doesn’t need any guy to save her. When Jason starts killing, she and her boyfriend Paul are the last two alive at the campgrounds, and Jason finally gets his hands on her. She gets in one more great moment, where she gets Jason to kneel before her by pretending to be his mother and then slices him with a machete.

Paul Holt

Friday The 13th Part 2

There are a handful of characters in the horror franchise whose fates are never made clear because they don’t appear back on screen or because they are severely injured, but never confirmed to die. The fate of Paul Holt remains ambiguous in the Friday the 13th series. He was never shown at the end, and it could be assumed that Jason killed him off-screen.

However, with most of the movies in the franchise, all of Jason’s kills are on-screen, so the fact no one saw Paul die means he likely lived. The movie saw Paul and Ginny running for safety, but Jason showed up and grabbed her. In the book, Crystal Lake Memories, screenwriter Ron Kurz said he wanted to imply Paul died off-screen, but since it was never shown or revealed in the movie, his death never actually happened.

Ted Bowen

Friday The 13th Part 2

Sometimes, in horror movies, a person is just lucky. Some characters are there solely to be comedic relief or to flesh out another character’s story. For those characters, they often end up outside of the main action. In the case of Ted Bowen from Friday the 13th Part 2, he was one of the unlikely survivors of Jason’s rampage.

Ted was mostly the comic relief from the movie, but he never met the end of an axe, knife, or any other weapon Jason was killing with. That is because Ted was able to leave before the massacre started. Paul, Ted, and Ginny go to a bar before the kids arrive the next day, and Ted chooses to stay there. Ginny and Paul go back and end up fighting Jason, while Ted is safe and sound at the bar having the time of his life.

Chris Higgins

Friday The 13th Part 3

Some of the movies in the franchise are so violent that there is not more than one survivor in the story. Friday the 13th Part 3‘s sole survivor is Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell), who fans actually would’ve seen get decapitated in the film’s originally shot ending, according to the book, Crystal Lake Memories. However, Chris not only was a Friday the 13th survivor, but she survived Jason’s attacks two different times in the same movie – the only person in the franchise (so far) to do so.

She survived him as a teenager and then returned to Crystal Lake two years later to confront her fears. When he attacked her as a teen, she was able to escape and run away. The second time, she actually threw an axe at Jason, blasting him in the head, and becoming the Final Girl here.

Tommy Jarvis

Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter & Friday The 13th: Jason Lives

Tommy Jarvis becomes a main character for a few of the Friday the 13th movies. He is the only person to survive two different movies against Jason Voorhees.

In the first movie, Tommy was a young boy played by Corey Feldman. Jason returned from the last movie and started killing again, with only Tommy and his sister Trish as the last two survivors. While he was only a child, Tommy delivered a killing blow to Jason and then started hacking at him over and over to make sure he was dead.

Tommy was back in Jason Lives as an adult and went to dig up Jason and cremate him. However, a lightning strike brought Jason back from the dead, which Tommy was in a position to stop Jason yet again. Tommy was able to send Jason to the bottom of Crystal Lake to survive again.

Trish Jarvis

Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter

Tommy Jarvis wasn’t alone in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter as a survivor. Jason was killing everyone there and his last two targets were Trish and her younger brother Tommy. The Jarvis family lived in a home near Camp Crystal Lake. When Jason went on a killing spree as he expanded his target area beyond the summer camp destination, his paths crossed with theirs. Jason killed their mother at their isolated home while Tommy and Trish were in town. It wasn’t until they returned and couldn’t find her that they realized something was wrong.

However, both of them lived as Tommy was able to kill Jason before he could hurt him or his sister. While Tommy was back in the next two movies (the fourth was a copycat killer and not Jason), this was Trish’s only appearance, and she didn’t have to deal with Jason again.

Megan Garris

Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

She was one of the most proactive Final Girls in the franchise.

Though Tommy’s sister might not appear in the movies again, there are other characters connected to him since he appears in two more movies. Tommy’s love interest Megan Garris (Jennifer Cooke) also avoids Jason’s wrath because she eagerly fights back. While Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives was the last part of the Tommy Jarvis trilogy, the real Final Girl here was Megan Garris, who gave Jason all he could handle.

With Tommy bringing Jason back from the dead, albeit accidentally, it puts him and Megan in danger. While Tommy sends Jason to the bottom of Crystal Lake, he almost drowns, and it is Megan who saves him. When Jason tries one last attack, Megan uses the boat propeller to end that threat. She was one of the most proactive Final Girls in the franchise.

Tina Shepard

Friday The 13th Part 7: The New Blood

Psychic teenager Tina (Lar Park Lincoln) and her love interest Nick (Kevin Blair) are the only survivors of Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood. It’s here that the franchise truly takes a turn from teen slasher to a more supernatural horror. It’s true that most of the villains in slasher flicks are considered unkillable, but they don’t usually go for a true supernatural twist.

This movie did something no other movie in the franchise had attempted to this point. It added a supernatural Final Girl to battle the now-supernatural Jason Voorhees. By this time, Jason was mostly a zombie while Tina Shepard had telekinetic powers. While these powers accidentally freed Jason from his lake grave, they also helped her fight him when he attacked. She tore off his jockey mask, launched nails into his face and chest, lit him on fire, and sent him into an explosion.

Nick Rogers

Friday The 13th Part 7: The New Blood

One thing that the Friday the 13th franchise does differently from other horror movies is that the Final Girls often save the men in the movies. An often maligned horror trope is that the boyfriends (or simply potential love interest) of the Final Girls are the ones who defeat the villain or sacrifice themselves so that the girl can continue on. That’s not the case here.

Megan saved Tommy Jarvis, and in The New Blood, Tina Shepard saves her boyfriend Nick Rogers. At the end of this movie, Jason has knocked out Nick, but before he can kill him, Tina goes on the attack. She saves her boyfriend and the two are loaded into an ambulance together and taken away from the massacre, making for another instance of two Friday the 13th survivors in the movie.

Rennie Wickham

Friday The 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan

Most of the events in the movie franchise take place at Camp Crystal Lake or in the homes near the summer camp location. Crystal Lake has become an iconic horror movie locale. While Friday the 13th shook things up in Jason Takes Manhattan by moving things from Crystal Lake to New York City, Rennie Wickham had Crystal Lake connections.

Rennie almost drowned at Crystal Lake when she was 13. She was only one of two survivors when Jason started stalking all the kids on a trip with their graduating class in Manhattan. Once again, it was the Final Girl who fought and beat Jason. In this case, Rennie lured Jason into the New York sewers and threw a vat of toxic waste into his face, melting his skin off the bones and then escaping as Jason was swept away in a sea of toxic waste.

Sean Robertson

Friday The 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan

Much like Nick in the last movie, Sean Robertson is the boyfriend of this movie’s Final Girl, and is saved from Jason by his girlfriend in Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan. When Sean and Rennie run into the sewers to escape Jason, they learn that toxic waste is flushed through the sewers every night. They then get Jason to follow them into the sewer system in order to use that knowledge against him.

During the chase, however, Jason knocks out Sean, leaving him in danger. Before Jason can kill him, Rennie gets his attention and attacks Jason with the toxic waste herself, while still getting Sean out alive. Even their dog Toby lives too. While family pets aren’t usually a focal point in the Friday the 13th movies, it’s nice to see that even the dog makes it out.

Jessica Kimble & Stephanie Kimble

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday

Jessica Kimble is the Final Girl in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. This movie made things personal, as Jessica was actually Jason Voorhees’ niece. This is one of the only times the movies really explore Jason’s family outside of his relationship with his mother. She is also a young mother with a baby named Stephanie. Her baby technically becomes a Final Girl as well, though Stephanie doesn’t actually have to fight Jason.

Based on the Friday the 13th lore that expands here, since they were the only living relatives of Jason, they were the only ones who could end his reign of terror forever. In this movie, Jason is able to possess others and kills Jessica’s mother before targeting his niece. As the only person who can kill Jason, she finally ends things when she stabs him in the chest and releases his soul to Hell.

Steven Freeman

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday

Steven Freeman is Jessica’s ex-boyfriend and for much of the movie, Jessica believes he is the killer. The idea of Jessica suspecting her former love interest certainly plays into one of the most-used horror tropes, turning a loved one or boyfriend into the real villain of the movie.

However, after Robert kills the police officers protecting Stephanie because he’s the one actually possessed by Jason, she realizes Steven is telling the truth, and they have to team up to fight Jason together. Steven is little help in the end, which is right in line with the franchise having its Final Girls do most of the dirty work in the movies. Steven leaves it up to Jessica to stop Jason before the two of them leave together with their baby, the entire family safe.

Creighton Duke

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday

Creighton Duke showed up almost like a deus-ex-machina with little explanation in Jason Goes to Hell to give Jessica the clues about how to stop Jason Voorhees and kill him once and for all. While little was revealed about Creighton, he was a bounty hunter obsessed with killing Jason. Creighton also had a planned tragic backstory that was ultimately left out of Jason Goes to Hell.

As a child, Jason killed Creighton’s girlfriend, so he was out for revenge on the franchise villain. It looked like Jason killed Creighton in the movie, but that isn’t the case, though his survival was never definitively revealed on screen in the franchise. Movie director Adam Marcus said that Duke survived the attack and was one of the rare Friday the 13th survivors who weren’t a Final Girl.

Rowan LaFontaine

Jason X

Rowan LaFontaine is the Final Girl in Jason X. This is the movie that takes the horror franchise into science fiction territory instead of typical slasher horror. It sends Jason into space and has him start killing people onboard a spacecraft. The idea is that scientists want to study his ability to heal his seemingly fatal wounds in the future, but Jason is more interested in killing everyone around him. It also includes one of the funniest scenes in the franchise with Jason on a holodeck.

As for Rowan, she is a scientist who has to find a way to stop Jason when all methods of trying to kill him fail. She decides to cryogenically freeze Jason. Both end up frozen and then are unfrozen 445 years later, and she still can’t kill him, only escaping as Jason ends up in space and drifting into the burning atmosphere.

Tsunaron

Jason X

Tsunaron is another survivor from Jason X and Voorhees’s trip into space. Surprisingly, the movie actually features more survivors than the franchise usually offers up in the Friday the 13th movies. Typically, the small casts mean that there are only one or two people who survive the killing spree. The unusual setting and the science-fiction approach to the story might have something to do with that.

Tsunaron is a student aboard the ship that Jason ended up on after they found his frozen body. He is also the man who helped create one of the best characters in the movie, the android Kay-Em 14, who also gets to fight Jason. To his credit, Tsunaron risks his life more than once to help his android invention, and he is one of the few survivors after Jason is blasted into space.

Kay-Em 14

Jason X

Kay-Em 14 is an android who is created by one of the scientists on the ship that Jason ends up on in Jason X. She is also the only person in the history of the franchise who is able to go blow for blow with Jason in a fight, and she completely decimates Voorhees. To be fair, that’s likely because she’s the only person he goes up against (at this point) who isn’t a typical human being.

She actually beats Jason pretty easily when she blows his torso apart and then blows his head off. However, thanks to nanobots on the ship, Jason ends up somehow reconstructed, and he chops Kay-Em 14’s head off before going after the humans. However, as an android, she does not die and Tsunaron is able to rescue her and escape before the ship explodes.

Lori Campbell

Freddy vs. Jason

Freddy vs. Jason was always meant to be a battle between two of slasher horror’s most iconic killers. Anyone who loves horror movies has likely debated which iconic characters could win in a cage match between them. However, the actual story has Freddy using Jason to kill kids, so he can return, all before the two killers end up fighting each other.

This left room for a Final Girl, and that is Lori Campbell. When Jason starts killing people on Elm Street, Lori and her friends have to figure out what is going on in order to survive his wrath, actually unleashing Freddy in the process. Lori puts everyone in danger by bringing Freddy out of her own dreams, but her plan works, and she is even able to blow up Freddy, showing she deserves her status as a Final Girl in this movie.

Will Rollins

Freddy vs. Jason

In Freddy vs Jason, Will Rollins is a patient at Westin Hills, a hospital in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise that often houses those with mental health issues in the movies. He also used to date Lori Campbell but is committed to the hospital after believing he sees Lori’s father kill her mother.

In the movie, he learns about the deaths at Lori’s house and escapes the hospital to try to save her. He then accompanies Lori and her other friends to Camp Crystal Lake, trying to lure Jason Voorhees there to fight Freddy Krueger. Will and Lori are the only survivors of the event, and while he helps blow up the dock while they are fighting, he still stands by and watches as Lori saves the day by stopping both of the franchise villains.

Clay Miller

Friday The 13th (2009)

When Friday the 13th rebooted in 2009, the series brought back Jason Voorhees, and his main opposition was Clay Miller, played by Jared Padalecki (Supernatural). When the movie starts, Clay’s sister Whitney has disappeared, and he sets out to find out what happened to her. This leads him to Camp Crystal Lake and Jason.

However, much like the earlier movies in the franchise, when Clay finds his sister, she needs no help in dispatching Jason with a machete, and the two of them leave together. While Whitney seemingly killed Jason, he showed up after the battle and Jason dragged her to the bottom of Crystal Lake, leaving Clay the only survivor in the Friday the 13th reboot movie. That is the last chapter in the franchise, making Clay the last survivor, for now.