Friday the 13th

Camp Crystal Lake, 1958. Two counselors slip away from a campfire sing-along to fool around in a loft. An unseen figure climbs the stairs and kills them both. The camp closes.

Two decades later, Steve Christy is reopening the property. Counselors arrive over a single afternoon — Alice, Bill, Brenda, Marcie, Ned, and Jack — while a local handyman, Crazy Ralph, warns anyone who'll listen that the place is cursed. The new cook, Annie, hitchhikes in and is murdered on the road before she ever reaches the gates.

The reopening day turns to evening, then to a storm. Counselors are picked off one by one in tightly staged set-pieces from Tom Savini: Ned vanishes; Jack is pinned to a bunk by an arrow through the throat from beneath the mattress; Marcie is killed with an axe in the camp bathroom; Brenda is lured to the archery range by what sounds like a child crying; Bill is pinned to a door with arrows. Steve Christy, returning from town, is murdered in the woods. Phones go dead. The power fails. By the time Alice realizes what's happening, she is alone.

A Jeep pulls up. The driver is a friendly middle-aged woman — Pamela Voorhees — who introduces herself as an old friend of the Christys. Alice lets her in. Slowly, Pamela's composure breaks. She explains that her son Jason drowned at the camp in 1957 while the counselors were having sex instead of watching the water. She has been killing every counselor who has tried to reopen the place ever since. She attacks.

Alice fights for her life through the camp and down to the lakeshore. At dawn, soaked and exhausted, she grabs a machete from the sand and decapitates Pamela with a single swing. Alice drags herself into a canoe and drifts out onto the lake, finally allowing herself to sleep as the sun comes up.

Police arrive at the shoreline and shout to her. As Alice raises her hand to wave, a drowned, deformed boy bursts from the water beside the canoe and drags her under. Alice wakes in a hospital bed. The officers tell her they pulled her out alone — there was no boy. Alice says: then he's still there.