Made on a budget of less than $600,000, with mostly unknown actors, corny dialogue, and a hastily prepared script (completed in under two weeks), the original installment of Friday the 13th in 1980 nevertheless went on to gross over $70 million at box offices around the world and launch a cottage industry of sequels, spoofs, spin-offs, and outright rip-offs. No modern horror film monster, save perhaps for Freddy Krueger, has managed to capture our culture's collective imagination as much as has Jason Voorhees, the speechless, seemingly immortal psychopath with a hatred for promiscuous adolescents. Along with John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th is credited with initiating the notorious "stalker cycle" of horror films—an immensely popular, and heavily criticized, subgenre that would continue to draw huge audiences through the mid-1980s.

Jason from Friday the 13th, Part IV.