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Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user’s problem. Same room, same problem, completely different lenses.

This is the beautiful, sometimes messy reality of having both a Design Manager and a Lead Designer on the same team. And if you’re wondering how to make this work without creating confusion, overlap, or the dreaded “too many cooks” scenario, you’re asking the right question.

The traditional answer has been to draw clean lines on an org chart. The Design Manager handles people, the Lead Designer handles craft. Problem solved, right? Except clean org charts are fantasy. In reality, both roles care deeply about team health, design quality, and shipping great work. 

The magic happens when you embrace the overlap instead of fighting it—when you start thinking of your design org as a design organism.

The Anatomy of a Healthy Design Team

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of being on both sides of this equation: think of your design team as a living organism. The Design Manager tends to the mind (the psychological safety, the career growth, the team dynamics). The Lead Designer tends to the body (the craft skills, the design standards, the hands-on work that ships to users).

But just like mind and body aren’t completely separate systems, so, too, do these roles overlap in important ways. You can’t have a healthy person without both working in harmony. The trick is knowing where those overlaps are and how to navigate them gracefully.

When we look at how healthy teams actually function, three critical systems emerge. Each requires both roles to work together, but with one taking primary responsibility for keeping that system strong.

The Nervous System: People & Psychology

Primary caretaker: Design Manager
Supporting role: Lead Designer

The nervous system is all about signals, feedback, and psychological safety. When this system is healthy, information flows freely, people feel safe to take risks, and the team can adapt quickly to new challenges.

The Design Manager is the primary caretaker here. They’re monitoring the team’s psychological pulse, ensuring feedback loops are healthy, and creating the conditions for people to grow. They’re hosting career conversations, managing workload, and making sure no one burns out.

But the Lead Designer plays a crucial supporting role. They’re providing sensory input about craft development needs, spotting when someone’s design skills are stagnating, and helping identify growth opportunities that the Design Manager might miss.

Design Manager tends to:

• Career conversations and growth planning
• Team psychological safety and dynamics
• Workload management and resource allocation
• Performance reviews and feedback systems
• Creating learning opportunities

Lead Designer supports by:

• Providing craft-specific feedback on team member development
• Identifying design skill gaps and growth opportunities
• Offering design mentorship and guidance
• Signaling when team members are ready for more complex challenges

The Muscular System: Craft & Execution

Primary caretaker: Lead Designer
Supporting role: Design Manager

The muscular system is about strength, coordination, and skill development. When this system is healthy, the team can execute complex design work with precision, maintain consistent quality, and adapt their craft to new challenges.

The Lead Designer is the primary caretaker here. They’re setting design standards, providing craft coaching, and ensuring that shipping work meets the quality bar. They’re the ones who can tell you if a design decision is sound or if we’re solving the right problem.

But the Design Manager plays a crucial supporting role. They’re ensuring the team has the resources and support to do their best craft work, like proper nutrition and recovery time for an athlete.

Lead Designer tends to:

• Definition of design standards and system usage
• Feedback on what design work meets the standard
• Experience direction for the product
• Design decisions and product-wide alignment
• Innovation and craft advancement

Design Manager supports by:

• Ensuring design standards are understood and adopted across the team
• Confirming experience direction is being followed
• Supporting practices and systems that scale without bottlenecking
• Facilitating design alignment across teams
• Providing resources and removing obstacles to great craft work

The Circulatory System: Strategy & Flow

Shared caretakers: Both Design Manager and Lead Designer

The circulatory system is about how information, decisions, and energy flow through the team. When this system is healthy, strategic direction is clear, priorities are aligned, and the team can respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges.

This is where true partnership happens. Both roles are responsible for keeping the circulation strong, but they’re bringing different perspectives to the table.

Lead Designer contributes:

• User needs are met by the product
• Overall product quality and experience
• Strategic design initiatives
• Research-based user needs for each initiative

Design Manager contributes:

• Communication to team and stakeholders
• Stakeholder management and alignment
• Cross-functional team accountability
• Strategic business initiatives

Both collaborate on:

• Co-creation of strategy with leadership
• Team goals and prioritization approach
• Organizational structure decisions
• Success measures and frameworks

Keeping the Organism Healthy

The key to making this partnership sing is understanding that all three systems need to work together. A team with great craft skills but poor psychological safety will burn out. A team with great culture but weak craft execution will ship mediocre work. A team with both but poor strategic circulation will work hard on the wrong things.

Be Explicit About Which System You’re Tending

When you’re in a meeting about a design problem, it helps to acknowledge which system you’re primarily focused on. “I’m thinking about this from a team capacity perspective” (nervous system) or “I’m looking at this through the lens of user needs” (muscular system) gives everyone context for your input.

This isn’t about staying in your lane. It’s about being transparent as to which lens you’re using, so the other person knows how to best add their perspective.

Create Healthy Feedback Loops

The most successful partnerships I’ve seen establish clear feedback loops between the systems:

Nervous system signals to muscular system: “The team is struggling with confidence in their design skills” → Lead Designer provides more craft coaching and clearer standards.

Muscular system signals to nervous system: “The team’s craft skills are advancing faster than their project complexity” → Design Manager finds more challenging growth opportunities.

Both systems signal to circulatory system: “We’re seeing patterns in team health and craft development that suggest we need to adjust our strategic priorities.”

Handle Handoffs Gracefully

The most critical moments in this partnership are when something moves from one system to another. This might be when a design standard (muscular system) needs to be rolled out across the team (nervous system), or when a strategic initiative (circulatory system) needs specific craft execution (muscular system).

Make these transitions explicit. “I’ve defined the new component standards. Can you help me think through how to get the team up to speed?” or “We’ve agreed on this strategic direction. I’m going to focus on the specific user experience approach from here.”

Stay Curious, Not Territorial

The Design Manager who never thinks about craft, or the Lead Designer who never considers team dynamics, is like a doctor who only looks at one body system. Great design leadership requires both people to care about the whole organism, even when they’re not the primary caretaker.

This means asking questions rather than making assumptions. “What do you think about the team’s craft development in this area?” or “How do you see this impacting team morale and workload?” keeps both perspectives active in every decision.

When the Organism Gets Sick

Even with clear roles, this partnership can go sideways. Here are the most common failure modes I’ve seen:

System Isolation

The Design Manager focuses only on the nervous system and ignores craft development. The Lead Designer focuses only on the muscular system and ignores team dynamics. Both people retreat to their comfort zones and stop collaborating.

The symptoms: Team members get mixed messages, work quality suffers, morale drops.

The treatment: Reconnect around shared outcomes. What are you both trying to achieve? Usually it’s great design work that ships on time from a healthy team. Figure out how both systems serve that goal.

Poor Circulation

Strategic direction is unclear, priorities keep shifting, and neither role is taking responsibility for keeping information flowing.

The symptoms: Team members are confused about priorities, work gets duplicated or dropped, deadlines are missed.

The treatment: Explicitly assign responsibility for circulation. Who’s communicating what to whom? How often? What’s the feedback loop?

Autoimmune Response

One person feels threatened by the other’s expertise. The Design Manager thinks the Lead Designer is undermining their authority. The Lead Designer thinks the Design Manager doesn’t understand craft.

The symptoms: Defensive behavior, territorial disputes, team members caught in the middle.

The treatment: Remember that you’re both caretakers of the same organism. When one system fails, the whole team suffers. When both systems are healthy, the team thrives.

The Payoff

Yes, this model requires more communication. Yes, it requires both people to be secure enough to share responsibility for team health. But the payoff is worth it: better decisions, stronger teams, and design work that’s both excellent and sustainable.

When both roles are healthy and working well together, you get the best of both worlds: deep craft expertise and strong people leadership. When one person is out sick, on vacation, or overwhelmed, the other can help maintain the team’s health. When a decision requires both the people perspective and the craft perspective, you’ve got both right there in the room.

Most importantly, the framework scales. As your team grows, you can apply the same system thinking to new challenges. Need to launch a design system? Lead Designer tends to the muscular system (standards and implementation), Design Manager tends to the nervous system (team adoption and change management), and both tend to circulation (communication and stakeholder alignment).

The Bottom Line

The relationship between a Design Manager and Lead Designer isn’t about dividing territories. It’s about multiplying impact. When both roles understand they’re tending to different aspects of the same healthy organism, magic happens.

The mind and body work together. The team gets both the strategic thinking and the craft excellence they need. And most importantly, the work that ships to users benefits from both perspectives.

So the next time you’re in that meeting room, wondering why two people are talking about the same problem from different angles, remember: you’re watching shared leadership in action. And if it’s working well, both the mind and body of your design team are getting stronger.

The internet has tones. Our style processes may also.

Designing techniques as living language

Design systems are living languages, not portion libraries. The parts are terms, patterns are phrases, and sentences are layouts. Tokens are phonemes. The conversations we have with people are what shape the stories that our goods represent.

But let’s remember that voices increase as a speech gets more fluent without losing its meaning. English in Scotland and English in Sydney are undeniably different, but both are clearly English. The terminology adapts to the situation while maintaining its fundamental meaning. As a Brazilian Portuguese speech who grew up in Sydney and learned English with an American accent, this was even more apparent to me.

Our pattern processes must operate in the same manner. rigid systems that break under the influence of cultural pressure are the result of rigid adhesion to visual rules. Fluidic techniques can bend without rupturing.

Consistent behavior turns into a captivity

Design systems had a promise that was easy: regular components would speed up development and bring together experiences. But that claim has become a prison as systems mature and goods become more sophisticated. Team submit “exception” demands innumerate. Alternatively of system parts, products release with solutions. Designers devote more time defending regularity than resolving customer issues.

Our design techniques may acquire dialects to function properly.

A pattern pronunciation is a comprehensive adaptation of a design system that maintains its foundational principles while creating novel patterns for particular situations. Dials maintain the state’s necessary language while expanding its vocabulary to provide various customers, environments, or constraints, unlike one-off customizations or product themes.

When Perfect Consistency Is A Problem

I at Booking.com took this teaching without warning. Everything we A/B tested was color, version, button shapes, yet logo colors. I found this stunning as a skilled with a background in graphic design and company type guides. Booking expanded into a huge without ever taking into account physical consistency, despite everyone’s adoration for Airbnb’s flawless design system.

The conflict taught me things that consistency is not ROI, but rather solved problems are.

At Shopify Our crown jewel was Polyris ( ), a mature design language that worked well for laptop manufacturers. We were expected to follow Polaris as-is as a product staff. Then my accomplishment team slammed an” Oh, Ship”! momentous as we attempted to create an app for storehouse pickers using our interface, which we used on shared, battered Android scanners in dark aisles, solid gloves, and multiple items that were being scanned at once, many of which had only limited English comprehension.

Task completion with the accepted Polaris of 0 %.

Every element that worked wonders for retailers entirely failed to satisfy farmers. Bright backgrounds produced light. Click targets for 44px were hidden behind covered fingers. Sentence-case names took too long to interpret. Multi-step flows confused non-native listeners.

Polaris had to be completely abandoned, or it could be taught to speak inventory.

The Dialect’s Delivery

We favored creation over trend. We developed what we now refer to as a style dialect by adhering to Polaris’s key principles of clarity, efficiency, consistency.

Results: Task completion increased from 0 % to 100 %. From three days to one move, onboard time was cut.

This wasn’t slang or theming; this was a rigorous adaptation that maintained Polaris ‘ key grammar while creating new words for a particular context. Polis hadn’t failed; it had picked up the language inventory.

The Flexibility Framework

Working on the Jira platform, which is a component of the larger Atlassian structure, I advocated for formalizing this understanding at Atlassian. We needed comprehensive flexibility because dozens of products shared a design language across various codebases, but we built our processes from scratch. The previous model, which required exception requests and exclusive approvals, was failing on a scale.

To help manufacturers determine how versatile they wanted their pieces to be, we created the Flexibility Framework.

Every aspect was tied together during a transportation remodel. International research and logo remain constant. Crumbs and cultural actions evolved into Flexible. Product team could quickly identify areas where persistence and technology were important.

The Decision Ladder

Freedom requires restrictions. We built a straightforward rope to determine when regulations should be broken:

Good: Send with already-existing system components. Strong, reliable, and proven.

Better: somewhat stretch a part. Document the shift. Bring changes up to the program so that everyone can use it.

Best: First, create the ideal practice. Update the system to support it if consumer assessment validates the profit.

Which solution allows users to achieve the fastest? is the key question.

Guidelines are tools, not replicas.

Unity Beats Uniformity

Email, Drive, and Maps all have a distinctive Google voice, but each one speaks with its own. They achieve coherence through shared values rather than copied pieces. About$ 30K in engineer time is spent on one more year of key color debate.

Competency is a consumer outcome, while unification is a brand outcome. Edge the consumer when the two conflict.

Gates ‘ Gates’ Law:

How can symmetry be maintained while enabling languages? Treat your diction like a life dictionary:

Document every change, such as dialects or warehouses. director with explanations for the photos and reasoning.

Promote shared designs: when three teams freely adopt a dialect and assess its core inclusion.

Retire ancient idioms using flags and migration notes; deprecate with context; not a big-bang purge.

A living vocabulary performs better than a freezing handbook.

Begin With Your First Dialect:

Are you ready to offer languages? Start with a bad practice:

Get one user flow this week where great consistency prevents task completion. May be accessibility issues that mobile users have with desktop-sized components or that your standard patterns don’t target.

What causes conventional patterns to fail here? Document the context: climate restrictions person capabilities intensity of the process?

Design one consistent change: prioritize actions over looks. If gloves are the issue, bigger targets aren’t “broken the method”; they’re serving the customer. Create the adjustments and render them purposeful.

Test and determine: Does the shift make tasks more effective? Time to increase performance? User happiness

Display the savings: If that slang frees yet a second, fluency has paid for itself.

Beyond the Component Library

We’re cultivating design languages, no managing design systems anymore. cultures that develop as they speak. voices that don’t lose significance when spoken in other languages. language that prioritize the needs of people over cosmetic ideals.

Our buttons breaking the style guide didn’t matter to the warehouse workers who went from 0 % to 100 % on their jobs. They were concerned about how the keys turned out.

Your customers share your opinion. Offer your program consent to use their speech.

This article contains spoilers for Monster: The Ed Gein Story. Ryan Murphy and co.’s latest Monster has finally dropped on Netflix, and post-release, there’s been a bit of a commotion. Some of that commotion is expected: blurring the lines between fact and fiction is not uncommon in dramatic retellings of true crimes, and The Ed […]

The post Monster: The Ed Gein Story Ends by Reminding Us of a Much Better Show appeared first on Den of Geek.

Jason movies aren’t supposed to be good. Heck, they weren’t even supposed to be about Jason. Back in the late 1970s, producer Sean S. Cunningham saw the financial success of Halloween and an opportunity to cash in himself. So he took out an ad for a movie called Friday the 13th, riffing on the holiday theme of the John Carpenter film.

Only later did he come up with the idea of a whodunnit, in which a killer begins menacing counselors trying to reopen a camp years after a youth named Jason Voorhees drowned there. As everyone now knows, that killer was Jason’s mother Pamela Voorhees, who wanted to prevent Camp Crystal Lake from over operating again. The shock ending of that film, in which Jason emerges from the water to grab a final girl, was only tacked on because Cunningham wanted to copy the shock ending of Carrie.

Creativity wasn’t the goal. Money was. And, to that end, Cunningham and Paramount Pictures succeeded, as Friday the 13th was a massive hit, as were its first few sequels. And yet, somehow, creativity happened nonetheless. In the second movie, Jason took the spotlight, supplanting his mother. And midway through the third movie, Jason got his signature mask, fully becoming a horror icon.

As you might expect, that digressive path resulted in films of varying quality. Not all of the Friday the 13th movies are great, but they all offer something worth watching—if only the grisly death of some camp counselor of ill-repute.

12. Friday the 13th (2009)

Who, exactly, is the 2009 remake Friday the 13th for? One would think that a reboot of the series would try to clarify the franchise’s famously ambling and imprecise timeline to make things easier for new viewers. Instead, the opening 30 minutes of Friday the 13th (2009) try to compress the first three films into one prologue, complete with killer Pamela (portrayed here by Nana Visitor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fame) and baghead Jason. The opening only confuses newcomers and feeds long-time fans insubstantial ‘member berries, pleasing no one–which accurately sums up the movie.

Which isn’t to say that the reboot doesn’t have its charms. Derek Mears is fantastic as a more feral Jason, trading dynamic energy for the usual slow-moving beast of previous films. The cast does a great job with its young adult jerks, and the movie pulls off a surprising final girl fake out. Still, Friday the 13th 2009 never shakes the feeling of being a fan film instead of a proper entry in the series.

11. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

For more than three and a half decades, people have been making fun of this movie for the fact that most of it takes place on a boat and the “New York” sections are actually Vancouver. And you know what? Jason Takes Manhattan deserves all that ridicule! Why give the eighth Friday the 13th entry that name if you’re never going to actually be in Manhattan (outside of some second unit stuff shot for the opening credits)?

Honestly, we could forgive a boat and we could forgive Canada if anything interesting happened in the movie. But, outside of a couple of cool kills, nothing does. Instead, Jason Takes Manhattan spends way too much time once again mythologizing the death of young Jason (which may or may not have happened, depending on the status of Fridays II, III, and IV). In the end, Jason Takes Manhattan succeeds at nothing: not drama, not horror, and not even taking Manhattan.

10. Friday the 13th Part III (1983)

Cunningham and Paramount knew that after the first two entries, Friday the 13th ran the risk of becoming rote and predictable. They knew they had to shake things up. However, they made perhaps the worst possible decision for the gimmick that would differentiate the series. They decided that Part III would be in 3-D.

Outside of that, everything in Part III covers familiar ground, from the group of counselors reopening the camp to the hicks who become early cannon fodder to a “shocker” ending, in which Pamela emerges from the lake to grab the final girl. And unless you’re using the flimsy blue and red 3D glasses that get distributed with modern releases, or unless you saw a special screening at a repertory theater, you’re watching all of this in 2-D, making the pointy bits annoying instead of compelling. At least Part III finally gives Jason his hockey mask. Outside of that, everything in this movie is a dud.

9. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

Like Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes to Hell doesn’t live up to a single part of its title. No, Jason doesn’t spend time in Hell in this movie. Instead, he’s skulking around a New Jersey town. No, it’s not the final Friday movie, as this list shows. Most shockingly of all, Jason isn’t even in Jason Goes to Hell, as he gets blown up by government agents in the cold open.

Instead, Jason Goes to Hell directly rips from The Hidden to introduce a bunch of nonsense lore about Jason being a demonic worm that can jump into other bodies. So instead of seeing Kane Hodder or any other big dude play Jason, we get to see Jason as character actors Richard Grant or Stephen Culp, hardly imposing figures. That said, Jason Goes to Hell commits so much to its absurd premise that it does provide some wacky fun for those who don’t get hung up on Friday the 13th lore.

8. Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

Freddy is the winner of Freddy vs. Jason. Yes, we all know that New Line Cinema wanted to keep the actual outcome of their monster mash ambiguous, letting Jason behead the Nightmare on Elm Street monster, but having Freddy give the camera a knowing wink at the end. But there’s no question that Freddy vs. Jason is an okay Freddy movie and a terrible Jason movie.

Sure, Jason gets in some cool kills and there is a part where he rips off Freddy’s arms and attacks him with them. But outside of that, director Ronny Yu’s hyper fight style and reliance on digital effects suit Freddy much better than they do Jason and, to his credit, Robert Englund has a blast reprising his signature role. All in all, Freddy vs. Jason manages to be a functional monster mash with a pretty coherent story. But if you’re here for Jason, you’ll be pretty disappointed.

7. Friday the 13th (1980)

As discussed earlier, the first Friday the 13th is little more than a rip off of Halloween with a little bit of Carrie. It doesn’t even get to call itself the best camp slasher of the era, as The Burning comes out next year. Instead, it’s a pretty by-the-numbers whodunnit with none of the flash or style of the Italian Giallo that precede it.

And yet, Friday the 13th does have two marks in its favor. First, the movie has an absolute ringer in Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees. She fully chews the scenery in her final scenes, convincingly pulling a reverse Norman Bates routine and channeling her son. Second, Friday the 13th has effects by Tom Savini, who gives the film a level of gore quality that, frankly, it doesn’t deserve. If the movie never went onto spawn any sequels, it would be remembered as a curio. Instead, it has to fall midway on a ranking in the franchise it started.

6. Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985)

Paramount tried to keep its word. The studio really did kill Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part IV. And when box office receipts made it clear that they couldn’t just ignore this profitable franchise, Paramount tried to go back to the drawing board. A New Beginning is another whodunnit with a new person doing the killing. Is it Jason, back from the dead? Is it Tommy Jarvis, the troubled boy who was sent to a juvenile home after killing the killer in the previous entry?

No, it’s Roy, an ambulance driver we see once at the start of the movie, who goes on a killing spree after his annoying son is murdered by a teen with an anger problem. That massive flub aside–and it is a big one–A New Beginning is actually kinda fun. And it has an all-timer of a kill sequence, thanks to the ever-reliable Miguel Nuñez Jr., an outhouse, and some burritos.

5. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

The biggest knock against Freddy vs. Jason is that it learned nothing from the far superior seventh entry in the franchise, in which Freddy fights Carrie White. Okay, it’s not really Carrie White, but teen Tina (Lar Park Lincoln) does have the same psychokinetic powers and parent issues as the famous character from the Stephen King novel and Brian DePalma film. On the orders of her unscrupulous therapist, Tina goes to Camp Crystal Lake for isolated study, and inadvertently brings Jason back from his watery grave.

From there on, The New Blood gives Jason plenty of room to do what he does best. As so often happens with the top entries on this list, censors did cut down a lot of the movie, which diminishes the shock of its best kill scenes. But even if we don’t get all the bloody gory, there’s something triumphant in watching Jason shove a weed eater into the therapist’s face.

4. Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that this list would not exist without Friday the 13th Part 2. But that statement isn’t totally inaccurate either. Part 2 took everything good about its predecessor and did it better, actually giving us Jason in the flesh and an excellent final girl in Ginny (Amy Steel).

Moreover, Part 2 is the first example of what the franchise actually becomes. A bunch of teens come to the camp, and Jason (wearing a burlap bag instead of the hockey mask that would be his trademark) kills them in inventive, gory ways. Between the pure energy of the kills and an actually intelligent final girl in Ginny, Part II makes a strong case for Friday the 13th as a reputable series.

3. Jason X (2001)

If Friday the 13th Part 2 says that Jason deserves respect, then Jason X suggests maybe he doesn’t. And that’s a good thing. Jason X belongs the the long and strange line of horror movies that send their killers to space, and while that model has mixed results when it comes to the Leprechaun or Pinhead, it works perfectly with Jason.

Well, mostly perfectly. Jason X wants so very badly to be a Kevin Williamson or Joss Whedon movie, and its characters–and there are so many characters–can’t say anything without dripping it in snark. Yet, these annoyances aside, it’s hard not to cheer when uber-Jason takes the stage or when he’s killing people with space-age weapons and chemicals.

2. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

Part VI: Jason Lives was Scream before Scream. Okay, okay, that’s going too far. But Part VI has a metatextual quality that both celebrates the ridiculousness of the franchise and locates it firmly within horror history. Jason Lives completes the Tommy Jarvis trilogy with yet another actor playing the part (Thom Matthews here), but it makes him into a proper Jason hunter and gives him a reason to accidentally resurrect the killer.

Better yet, the movie manages to balance clever quips with good kills. There’s, of course, the James Bond opening in which Jason throws a machete at the screen. But there’s also the pitch black joke when one kid, realizing that Jason is coming to get him, turns to another and asks, “So, what did you want to be when you grew up?” A genuinely smart Friday the 13th movie? Believe it or not, yes!

1. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

It took four movies for Friday the 13th to get it right. But, man, did it get it really right! The Final Chapter is the platonic ideal of a slasher movie. It’s lean, it has interesting victims, and it has some incredible and memorable kills. It even has a great kid performance from Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis at his youngest and awesome Savini effects.

The plot of The Final Chapter isn’t anything special. Again, we have teens coming to party at the campground, at the same time that single mom Mrs. Jarvis (Joan Freeman) arrives with her kids Trish (Kimberly Beck) and Tommy. But that sparse plot leaves room for some great kills and for the teens to distinguish themselves. I mean, when you have Crispin Glover as a slasher movie teen, you don’t need any plot. Sparse and simple, The Final Chapter is what every Friday the 13th movie should be.

The post Friday the 13th Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Consstantine didn’t specifically ignite the box office when it first debuted in 2005, but it did pique some curiosity in a movie for fans of the favorite DC Comics detective’s occult adventures, which included one of the precious DC Comics detective’s adventures. Since then, Constantine has joined other DC superheroes]… ]

The first article on Den of Geek: Keanu Reeves Offers an Intriguing Constantine 2 Update was first published.

Jason videos aren&#8217, t supposed to be good. They weren’t actually supposed to be about Jason, hmm. Back in the late 1970s, maker Sean S. Cunningham saw the economic achievements of Halloween and an opportunity to cash in himself. In response, he ran an advertisement for a film called Friday the 13th that was a riff on the John Carpenter movie’s holiday design.

Only later did he come up with the idea of a whodunnit, in which a criminal begins menacing lawyers trying to restart a camp times after a junior named Jason Voorhees drowned it. As everyone is well aware, Jason&#8217, Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s family, wanted to stop Camp Crystal Lake from reopening. The shock end of that picture, in which Jason emerges from the water to get a last lady, was only tacked on because Cunningham wanted to copy the shock ending of Carrie.

Creativity wasn’t the end aim, either. Cash was. And to accomplish that, Cunningham and Paramount Pictures succeeded, as Friday the 13th was a huge hit, as were its second some sequels. And still, apparently, imagination happened yet. In the next film, Jason stepped up and replaced his mother. And midway through the next movie, Jason got his name face, entirely becoming a dread image.

As you might have guessed, those movies had varying levels of quality as a result of this prolix course. Not all of the Friday the 13th shows are wonderful, but they all offer something for watching—if just the terrible death of some camp counsellor of ill-repute.

12. Friday the 13th ( 2009 )

Who specifically is the target of the 2009 version of Friday the 13th? One would assume that a reboot of the collection may try to clarify the franchise&#8217, s reportedly wandering and vague timeline to make things easier for fresh viewers. Instead, Friday the 13th ( 2009 )’s first 30 minutes attempt to condense the first three movies into a single prologue, complete with killer Pamela ( portrayed by Nana Visitor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ) and baghead Jason. The opening only confuses newcomers and feeds long-time fans insubstantial &#8216, member berries, pleasing no one&#8211, which accurately sums up the movie.

Which is not to say that the reboot lacks charm, though. Derek Mears is fantastic as a more feral Jason, trading dynamic energy for the usual slow-moving beast of previous films. The film pulls off a surprising final girl fake out and does a great job with its young adult jerks. Still, Friday the 13th 2009 never shakes the feeling of being a fan film instead of a proper entry in the series.

11. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan ( 1989 )

People have been making fun of this film for more than three and a half decades because the majority of it is shot on a boat and the majority of the New York and Vancouver sections. And you know what? Jason Takes Manhattan deserves all the sneering praise! Why give the eighth Friday the 13th entry that name if you &#8217, re never going to actually be in Manhattan (outside of some second unit stuff shot for the opening credits )?

Sincerely, if anything interesting happened in the movie, we could forgive a boat and we could forgive Canada. But, outside of a couple of cool kills, nothing does. Jason Takes Manhattan instead spends way too much time mythologizing the tragic passing of a young Jason ( which, depending on the status of Fridays II, III, and IV ), again. In the end, Jason Takes Manhattan succeeds at nothing: not drama, not horror, and not even taking Manhattan.

10. Friday the 13th Part III ( 1983 )

After the first two entries, Friday the 13th ran the risk of becoming predictable and rote. Cunningham and Paramount were aware of this. They knew they had to shake things up. However, they made the most imprecise choice possible regarding the gimmick, which would set the series apart. They decided that Part III would be in 3-D.

Everything in Part III is well-known, from the group of counselors reopening the camp to the hicks who turn into early cannon fodder to the shocking ending in which Pamela emerges from the lake to grab the final girl. And unless you &#8217, re using the flimsy blue and red 3D glasses that get distributed with modern releases, or unless you saw a special screening at a repertory theater, you &#8217, re watching all of this in 2-D, making the pointy bits annoying instead of compelling. Jason receives his hockey mask at the end of Part III. Outside of that, everything in this movie is a dud.

9. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday ( 1993 )

Like Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes to Hell falls short of the title’s intended use. No, Jason does n&#8217, t spend time in Hell in this movie. He&#8217 is instead scurrying through a small town in New Jersey. No, it &#8217, s not the final Friday movie, as this list shows. The most shocking of all is Jason, who isn’t even mentioned in Jason Goes to Hell when he is blown up by government agents in the cold air.

Instead, Jason Goes to Hell directly rips from The Hidden to introduce a bunch of nonsense lore about Jason being a demonic worm that can jump into other bodies. So Jason is cast as Richard Grant or Stephen Culp, not as imposing as Kane Hodder or any other big-boy actor, which is not what we get. That said, Jason Goes to Hell commits so much to its absurd premise that it does provide some wacky fun for those who don&#8217, t get hung up on Friday the 13th lore.

8. Freddy vs. Jason ( 2003 )

Freddy wins the Freddy vs. Jason game. Yes, we all know that New Line Cinema wanted to keep the actual outcome of their monster mash ambiguous, letting Jason behead the Nightmare on Elm Street monster, but having Freddy give the camera a knowing wink at the end. However, it is unquestionable that Freddy vs. Jason is both a good and bad Jason movie.

Sure, Jason gets in some cool kills and there is a part where he rips off Freddy &#8217, s arms and attacks him with them. However, Ronny Yu&#8217, the director, does much better with Freddy than Jason, and Robert Englund is fantastic reprising his signature role. All in all, Freddy vs. Jason manages to be a functional monster mash with a pretty coherent story. However, you’ll be disappointed if you’re here for Jason.

7. The 13th of September ( 1980 )

As discussed earlier, the first Friday the 13th is little more than a rip off of Halloween with a little bit of Carrie. Because The Burning is coming out next year, it doesn’t even get to call itself the best camp slasher of the era. Instead, it &#8217, s a pretty by-the-numbers whodunnit with none of the flash or style of the Italian Giallo that precede it.

However, Friday the 13th receives two favorable marks. First, the movie has an absolute ringer in Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees. In her final scenes, she convincingly pulls a reverse Norman Bates routine and channels her son, fully chewing on the scenery. Second, Friday the 13th has effects by Tom Savini, who gives the film a level of gore quality that, frankly, it does n&#8217, t deserve. It would be remembered as a curio if the film didn’t produce any sequels. Instead, it has to fall midway on a ranking in the franchise it started.

6. Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning ( 1985 )

Paramount made an effort to keep its word. The studio really did kill Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part IV. Paramount attempted to return to the drawing board when box office receipts made it clear that they couldn’t just ignore this profitable franchise. A New Beginning is another whodunnit with a new person doing the killing. Has Jason come back from the dead? Is it Tommy Jarvis, the troubled boy who was sent to a juvenile home after killing the killer in the previous entry?

No, it’s Roy, an ambulance driver who appears once in the first scene of the film, who commits murder after his obnoxious son is killed by a young, angry teen. That massive flub aside&#8211, and it is a big one&#8211, A New Beginning is actually kinda fun. Additionally, it has an all-timer of a kill sequence thanks to the ever-reliable Miguel Nuez Jr., an outhouse, and some burritos.

5. The New Blood ( 1988 ): Friday the 13th Part VII

The biggest knock against Freddy vs. Jason is that it learned nothing from the far superior seventh entry in the franchise, in which Freddy fights Carrie White. Okay, it’s not really Carrie White, but teen Tina ( Lar Park Lincoln ) does share the same psychokinetic powers and parent issues as the well-known character from the Stephen King novel and Brian DePalma movie. On the orders of her unscrupulous therapist, Tina goes to Camp Crystal Lake for isolated study, and inadvertently brings Jason back from his watery grave.

Jason has plenty of room to do what The New Blood does best from there. As so often happens with the top entries on this list, censors did cut down a lot of the movie, which diminishes the shock of its best kill scenes. There is something triumphant in watching Jason shove a weed eater into the therapist&#8217, s face, even if we don&#8217, t get all the bloody gory.

4. Part 2 of Friday the 13th ( 1981 )

It would n&#8217, t be accurate to say that this list would not exist without Friday the 13th Part 2. However, that statement isn’t entirely accurate either. Part 2 took everything good about its predecessor and did it better, actually giving us Jason in the flesh and an excellent final girl in Ginny ( Amy Steel ).

Additionally, Part 2 is the first illustration of what the franchise actually becomes. A bunch of teens come to the camp, and Jason ( wearing a burlap bag instead of the hockey mask that would be his trademark ) kills them in inventive, gory ways. Part II makes a strong case for Friday the 13th as a reputable series in addition to the pure energy of the kills and an actually intelligent final girl in Ginny.

3. Jason X ( 2001 )

If Friday the 13th Part 2 says that Jason deserves respect, then Jason X suggests maybe he does n&#8217, t. And that &#8217, s a good thing. Jason X belongs to the long, strange line of horror films that transport their killers to space. Although Jason’s interpretation of the Leprechaun or Pinhead has mixed results, Jason’s suitability is admirable.

Well, mostly perfectly. There are so many characters, and Jason X wants so badly to be a Kevin Williamson or Joss Whedon movie, and he can’t say anything without dripping it in snark. Yet, these annoyances aside, it &#8217, s hard not to cheer when uber-Jason takes the stage or when he&#8217, s killing people with space-age weapons and chemicals.

2. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives ( 1986 )

Jason Lives was Scream before Scream in Part VI. Okay, okay, that &#8217, s going too far. However, Part VI has a metatextual quality that both acknowledges the absurdity of the franchise and firmly places it in horror history. Jason Lives completes the Tommy Jarvis trilogy with yet another actor playing the part ( Thom Matthews here ), but it makes him into a proper Jason hunter and gives him a reason to accidentally resurrect the killer.

Even better, the film strikes a balance between clever jokes and effective kills. There&#8217, s, of course, the James Bond opening in which Jason throws a machete at the screen. However, there is a pitch-black joke that occurs when one child realizes that Jason is coming to get him and asks,” So, what did you want to be when you were growing up?” &#8221, A genuinely smart Friday the 13th movie? Believe it or not, yes!

1. The final chapter of Friday the 13th ( 1984 )

It took four movies for Friday the 13th to get it right. But man, did it actually get it right? The Final Chapter is the platonic ideal of a slasher movie. It has interesting victims, is lean, and some incredible and unforgettable kills. It even has a great kid performance from Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis at his youngest and awesome Savini effects.

The Final Chapter‘s story isn’t particularly interesting. Again, we have teens coming to party at the campground, at the same time that single mom Mrs. Jarvis ( Joan Freeman ) arrives with her kids Trish ( Kimberly Beck ) and Tommy. However, that skewed plot allows for some excellent kills and for the teenagers to stand out. I mean, when you have Crispin Glover as a slasher movie teen, you don&#8217, t need any plot. The Final Chapter is what every Friday the 13th movie should be, sparse and straightforward.

The post Friday the 13th Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Trailers appear in this post for Peacemaker period 2 event 7. Earth-X Auggie Smith ( Robert Patrick ) isn’t a Nazi. In the final season of Peacemaker’s next time, Chris Smith must take into account the possibility that Earth-X may be the home of his beloved father and [ …] [ …].. Those unexpected twists arrived late in that episode.

The article James Gunn Weighs in on Controversial Peacemaker Character appeared second on Den of Geek.

Jason shows aren’t supposed to be good, either. Heck, they weren&#8217, t actually supposed to be about Jason. Producer Sean S. Cunningham saw the economic achievements of Halloween as an opportunity to funds in himself in the late 1970s. But he took out an ad for a film called Friday the 13th, riffing on the holiday theme of the John Carpenter picture.

Only afterwards did he develop the concept of a whodunnit, in which a criminal begins threatening lawyers trying to restart a station after a youngster named Jason Voorhees perished there. As people now knows, that criminal was Jason&#8217, s family Pamela Voorhees, who wanted to prevent Camp Crystal Lake from over running again. The shocking end of that movie, in which Jason emerges from the water to get a final woman, was simply added because Cunningham wanted to imitate Carrie‘s shocking end.

Creativity was n&#8217, t the target. Wealth was a. And, to that end, Cunningham and Paramount Pictures succeeded, as Friday the 13th was a large hit, as were its first few sequel. But, imagination still manifested in some way. In the next video, Jason took the spotlight, supplanting his family. And Jason completely transformed into a scary icon just before the next film’s release.

As you might anticipate, that prolix journey resulted in pictures of varying quality. Even though not all of the Friday the 13th movies are excellent, they all have something to watch, if not the terrible death of a notorious station counselor.

12. Friday the 13th ( 2009 )

Who, exactly, is the 2009 remake Friday the 13th for? One would assume that a reboot of the line would attempt to understand the franchise’s notoriously rambunctious and inaccurate timeline to make things simpler for fresh viewers. Instead, the opening 30 minutes of Friday the 13th ( 2009 ) try to compress the first three films into one prologue, complete with killer Pamela ( portrayed here by Nana Visitor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fame ) and baghead Jason. The beginning just confounds newcomers and feeds long-standing fans insubstantially, which accurately sums up the film.

Which is n&#8217, t to say that the reboot does n&#8217, t have its charms. As a more wild Jason, Derek Mears excels as the slow-moving beast of his past movies, with dynamic power. The solid does a great job with its young child jerks, and the film pulls off a surprising last child false up. Even so, Friday the 13th 2009 always manages to feel like a true episode of the series.

11. Fourth Friday, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan ( 1989 )

For more than three and a half years, people have been making fun of this movie for the fact that most of it takes place on a ship and the &#8220, New York &#8221, parts are actually Vancouver. What do you know, exactly? Jason Takes Manhattan deserves all that scorn! If you &#8217, re never going to really get in Manhattan (outside of some second unit thing shot for the opening credits ), why give the seventh Friday the 13th passage that name?

Actually, we could pardon a boat and we could pardon Canada if anything exciting happened in the film. Everything else, aside from a few great kills, does. Instead, Jason Takes Manhattan spends way too much time once again mythologizing the death of young Jason ( which may or may not have happened, depending on the status of Fridays II, III, and IV ). Jason Takes Manhattan ultimately succeeds without a hitch: it’s not a play, a dread, or even a takedown.

10. Third Part of Friday the 13th ( 1983 )

Cunningham and Paramount knew that after the first two comments, Friday the 13th ran the risk of becoming rote and predictable. They were aware that they had to alter issues. Nevertheless, they made perhaps the worst possible choice for the fad that would distinguish the series. Part III will be in 3-D, they decided.

Outside of that, whatever in Piece III covers common earth, from the class of counselors reopening the camp to the hicks who become early cannon fodder to a &#8220, shocker&#8221, ending, in which Pamela emerges from the lake to get the ultimate girl. And you’re watching all of this in 2-D, making the pointy bits annoying instead of compelling, unless you’re using the flimsy blue and red 3D glasses that are distributed with contemporary releases. At least Part III finally gives Jason his hockey mask. Besides that, everything in this film is a dud.

9. The final Friday of Jason Goes to Hell ( 1993 )

Like Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes to Hell does n&#8217, t live up to a single part of its title. No, Jason doesn’t spend any time in Hell in this film. Instead, he&#8217, s skulking around a New Jersey town. No, as this list indicates, this is not the last Friday film. Most shockingly of all, Jason is n&#8217, t even in Jason Goes to Hell, as he gets blown up by government agents in the cold open.

Instead, Jason Goes to Hell directly rips from The Hidden to dispel the myth that Jason is a demonic worm capable of jumping into other bodies. So instead of seeing Kane Hodder or any other big dude play Jason, we get to see Jason as character actors Richard Grant or Stephen Culp, hardly imposing figures. Despite this, Jason Goes to Hell commits so much to its absurd premise that it does offer some wacky entertainment for those who don’t feel hung up on Friday the 13th lore.

8. Jason vs. Freddy ( 2003 )

Freddy is the winner of Freddy vs. Jason. Yes, we all know that New Line Cinema wanted to keep the actual storyline of their monster mash ambiguous, with Freddy giving the camera a knowing nod at the end of the film. Jason was allowed to behead the Nightmare on Elm Street monster. But there&#8217, s no question that Freddy vs. Jason is an okay Freddy movie and a terrible Jason movie.

Jason does some cool kills, but one scene features him attacking Freddy with his arms. But outside of that, director Ronny Yu&#8217, s hyper fight style and reliance on digital effects suit Freddy much better than they do Jason and, to his credit, Robert Englund has a blast reprising his signature role. Overall, Freddy vs. Jason is a good monster mashup with a solid plot. But if you &#8217, re here for Jason, you &#8217, ll be pretty disappointed.

7. Friday the 13th ( 1980 )

The 13th Friday is essentially a rip-off of Halloween with a little Carrie, as previously mentioned. It does n&#8217, t even get to call itself the best camp slasher of the era, as The Burning comes out next year. It’s a pretty by-the-numbers whodunnit, with none of the flash or style of the Italian Giallo that came before it.

And yet, Friday the 13th does have two marks in its favor. Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees is the absolute ringer in the movie, first. She fully chews the scenery in her final scenes, convincingly pulling a reverse Norman Bates routine and channeling her son. Second, Tom Savini’s effects give the movie a level of gore quality that, to be honest, it doesn’t deserve. If the movie never went onto spawn any sequels, it would be remembered as a curio. Instead, it must place it midway in the franchise it launched.

6. A New Beginning ( 1985 ) Friday the 13th Part V

Paramount tried to keep its word. Jason Voorhees was actually killed by the studio in Friday the 13th Part IV. And when box office receipts made it clear that they couldn&#8217, t just ignore this profitable franchise, Paramount tried to go back to the drawing board. Another whodunnit involves a brand-new killer killing in” A New Beginning.” Is it Jason, back from the dead? Is it Tommy Jarvis, the troubled boy who was taken to a juvenile facility after the murderer was killed in the previous entry?

No, it &#8217, s Roy, an ambulance driver we see once at the start of the movie, who goes on a killing spree after his annoying son is murdered by a teen with an anger problem. A New Beginning is actually a lot of fun, despite the massive flub, which is a big one. And it has an all-timer of a kill sequence, thanks to the ever-reliable Miguel Nuñez Jr., an outhouse, and some burritos.

5. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood ( 1988 )

The biggest detriment to Freddy vs. Jason is that it learned nothing from the far superior seventh installment of the franchise, in which Freddy fights Carrie White. Okay, it &#8217, s not really Carrie White, but teen Tina ( Lar Park Lincoln ) does have the same psychokinetic powers and parent issues as the famous character from the Stephen King novel and Brian DePalma film. On the orders of her dishonest therapist, Tina travels to Camp Crystal Lake to study alone, and unintentionally rescues Jason from his salty grave.

From there on, The New Blood gives Jason plenty of room to do what he does best. The majority of the film was cut down, which lessens the shock of its best kill scenes, as happens frequently with the best entries on this list. But even if we don&#8217, t get all the bloody gory, there&#8217, s something triumphant in watching Jason shove a weed eater into the therapist&#8217, s face.

4. Friday the 13th Part 2 ( 1981 )

Without Friday the 13th Part 2, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that this list wouldn’t exist. But that statement is n&#8217, t totally inaccurate either. Part 2 improved upon everything that was good about its predecessor, including adding a fantastic final girl in Ginny ( Amy Steel ) and Jason in the flesh.

Moreover, Part 2 is the first example of what the franchise actually becomes. A group of teenagers arrive at the camp, and Jason ( who is not wearing the typical hockey mask ) kills them in creative, bloody ways. Between the pure energy of the kills and an actually intelligent final girl in Ginny, Part II makes a strong case for Friday the 13th as a reputable series.

3. Jason X ( 2001 )

If Jason in Friday’s 13th Part 2 claims that he deserves respect, Jason X suggests that he doesn’t, which is a good thing. Jason X belongs the the long and strange line of horror movies that send their killers to space, and while that model has mixed results when it comes to the Leprechaun or Pinhead, it works perfectly with Jason.

Mostly, but mostly, perfectly. Jason X wants so very badly to be a Kevin Williamson or Joss Whedon movie, and its characters &#8211, and there are so many characters &#8211, can&#8217, t say anything without dripping it in snark. Even with these minor annoyances, it &#8217 ;s difficult not to cheer when uber-Jason takes the stage or when he&#8217, slaying people with space-age weapons and chemicals.

2. Jason Lives, Part VI of Friday the 13th, 1986

Part VI: Jason Lives was Scream before Scream. Okay, that &#8217 is going too far. But Part VI has a metatextual quality that both celebrates the ridiculousness of the franchise and locates it firmly within horror history. With the addition of another actor ( Thom Matthews in this role ), Jason Lives completes the Tommy Jarvis trilogy, giving him a legitimate reason to unintentionally resurrect the killer.

Better yet, the movie manages to balance clever quips with good kills. The James Bond opening, in which Jason throws a machete at the screen, is, of course, there. But there&#8217, s also the pitch black joke when one kid, realizing that Jason is coming to get him, turns to another and asks, &#8220, So, what did you want to be when you grew up? A genuinely smart Friday the 13th movie, &#8221? Believe it or not, yes!

1. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter ( 1984 )

For Friday the 13th, it took four movies to get it right. But, man, did it get it really right! The Final Chapter is a slasher movie with a platonic ideal. It&#8217, s lean, it has interesting victims, and it has some incredible and memorable kills. Even Corey Feldman’s excellent performance as Tommy Jarvis in his youngest Savini effects is included in the film.

The plot of The Final Chapter is n&#8217, t anything special. Teenagers are also partying at the campground when single mother Mrs. Jarvis ( Joan Freeman ) arrives with her kids Trish ( Kimberly Beck ) and Tommy. But that sparse plot leaves room for some great kills and for the teens to distinguish themselves. You don’t need any plot when Crispin Glover plays a teen in a slasher movie, after all. Sparse and simple, The Final Chapter is what every Friday the 13th movie should be.

The first post Friday the 13th Movies Ranked was posted on Den of Geek.

It became challenging to evaluate Marvel films alone around Phase 2 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While any number of punters could roll up at the theater, see the latest installment of their favorite superhero’s adventures and leave happy, having experienced callbacks, Marvel Comics references, and fan-pleasing moments, your average critic might have ]… ]

On Den of Geek, the first article Marvel Star claimed that MCU films are for fans and no detractors.

Jason shows aren&#8217, t supposed to be good. They weren’t actually supposed to be about Jason, hmm. Back in the late 1970s, maker Sean S. Cunningham saw the economic achievements of Halloween and an opportunity to cash in himself. In response, he ran an advertisement for a film called Friday the 13th that riffed on the John Carpenter movie’s holiday theme.

Only later did he come up with the idea of a whodunnit, in which a criminal begins menacing lawyers trying to restart a camp times after a junior named Jason Voorhees drowned it. As everyone is aware of, Jason&#8217’s family Pamela Voorhees, who wanted to stop Camp Crystal Lake from reopening, was the criminal. The shock end of that picture, in which Jason emerges from the water to get a last lady, was only tacked on because Cunningham wanted to copy the shock ending of Carrie.

Creativity wasn’t the end objective. Cash was. And to achieve that, Cunningham and Paramount Pictures were successful, with Friday the 13th being a huge hit as well as its primary some sequels. And still, apparently, imagination happened yet. Jason replaced his mother in the next film, taking the lead. And midway through the next movie, Jason got his name face, entirely becoming a dread image.

As you might have guessed, those films had varying levels of quality as a result of this digressive course. Not all of the Friday the 13th movies are great, but they all offer something worth watching—if only the grisly death of some camp counselor of ill-repute.

12. Friday the 13th ( 2009 )

Who exactly is the target of the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th? One would think that a reboot of the series would try to clarify the franchise&#8217, s famously ambling and imprecise timeline to make things easier for new viewers. Instead, Friday the 13th ( 2009 )’s first 30 minutes attempt to condense the first three movies into a single prologue, complete with killer Pamela ( portrayed by Nana Visitor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ) and baghead Jason. The opening only confuses newcomers and feeds long-time fans insubstantial &#8216, member berries, pleasing no one&#8211, which accurately sums up the movie.

Which is not to say that the reboot lacks charm, though. Derek Mears is fantastic as a more feral Jason, trading dynamic energy for the usual slow-moving beast of previous films. The film pulls off a surprising final girl fake out and does a great job with its young adult jerks. Still, Friday the 13th 2009 never shakes the feeling of being a fan film instead of a proper entry in the series.

11. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan ( 1989 )

People have been making fun of this film for more than three and a half decades because the majority of it is shot on a boat and the majority of the New York and Vancouver sections are actually in the water. And you know what? Jason Takes Manhattan deserves all the sneering praise! Why give the eighth Friday the 13th entry that name if you &#8217, re never going to actually be in Manhattan (outside of some second unit stuff shot for the opening credits )?

Sincerely, if anything interesting happened in the movie, we could forgive a boat and we could forgive Canada. But, outside of a couple of cool kills, nothing does. Jason Takes Manhattan instead spends way too much time once more mythologizing the death of a young Jason ( which may or may not have happened, depending on the status of Fridays II, III, and IV ). In the end, Jason Takes Manhattan succeeds at nothing: not drama, not horror, and not even taking Manhattan.

10. Friday the 13th Part III ( 1983 )

After the first two entries, Friday the 13th ran the risk of becoming predictable and rote. Cunningham and Paramount were aware of this. They knew they had to shake things up. They made the gimmick that would set the series apart, perhaps the most disastrous one. They decided that Part III would be in 3-D.

Everything in Part III is well-known, from the group of counselors reopening the camp to the hicks who turn into early cannon fodder to the shocking ending in which Pamela emerges from the lake to grab the final girl. And unless you &#8217, re using the flimsy blue and red 3D glasses that get distributed with modern releases, or unless you saw a special screening at a repertory theater, you &#8217, re watching all of this in 2-D, making the pointy bits annoying instead of compelling. Part III at least finally reveals Jason his hockey mask. Outside of that, everything in this movie is a dud.

9. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday ( 1993 )

Jason Goes to Hell, like Jason Takes Manhattan, falls short of the title’s expectations. No, Jason does n&#8217, t spend time in Hell in this movie. He&#8217 is instead scurrying around a town in New Jersey. No, it &#8217, s not the final Friday movie, as this list shows. The most shocking of all is Jason, who isn’t even mentioned in Jason Goes to Hell when he is blown up by government agents in the cold air.

Instead, Jason Goes to Hell directly rips from The Hidden to introduce a bunch of nonsense lore about Jason being a demonic worm that can jump into other bodies. So instead of seeing Kane Hodder or any other big men play Jason, we instead see Jason as Richard Grant or Stephen Culp, who are hardly imposing actors. That said, Jason Goes to Hell commits so much to its absurd premise that it does provide some wacky fun for those who don&#8217, t get hung up on Friday the 13th lore.

8. Freddy vs. Jason ( 2003 )

Freddy wins the Freddy vs. Jason game. Yes, we all know that New Line Cinema wanted to keep the actual outcome of their monster mash ambiguous, letting Jason behead the Nightmare on Elm Street monster, but having Freddy give the camera a knowing wink at the end. However, it is unquestionably a bad Jason movie and a good Freddy movie.

Sure, Jason gets in some cool kills and there is a part where he rips off Freddy &#8217, s arms and attacks him with them. However, Ronny Yu&#8217, the director, does much better with Freddy than Jason, and Robert Englund is fantastic reprising his signature role. All in all, Freddy vs. Jason manages to be a functional monster mash with a pretty coherent story. However, you’ll be disappointed if you’re here for Jason.

7. The 13th of September ( 1980 )

As discussed earlier, the first Friday the 13th is little more than a rip off of Halloween with a little bit of Carrie. Because The Burning is coming out next year, it doesn’t even get to call itself the best camp slasher of the era. Instead, it &#8217, s a pretty by-the-numbers whodunnit with none of the flash or style of the Italian Giallo that precede it.

Nonetheless, Friday the 13th does receive two marks in its favor. First, the movie has an absolute ringer in Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees. In her final scenes, she convincingly channels her son and pulls a reverse Norman Bates routine. Second, Friday the 13th has effects by Tom Savini, who gives the film a level of gore quality that, frankly, it does n&#8217, t deserve. It would be remembered as a curio if the film never did lead to any sequels. Instead, it has to fall midway on a ranking in the franchise it started.

6. Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning ( 1985 )

Paramount made an effort to keep its word. The studio really did kill Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part IV. Paramount attempted to return to the drawing board when box office receipts made it clear that they couldn’t just ignore this profitable franchise. A New Beginning is another whodunnit with a new person doing the killing. Has Jason come back from the dead? Is it Tommy Jarvis, the troubled boy who was sent to a juvenile home after killing the killer in the previous entry?

No, it’s Roy, an ambulance driver who appears once at the beginning of the film, who commits murder after his obnoxious son is killed by a teenager with an anger issue. That massive flub aside&#8211, and it is a big one&#8211, A New Beginning is actually kinda fun. And it has a kill sequence that lasts forever thanks to the reliable Miguel Nuez Jr., an outhouse, and some burritos.

5. The New Blood ( 1988 ): Friday the 13th Part VII

The biggest knock against Freddy vs. Jason is that it learned nothing from the far superior seventh entry in the franchise, in which Freddy fights Carrie White. Okay, it’s not really Carrie White, but teen Tina ( Lar Park Lincoln ) does share the same psychokinetic powers and parent issues as the well-known character from the Stephen King novel and Brian DePalma movie. On the orders of her unscrupulous therapist, Tina goes to Camp Crystal Lake for isolated study, and inadvertently brings Jason back from his watery grave.

From there, The New Blood gives Jason plenty of room to concentrate on what he does best. As so often happens with the top entries on this list, censors did cut down a lot of the movie, which diminishes the shock of its best kill scenes. There is something triumphant in watching Jason shove a weed eater into the therapist’s face, even if we don’t get all the bloody gory.

4. Part 2 of Friday the 13th ( 1981 )

It would n&#8217, t be accurate to say that this list would not exist without Friday the 13th Part 2. However, that statement isn’t entirely accurate either. Part 2 took everything good about its predecessor and did it better, actually giving us Jason in the flesh and an excellent final girl in Ginny ( Amy Steel ).

Additionally, Part 2 is the first illustration of what the franchise actually becomes. A bunch of teens come to the camp, and Jason ( wearing a burlap bag instead of the hockey mask that would be his trademark ) kills them in inventive, gory ways. Part II makes a strong case for Friday the 13th as a reputable series in addition to the pure energy of the kills and Ginny’s intelligent final girl.

3. Jason X ( 2001 )

If Friday the 13th Part 2 says that Jason deserves respect, then Jason X suggests maybe he does n&#8217, t. And that &#8217, s a good thing. Jason X belongs to the long, strange line of horror films that transport their killers to space. Although Jason’s interpretation of the Leprechaun or Pinhead has mixed results, Jason’s suitability is admirable.

Well, mostly perfectly. There are so many characters, and Jason X wants so badly to be a Kevin Williamson or Joss Whedon movie. He also can’t say anything without dripping it in snark. Yet, these annoyances aside, it &#8217, s hard not to cheer when uber-Jason takes the stage or when he&#8217, s killing people with space-age weapons and chemicals.

2. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives ( 1986 )

Jason Lives ‘ first appearance in Part VI was Scream. Okay, okay, that &#8217, s going too far. However, Part VI has a metatextural quality that both acknowledges the franchise’s absurdity and situates it firmly in horror history. Jason Lives completes the Tommy Jarvis trilogy with yet another actor playing the part ( Thom Matthews here ), but it makes him into a proper Jason hunter and gives him a reason to accidentally resurrect the killer.

Better yet, the film strikes a balance between clever jokes and effective kills. There&#8217, s, of course, the James Bond opening in which Jason throws a machete at the screen. However, there is a pitch-black joke that occurs when one child realizes that Jason is coming to get him and asks,” So, what did you want to be when you were growing up?” &#8221, A genuinely smart Friday the 13th movie? Believe it or not, yes!

1. The final chapter of Friday the 13th ( 1984 )

It took four movies for Friday the 13th to get it right. But man, did it actually get it right? The Final Chapter is the platonic ideal of a slasher movie. It has interesting victims, is lean, and some incredible and unforgettable kills. It even has a great kid performance from Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis at his youngest and awesome Savini effects.

The Final Chapter‘s story isn’t anything special, either. Again, we have teens coming to party at the campground, at the same time that single mom Mrs. Jarvis ( Joan Freeman ) arrives with her kids Trish ( Kimberly Beck ) and Tommy. However, that skewed plot allows for some excellent kills and for the teenagers to stand out. I mean, when you have Crispin Glover as a slasher movie teen, you don&#8217, t need any plot. The Final Chapter is the 13th movie’s perfect Friday, simple, and sparse.

The post Friday the 13th Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Ridley Scott hasn’t used much of a sensor in his entire career. Now, the same is also real. It’s one of the items we kind of adore about him! The legendary director of Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator turned up to give a talk at the BFI Southbank last week and certainly didn’t hold back when discussing the state ]… ]

The article Legendary director” Most of it Is Shit”- Offers Harsh Verdict on Hollywood first appeared on Den of Geek.

Jason shows aren&#8217, t supposed to be good. They weren’t actually supposed to be about Jason, hmm. Back in the late 1970s, supplier Sean S. Cunningham saw the economic achievements of Halloween and an opportunity to cash in himself. In response, he ran an advertisement for a film called Friday the 13th that was a riff on the John Carpenter movie’s holiday theme.

Only later did he come up with the idea of a whodunnit, in which a criminal begins menacing lawyers trying to restart a camp times after a junior named Jason Voorhees drowned it. All now knows that Jason’s family Pamela Voorhees, who wanted to stop Camp Crystal Lake from reopening, was the killer. The shock end of that picture, in which Jason emerges from the water to get a last lady, was only tacked on because Cunningham wanted to copy the shock ending of Carrie.

Creativity wasn’t the end aim, either. Cash was. And to accomplish that, Cunningham and Paramount Pictures succeeded, as Friday the 13th was a huge hit, as were its second some sequels. And still, apparently, imagination happened yet. In the next film, Jason stepped up and replaced his mother. And midway through the next movie, Jason got his name face, entirely becoming a dread image.

As you might have guessed, those movies had varying levels of quality as a result of this prolix approach. Not all of the Friday the 13th shows are wonderful, but they all offer something for watching—if just the terrible death of some camp counsellor of ill-repute.

12. Friday the 13th ( 2009 )

Who accurately is the target of the 2009 version of Friday the 13th? One may think that a reboot of the collection may try to clarify the franchise&#8217, s reportedly wandering and vague timeframe to make things easier for fresh viewers. Instead, the opening 30 minutes of Friday the 13th ( 2009 ) attempt to condense the first three movies into a single prologue, complete with killer Pamela ( portrayed by Nana Visitor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ) and baghead Jason. The beginning just confuses visitors and feeds long-time fans ephemeral &#8216, part berries, pleasing no one&#8211, which accurately sums up the film.

Which is not to say that the reboot has no charms. Derek Mears is fantastic as a more feral Jason, trading dynamic energy for the usual slow-moving beast of previous films. The film pulls off a surprising final girl fake out thanks to the excellent acting by the cast of young adult jerks. Still, Friday the 13th 2009 never shakes the feeling of being a fan film instead of a proper entry in the series.

11. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan ( 1989 )

People have been making fun of this film for more than three and a half decades because the majority of it is shot on a boat and the majority of the New York and Vancouver sections are actually in the water. And you know what? All that mockery belongs to Jason Takes Manhattan, though! Why give the eighth Friday the 13th entry that name if you &#8217, re never going to actually be in Manhattan (outside of some second unit stuff shot for the opening credits )?

Sincerely, if something interesting happened in the movie, we could forgive the boat and Canada. But, outside of a couple of cool kills, nothing does. Jason Takes Manhattan instead spends way too much time once more mythologizing the death of a young Jason ( which may or may not have happened, depending on the status of Fridays II, III, and IV ). In the end, Jason Takes Manhattan succeeds at nothing: not drama, not horror, and not even taking Manhattan.

10. Friday the 13th Part III ( 1983 )

After the first two entries, Friday the 13th ran the risk of becoming predictable and rote. Cunningham and Paramount were aware of this. They knew they had to shake things up. However, they made the most imprecise choice possible regarding the gimmick, which would set the series apart. They decided that Part III would be in 3-D.

Everything in Part III is well-known, from the counselors ‘ reopening the camp to the hicks who turn into early cannon fodder to the shocking ending where Pamela emerges from the lake to grab the final girl. And unless you &#8217, re using the flimsy blue and red 3D glasses that get distributed with modern releases, or unless you saw a special screening at a repertory theater, you &#8217, re watching all of this in 2-D, making the pointy bits annoying instead of compelling. Jason receives his hockey mask at the end of Part III. Outside of that, everything in this movie is a dud.

9. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday ( 1993 )

Jason Goes to Hell, like Jason Takes Manhattan, falls short of the title’s expectations. No, Jason does n&#8217, t spend time in Hell in this movie. He&#8217 is instead scurrying around a town in New Jersey. No, it &#8217, s not the final Friday movie, as this list shows. The most shocking of all is Jason, who isn’t even mentioned in Jason Goes to Hell when he is blown up by government agents in the cold air.

Instead, Jason Goes to Hell directly rips from The Hidden to introduce a bunch of nonsense lore about Jason being a demonic worm that can jump into other bodies. So instead of seeing Kane Hodder or any other big men play Jason, we instead see Jason as Richard Grant or Stephen Culp, who are hardly imposing actors. That said, Jason Goes to Hell commits so much to its absurd premise that it does provide some wacky fun for those who don&#8217, t get hung up on Friday the 13th lore.

8. Freddy vs. Jason ( 2003 )

In Freddy vs. Jason, Freddy triumphs. Yes, we all know that New Line Cinema wanted to keep the actual outcome of their monster mash ambiguous, letting Jason behead the Nightmare on Elm Street monster, but having Freddy give the camera a knowing wink at the end. However, it is unquestionably a bad Jason movie and a good Freddy movie.

Sure, Jason gets in some cool kills and there is a part where he rips off Freddy &#8217, s arms and attacks him with them. However, other than that, director Ronny Yu&#8217’s hyper fight style and reliance on digital effects suit Freddy much better than Jason, and Robert Englund has a blast reprising his signature role. All in all, Freddy vs. Jason manages to be a functional monster mash with a pretty coherent story. However, if you’re here for Jason and are willing to pay a premium, you’ll be disappointed.

7. Friday the 13th ( 1980 ) )

As discussed earlier, the first Friday the 13th is little more than a rip off of Halloween with a little bit of Carrie. Because The Burning is coming out next year, it doesn’t even get to call itself the best camp slasher of the era. Instead, it &#8217, s a pretty by-the-numbers whodunnit with none of the flash or style of the Italian Giallo that precede it.

Nonetheless, Friday the 13th does receive two marks in its favor. First, the movie has an absolute ringer in Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees. In her final scenes, she convincingly channels her son and pulls a reverse Norman Bates routine. Second, Friday the 13th has effects by Tom Savini, who gives the film a level of gore quality that, frankly, it does n&#8217, t deserve. It would be remembered as a curio if the film didn’t produce any sequels. Instead, it has to fall midway on a ranking in the franchise it started.

6. Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning ( 1985 )

Paramount made an effort to keep its word. The studio really did kill Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part IV. And when box office receipts made it clear that they couldn’t just ignore this lucrative franchise, Paramount attempted to return to the drawing board. A New Beginning is another whodunnit with a new person doing the killing. Is it Jason who has come back from the dead? Is it Tommy Jarvis, the troubled boy who was sent to a juvenile home after killing the killer in the previous entry?

No, it’s Roy, an ambulance driver who appears once in the first scene of the film, who commits murder after his obnoxious son is killed by a young, angry teen. That massive flub aside&#8211, and it is a big one&#8211, A New Beginning is actually kinda fun. Additionally, it has an all-timer of a kill sequence thanks to the ever-reliable Miguel Nuez Jr., an outhouse, and some burritos.

5. The New Blood ( 1988 ): Friday the 13th Part VII

The biggest knock against Freddy vs. Jason is that it learned nothing from the far superior seventh entry in the franchise, in which Freddy fights Carrie White. Okay, it’s not really Carrie White, but teen Tina ( Lar Park Lincoln ) does share the same psychokinetic powers and parent issues as the well-known character from the Stephen King novel and Brian DePalma movie. On the orders of her unscrupulous therapist, Tina goes to Camp Crystal Lake for isolated study, and inadvertently brings Jason back from his watery grave.

From there, Jason has plenty of room to do what he does best in The New Blood. As so often happens with the top entries on this list, censors did cut down a lot of the movie, which diminishes the shock of its best kill scenes. There is something triumphant in watching Jason shove a weed eater into the therapist’s face, even if we don’t get all the bloody gory.

4. Part 2 of Friday the 13th ( 1981 )

It would n&#8217, t be accurate to say that this list would not exist without Friday the 13th Part 2. However, that statement isn’t entirely accurate either. Part 2 took everything good about its predecessor and did it better, actually giving us Jason in the flesh and an excellent final girl in Ginny ( Amy Steel ).

Additionally, Part 2 provides the first illustration of what the franchise actually becomes. A bunch of teens come to the camp, and Jason ( wearing a burlap bag instead of the hockey mask that would be his trademark ) kills them in inventive, gory ways. Part II makes a strong case for Friday the 13th as a reputable series in addition to the pure energy of the kills and an actually intelligent final girl in Ginny.

3. Jason X ( 2001 )

If Friday the 13th Part 2 says that Jason deserves respect, then Jason X suggests maybe he does n&#8217, t. And that &#8217, s a good thing. Jason X belongs to the long and odd line of horror films that transport their murderers to space. Although that approach has had mixed results with the Leprechaun or Pinhead, it still works well with Jason.

Well, mostly perfectly. There are so many characters, and Jason X wants so badly to be a Kevin Williamson or Joss Whedon movie, and he can’t say anything without dripping it in snark. Yet, these annoyances aside, it &#8217, s hard not to cheer when uber-Jason takes the stage or when he&#8217, s killing people with space-age weapons and chemicals.

2. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives ( 1986 )

Jason Lives was Scream before Scream in Part VI. Okay, okay, that &#8217, s going too far. However, Part VI has a metatextual quality that both acknowledges the absurdity of the franchise and firmly places it in horror history. Jason Lives completes the Tommy Jarvis trilogy with yet another actor playing the part ( Thom Matthews here ), but it makes him into a proper Jason hunter and gives him a reason to accidentally resurrect the killer.

Even better, the film strikes a balance between clever jokes and effective kills. There&#8217, s, of course, the James Bond opening in which Jason throws a machete at the screen. However, there is also the pitch black joke when one child realizes that Jason is coming to get him and asks,” So, what did you want to be when you were growing up?” &#8221, A genuinely smart Friday the 13th movie? Believe it or not, yes!

1. The final chapter of Friday the 13th ( 1984 )

It took four movies for Friday the 13th to get it right. But man, did it actually get it right? The Final Chapter is the platonic ideal of a slasher movie. It has interesting victims, lean, and some incredible and unforgettable kills. It even has a great kid performance from Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis at his youngest and awesome Savini effects.

The Final Chapter‘s story isn’t particularly interesting. Again, we have teens coming to party at the campground, at the same time that single mom Mrs. Jarvis ( Joan Freeman ) arrives with her kids Trish ( Kimberly Beck ) and Tommy. However, that skewed plot allows for some excellent kills and for the teens to stand out. I mean, when you have Crispin Glover as a slasher movie teen, you don&#8217, t need any plot. The Final Chapter is the 13th movie’s perfect Friday, simple, and sparse.

The post Friday the 13th Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

The Black Phone and V/H/S/8 5 have clues in this post. In two days, the history of the Grabber continues, as Black Phone 2 comes to venues on October 17. Someone who doesn’t want to wait until that point you pique their interest by seeing a completely different film. Before casting Ethan Hawke as the Grabber, Mason ]…]

The Forgotten VHS Entry That’s a Black Phone Sequel initially appeared on Den of Geek.

Jason shows aren&#8217, t supposed to be good. They weren’t actually supposed to be about Jason, hmm. Back in the late 1970s, supplier Sean S. Cunningham saw the economic achievements of Halloween and an opportunity to cash in himself. In response, he ran an advertisement for a film called Friday the 13th that riffed on the John Carpenter movie’s trip theme.

Only later did he come up with the idea of a whodunnit, in which a criminal begins menacing lawyers trying to restart a camp times after a junior named Jason Voorhees drowned it. As everyone is well aware, Jason&#8217, Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s family, wanted to stop Camp Crystal Lake from reopening. The shock end of that picture, in which Jason emerges from the water to get a last lady, was only tacked on because Cunningham wanted to copy the shock ending of Carrie.

Creativity wasn’t the end objective. Cash was. And to accomplish that, Cunningham and Paramount Pictures succeeded, as Friday the 13th was a huge hit, as were its second some sequels. And yet, apparently, imagination happened yet. In the next film, Jason stepped up and replaced his family. And midway through the next movie, Jason got his name face, entirely becoming a dread image.

As you might have guessed, that prolix way produced movies of varying quality. Not all of the Friday the 13th shows are wonderful, but they all offer something for watching—if just the terrible death of some camp counsellor of ill-repute.

12. Friday the 13th ( 2009 )

Who specifically is the 2009 version of Friday the 13th for? One may think that a reboot of the collection may try to clarify the franchise&#8217, s notably wandering and vague timeframe to make things easier for fresh viewers. Instead, Friday the 13th ( 2009 )’s first 30 minutes attempt to condense the first three movies into a single prologue, complete with killer Pamela ( portrayed by Nana Visitor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ) and baghead Jason. The beginning just confuses visitors and feeds long-time enthusiasts ephemeral &#8216, part berries, pleasing no one&#8211, which accurately sums up the film.

Which is not to say that the reboot lacks its charms, which isn’t. Derek Mears is fantastic as a more feral Jason, trading dynamic energy for the usual slow-moving beast of previous films. The film pulls off a surprising final girl fake out and does a great job with its young adult jerks. Still, Friday the 13th 2009 never shakes the feeling of being a fan film instead of a proper entry in the series.

11. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan ( 1989 )

People have been making fun of this film for more than three and a half decades because the majority of it is shot on a boat and the majority of the New York and Vancouver sections. And you know what? All that mockery belongs to Jason Takes Manhattan, though! Why give the eighth Friday the 13th entry that name if you &#8217, re never going to actually be in Manhattan (outside of some second unit stuff shot for the opening credits )?

Sincerely, if anything interesting happened in the movie, we could forgive a boat and we could forgive Canada. But, outside of a couple of cool kills, nothing does. Jason Takes Manhattan instead spends way too much time once more mythologizing the death of a young Jason ( which may or may not have happened, depending on the status of Fridays II, III, and IV ). In the end, Jason Takes Manhattan succeeds at nothing: not drama, not horror, and not even taking Manhattan.

10. Friday the 13th Part III ( 1983 )

After the first two entries, Friday the 13th ran the risk of becoming predictable and rote. Cunningham and Paramount were aware of this. They knew they had to shake things up. They made the gimmick that would set the series apart, perhaps the most disastrous one. They decided that Part III would be in 3-D.

Everything in Part III is well-known, from the group of counselors reopening the camp to the hicks who turn into early cannon fodder to the shocking ending in which Pamela emerges from the lake to grab the final girl. And unless you &#8217, re using the flimsy blue and red 3D glasses that get distributed with modern releases, or unless you saw a special screening at a repertory theater, you &#8217, re watching all of this in 2-D, making the pointy bits annoying instead of compelling. Part III at least finally reveals Jason his hockey mask. Outside of that, everything in this movie is a dud.

9. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday ( 1993 )

Jason Goes to Hell, like Jason Takes Manhattan, falls short of the title’s expectations. No, Jason does n&#8217, t spend time in Hell in this movie. Instead, he&#8217 is scurrying around a town in New Jersey. No, it &#8217, s not the final Friday movie, as this list shows. The most shocking of all is Jason, who isn’t even mentioned in Jason Goes to Hell when he is blown up by government agents in the cold air.

Instead, Jason Goes to Hell directly rips from The Hidden to introduce a bunch of nonsense lore about Jason being a demonic worm that can jump into other bodies. So instead of seeing Kane Hodder or any other big men play Jason, we instead see Jason as Richard Grant or Stephen Culp, who are hardly imposing actors. That said, Jason Goes to Hell commits so much to its absurd premise that it does provide some wacky fun for those who don&#8217, t get hung up on Friday the 13th lore.

8. Freddy vs. Jason ( 2003 )

Freddy wins the Freddy vs. Jason game. Yes, we all know that New Line Cinema wanted to keep the actual outcome of their monster mash ambiguous, letting Jason behead the Nightmare on Elm Street monster, but having Freddy give the camera a knowing wink at the end. However, it is unquestionable that Freddy vs. Jason is both a good and bad Jason movie.

Sure, Jason gets in some cool kills and there is a part where he rips off Freddy &#8217, s arms and attacks him with them. However, other than that, director Ronny Yu&#8217’s hyper fight style and reliance on digital effects suit Freddy much better than they do Jason, and Robert Englund has a blast reprising his signature role. All in all, Freddy vs. Jason manages to be a functional monster mash with a pretty coherent story. However, if you &#8217, are here for Jason, you &#8217 will be pretty disappointed.

7. The 13th of September ( 1980 )

As discussed earlier, the first Friday the 13th is little more than a rip off of Halloween with a little bit of Carrie. Because The Burning is coming out next year, it doesn’t even get to call itself the best camp slasher of the era. Instead, it &#8217, s a pretty by-the-numbers whodunnit with none of the flash or style of the Italian Giallo that precede it.

However, Friday the 13th receives two favorable marks. First, the movie has an absolute ringer in Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees. In her final scenes, she convincingly pulls a reverse Norman Bates routine and channels her son, fully chewing on the scenery. Second, Friday the 13th has effects by Tom Savini, who gives the film a level of gore quality that, frankly, it does n&#8217, t deserve. It would be remembered as a curio if the film didn’t produce any sequels. Instead, it has to fall midway on a ranking in the franchise it started.

6. Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning ( 1985 )

Paramount made an effort to keep its word. The studio really did kill Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part IV. Paramount attempted to return to the drawing board when box office receipts made it clear that they couldn’t just ignore this profitable franchise. A New Beginning is another whodunnit with a new person doing the killing. Is it Jason who has come back from the dead? Is it Tommy Jarvis, the troubled boy who was sent to a juvenile home after killing the killer in the previous entry?

No, it’s Roy, an ambulance driver who appears once at the beginning of the film, who commits murder after his obnoxious son is killed by a teenager with an anger issue. That massive flub aside&#8211, and it is a big one&#8211, A New Beginning is actually kinda fun. Additionally, it has an all-timer of a kill sequence thanks to the ever-reliable Miguel Nuez Jr., an outhouse, and some burritos.

5. The New Blood ( 1988 ) is the title of Friday the 13th Part VII.

The biggest knock against Freddy vs. Jason is that it learned nothing from the far superior seventh entry in the franchise, in which Freddy fights Carrie White. Okay, it’s not really Carrie White, but teen Tina ( Lar Park Lincoln ) does share the same psychokinetic powers and parent issues as the well-known character from the Stephen King novel and Brian DePalma movie. On the orders of her unscrupulous therapist, Tina goes to Camp Crystal Lake for isolated study, and inadvertently brings Jason back from his watery grave.

From there, Jason has plenty of room to do what he does best in The New Blood. As so often happens with the top entries on this list, censors did cut down a lot of the movie, which diminishes the shock of its best kill scenes. There is something triumphant in watching Jason shove a weed eater into the therapist’s face, even if we don’t get all the bloody gory.

4. Part 2 of Friday the 13th ( 1981 )

It would n&#8217, t be accurate to say that this list would not exist without Friday the 13th Part 2. However, that statement isn’t entirely accurate either. Part 2 took everything good about its predecessor and did it better, actually giving us Jason in the flesh and an excellent final girl in Ginny ( Amy Steel ).

Additionally, Part 2 provides the first illustration of what the franchise actually becomes. A bunch of teens come to the camp, and Jason ( wearing a burlap bag instead of the hockey mask that would be his trademark ) kills them in inventive, gory ways. Part II makes a strong case for Friday the 13th as a reputable series in addition to the pure energy of the kills and an actually intelligent final girl in Ginny.

3. Jason X ( 2001 )

If Friday the 13th Part 2 says that Jason deserves respect, then Jason X suggests maybe he does n&#8217, t. And that &#8217, s a good thing. Jason X belongs to the long and odd line of horror films that transport their murderers to space. Although that approach has had mixed results with the Leprechaun or Pinhead, it still works well with Jason.

Well, mostly perfectly. There are so many characters, and Jason X wants so badly to be a Kevin Williamson or Joss Whedon movie, and he can’t say anything without dripping it in snark. Yet, these annoyances aside, it &#8217, s hard not to cheer when uber-Jason takes the stage or when he&#8217, s killing people with space-age weapons and chemicals.

2. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives ( 1986 )

Jason Lives was Scream before Scream in Part VI. Okay, okay, that &#8217, s going too far. However, Part VI has a metatextual quality that both acknowledges the absurdity of the franchise and firmly places it in horror history. Jason Lives completes the Tommy Jarvis trilogy with yet another actor playing the part ( Thom Matthews here ), but it makes him into a proper Jason hunter and gives him a reason to accidentally resurrect the killer.

Better yet, the film strikes a balance between clever jokes and effective kills. There&#8217, s, of course, the James Bond opening in which Jason throws a machete at the screen. However, there is a pitch-black joke that occurs when one child realizes that Jason is coming to get him and asks,” So, what did you want to be when you were growing up?” &#8221, A genuinely smart Friday the 13th movie? Believe it or not, yes!

1. The final chapter of Friday the 13th ( 1984 )

It took four movies for Friday the 13th to get it right. But man, did it actually get it right? The Final Chapter is the platonic ideal of a slasher movie. It has interesting victims, lean, and some incredible and unforgettable kills. It even has a great kid performance from Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis at his youngest and awesome Savini effects.

The Final Chapter‘s story isn’t anything special, either. Again, we have teens coming to party at the campground, at the same time that single mom Mrs. Jarvis ( Joan Freeman ) arrives with her kids Trish ( Kimberly Beck ) and Tommy. However, that skewed plot allows for some excellent kills and for the teenagers to stand out. I mean, when you have Crispin Glover as a slasher movie teen, you don&#8217, t need any plot. The Final Chapter is the 13th movie of Friday, which is simple and sparse.

The post Friday the 13th Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Jason videos aren’t supposed to be good. Heck, they weren’t actually supposed to be about Jason. Producer Sean S. Cunningham saw the economic achievements of Halloween as an opportunity to funds in himself in the late 1970s. But he took out an ad for a movie called Friday the 13th, riffing on the trip ]…]

On Den of Geek, the second post Friday the 13th Movies Ranked appeared.

Jason shows aren&#8217, t supposed to be good. They weren’t actually supposed to be about Jason, hmm. Producer Sean S. Cunningham saw the economic achievements of Halloween as an opportunity to money in himself in the late 1970s. In response, he ran an advertisement for a film called Friday the 13th that was a riff on the John Carpenter movie’s holiday theme.

Only later did he come up with the idea of a whodunnit, in which a criminal begins menacing lawyers trying to restart a camp times after a junior named Jason Voorhees drowned it. As everyone is aware of, Jason&#8217’s family Pamela Voorhees, who wanted to stop Camp Crystal Lake from reopening, was the killer. The shock end of that picture, in which Jason emerges from the water to get a last lady, was only tacked on because Cunningham wanted to copy the shock ending of Carrie.

Creativity wasn’t the end objective. Income was. And to achieve that, Cunningham and Paramount Pictures were successful, with Friday the 13th being a huge hit as well as its earliest some sequels. And still, apparently, imagination happened yet. Jason replaced his mother in the next film, taking the lead. And midway through the next movie, Jason got his name face, entirely becoming a dread image.

As you might have guessed, those pictures had varying levels of quality as a result of this prolix approach. Not all of the Friday the 13th shows are wonderful, but they all offer something for watching—if just the terrible death of some camp counsellor of ill-repute.

12. Friday the 13th ( 2009 )

Who accurately is the 2009 version of Friday the 13th for? One may think that a reboot of the collection may try to clarify the franchise&#8217, s reportedly wandering and vague timeframe to make things easier for fresh viewers. Instead, Friday the 13th ( 2009 )’s first 30 minutes attempt to condense the first three movies into a single prologue, complete with killer Pamela ( portrayed by Nana Visitor of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ) and baghead Jason. The beginning just confuses visitors and feeds long-time enthusiasts ephemeral &#8216, part berries, pleasing no one&#8211, which accurately sums up the film.

Which is not to say that the reboot lacks charm, though. Derek Mears is fantastic as a more feral Jason, trading dynamic energy for the usual slow-moving beast of previous films. The film pulls off a surprising final girl fake out thanks to the excellent acting by the cast of young adult jerks. Still, Friday the 13th 2009 never shakes the feeling of being a fan film instead of a proper entry in the series.

11. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan ( 1989 )

People have been making fun of this film for more than three and a half decades because the majority of it is shot on a boat and the majority of the New York and Vancouver sections are actually in the water. And you know what? Jason Takes Manhattan deserves a lot of mockery! Why give the eighth Friday the 13th entry that name if you &#8217, re never going to actually be in Manhattan (outside of some second unit stuff shot for the opening credits )?

Sincerely, we could forgive a boat and Canada if anything interesting happened in the movie. But, outside of a couple of cool kills, nothing does. Jason Takes Manhattan instead spends way too much time mythologizing the tragic passing of a young Jason ( which, depending on the status of Fridays II, III, and IV ), again. In the end, Jason Takes Manhattan succeeds at nothing: not drama, not horror, and not even taking Manhattan.

10. Friday the 13th Part III ( 1983 )

After the first two entries, Friday the 13th ran the risk of becoming predictable and rote. Cunningham and Paramount were aware of this. They knew they had to shake things up. They made the gimmick that would set the series apart, perhaps the most disastrous one. They decided that Part III would be in 3-D.

Everything in Part III is well-known, from the group of counselors reopening the camp to the hicks who turn into early cannon fodder to the &#8220, shocker &#8221, ending in which Pamela emerges from the lake to grab the final girl. And unless you &#8217, re using the flimsy blue and red 3D glasses that get distributed with modern releases, or unless you saw a special screening at a repertory theater, you &#8217, re watching all of this in 2-D, making the pointy bits annoying instead of compelling. Jason receives his hockey mask at the end of Part III. Outside of that, everything in this movie is a dud.

9. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday ( 1993 )

Like Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes to Hell falls short of the title’s intended use. No, Jason does n&#8217, t spend time in Hell in this movie. He&#8217 is instead scurrying around a town in New Jersey. No, it &#8217, s not the final Friday movie, as this list shows. Most shocking of all, Jason isn’t even in Jason Goes to Hell when he is blown up by government agents in the cold open.

Instead, Jason Goes to Hell directly rips from The Hidden to introduce a bunch of nonsense lore about Jason being a demonic worm that can jump into other bodies. So Jason is cast as Richard Grant or Stephen Culp, not as imposing as Kane Hodder or any other big-boy actor, which is not what we get. That said, Jason Goes to Hell commits so much to its absurd premise that it does provide some wacky fun for those who don&#8217, t get hung up on Friday the 13th lore.

8. Freddy vs. Jason ( 2003 )

Freddy wins the Freddy vs. Jason game. Yes, we all know that New Line Cinema wanted to keep the actual outcome of their monster mash ambiguous, letting Jason behead the Nightmare on Elm Street monster, but having Freddy give the camera a knowing wink at the end. However, it is unquestionably a bad Jason movie and a good Freddy movie.

Sure, Jason gets in some cool kills and there is a part where he rips off Freddy &#8217, s arms and attacks him with them. However, other than that, director Ronny Yu&#8217’s hyper fight style and reliance on digital effects suit Freddy much better than Jason, and Robert Englund has a blast reprising his signature role. All in all, Freddy vs. Jason manages to be a functional monster mash with a pretty coherent story. However, if you’re here for Jason and are willing to pay a premium, you’ll be disappointed.

7. 1980’s Friday the 13th

As discussed earlier, the first Friday the 13th is little more than a rip off of Halloween with a little bit of Carrie. The Burning will be released the following year, so it doesn’t even get to call itself the best camp slasher of all time. Instead, it &#8217, s a pretty by-the-numbers whodunnit with none of the flash or style of the Italian Giallo that precede it.

However, Friday the 13th receives two favorable marks. First, the movie has an absolute ringer in Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees. In her final scenes, she convincingly pulls a reverse Norman Bates routine and channels her son, chewing on the scenery. Second, Friday the 13th has effects by Tom Savini, who gives the film a level of gore quality that, frankly, it does n&#8217, t deserve. If the film didn’t produce any sequels, it would be remembered as a curio. Instead, it has to fall midway on a ranking in the franchise it started.

6. Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning ( 1985 )

Paramount made an effort to keep its word. The studio really did kill Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part IV. Paramount attempted to return to the drawing board when box office receipts made it clear that they couldn’t just ignore this profitable franchise. A New Beginning is another whodunnit with a new person doing the killing. Is it Jason who has come back from the dead? Is it Tommy Jarvis, the troubled boy who was sent to a juvenile home after killing the killer in the previous entry?

No, it &#8217 is not Roy, an ambulance driver we only see once at the beginning of the film, who commits murder after his obnoxious son is killed by a teenager with an anger issue. That massive flub aside&#8211, and it is a big one&#8211, A New Beginning is actually kinda fun. And it has a kill sequence that lasts forever thanks to the reliable Miguel Nuez Jr., an outhouse, and some burritos.

5. The New Blood ( 1988 ) is the title of Friday the 13th Part VII.

The biggest knock against Freddy vs. Jason is that it learned nothing from the far superior seventh entry in the franchise, in which Freddy fights Carrie White. Okay, it’s not really Carrie White, but teen Tina ( Lar Park Lincoln ) does share the same psychokinetic powers and parent issues as the well-known character from the Stephen King novel and Brian DePalma movie. On the orders of her unscrupulous therapist, Tina goes to Camp Crystal Lake for isolated study, and inadvertently brings Jason back from his watery grave.

From there, Jason has plenty of room to do what he does best in The New Blood. As so often happens with the top entries on this list, censors did cut down a lot of the movie, which diminishes the shock of its best kill scenes. There is something triumphant in watching Jason shove a weed eater into the therapist’s face, even if we don’t get all the bloody gory.

4. Part 2 of Friday the 13th ( 1981 )

It would n&#8217, t be accurate to say that this list would not exist without Friday the 13th Part 2. However, that statement isn’t entirely accurate either. Part 2 took everything good about its predecessor and did it better, actually giving us Jason in the flesh and an excellent final girl in Ginny ( Amy Steel ).

Additionally, Part 2 provides the first illustration of what the franchise actually becomes. A bunch of teens come to the camp, and Jason ( wearing a burlap bag instead of the hockey mask that would be his trademark ) kills them in inventive, gory ways. Part II makes a strong case for Friday the 13th as a reputable series in addition to the pure energy of the kills and an actually intelligent final girl in Ginny.

3. Jason X ( 2001 )

If Friday the 13th Part 2 says that Jason deserves respect, then Jason X suggests maybe he does n&#8217, t. And that &#8217, s a good thing. Jason X belongs to the long and odd line of horror films that transport their murderers to space. Although that approach has had mixed results with the Leprechaun or Pinhead, it still works well with Jason.

Well, mostly perfectly. There are so many characters, and Jason X wants so badly to be a Kevin Williamson or Joss Whedon movie, and he can’t say anything without dripping it in snark. Yet, these annoyances aside, it &#8217, s hard not to cheer when uber-Jason takes the stage or when he&#8217, s killing people with space-age weapons and chemicals.

2. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives ( 1986 )

Jason Lives was Scream before Scream in Part VI. Okay, okay, that &#8217, s going too far. However, Part VI has a metatextual quality that both acknowledges the absurdity of the franchise and firmly places it in horror history. Jason Lives completes the Tommy Jarvis trilogy with yet another actor playing the part ( Thom Matthews here ), but it makes him into a proper Jason hunter and gives him a reason to accidentally resurrect the killer.

Even better, the film strikes a balance between clever jokes and effective kills. There&#8217, s, of course, the James Bond opening in which Jason throws a machete at the screen. However, there is also the pitch black joke when one child realizes that Jason is coming to get him and asks,” So, what did you want to be when you were growing up?” &#8221, A genuinely smart Friday the 13th movie? Believe it or not, yes!

1. The final chapter of Friday the 13th ( 1984 )

It took four movies for Friday the 13th to get it right. But man, did it actually get it right? The Final Chapter is the platonic ideal of a slasher movie. It has interesting victims, is lean, and some incredible and unforgettable kills. It even has a great kid performance from Corey Feldman as Tommy Jarvis at his youngest and awesome Savini effects.

The Final Chapter‘s plot isn’t anything special, either. Again, we have teens coming to party at the campground, at the same time that single mom Mrs. Jarvis ( Joan Freeman ) arrives with her kids Trish ( Kimberly Beck ) and Tommy. However, that skewed plot allows for some excellent kills and for the teens to stand out. I mean, when you have Crispin Glover as a slasher movie teen, you don&#8217, t need any plot. The Final Chapter is what every Friday the 13th movie should be, sparse and straightforward.

On Den of Geek, the second post Friday the 13th Movies Ranked appeared.

” Any reply”? is perhaps one of the worst ways to ask for opinions. It’s obscure and unfocused, and it doesn’t give a clear picture of what we’re looking for. Getting good opinions starts sooner than we might hope: it starts with the demand.

Starting the process of receiving feedback with a question may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense if we consider that receiving input can be seen as a form of design research. In the same way that we wouldn’t perform any studies without the correct questions to get the insight that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to build strong issues.

Design criticism is not a one-time procedure. Sure, any great comments process continues until the project is finished, but this is especially true for layout because architecture work continues iteration after iteration, from a high level to the finest details. Each stage requires its unique set of questions.

And suddenly, as with any great research, we need to examine what we got up, get to the base of its perspectives, and take action. Iteration, evaluation, and problem. This look at each of those.

The query

Being available to input is important, but we need to be specific about what we’re looking for. Any comments,” What do you think,” or” I’d love to hear your mind” at the conclusion of a presentation are likely to garner a lot of different ideas, or worse, to make everyone follow the lead of the first speaker. And next… we get frustrated because vague issues like those can change a high-level moves review into folks rather commenting on the borders of buttons. Which topic may be important, so it might be difficult to get the team to pay attention to it.

But how do we get into this scenario? A number of elements are involved. One is that we don’t often consider asking as a part of the input approach. Another is how healthy it is to keep the issue open and assume that everyone else will agree. Another is that in nonprofessional debate, there’s usually no need to be that exact. In summary, we tend to undervalue the value of the issues, and we don’t work to improve them.

The work of asking good questions guidelines and focuses the criticism. It also serves as a form of acceptance, outlining your willingness to make remarks and the types of comments you want to receive. It puts people in the right emotional position, especially in situations when they weren’t expecting to provide feedback.

There isn’t a second best method to request suggestions. It simply needs to be certain, and sensitivity can take several shapes. The concept of stage over level is a concept for design critique that I’ve found to be particularly helpful in my coaching.

” Stage” refers to each of the steps of the process—in our case, the design process. The type of feedback changes as the user research moves on to the final design. But within a single step, one might still review whether some assumptions are correct and whether there’s been a proper translation of the amassed feedback into updated designs as the project has evolved. The layers of user experience could serve as a starting point for future inquiries. What do you want to know: Project objectives? user requirements? Functionality? Content? Interaction design? Information architecture UI design? Navigation planning? Visual design? branding?

Here’re a few example questions that are precise and to the point that refer to different layers:

• Functionality: Is it desirable to automate account creation?
• Interaction design: Take a look through the updated flow and let me know whether you see any steps or error states that I might’ve missed.
• Information architecture: This page contains two competing pieces of information. Is the structure effective in communicating them both?
• User interface design: What do you think about the top-most error counter, which ensures that you can see the next error even when the error is outside the viewport?
• Navigation design: From research, we identified these second-level navigation items, but once you’re on the page, the list feels too long and hard to navigate. Do you have any suggestions for how to handle this?
• Visual design: Are the sticky notifications in the bottom-right corner visible enough?

The other axis of specificity is determined by how far you’d like to go with the information being presented. For example, we might have introduced a new end-to-end flow, but there was a specific view that you found particularly challenging and you’d like a detailed review of that. This can be especially helpful when switching between iterations because it’s crucial to highlight the changes made.

There are other things that we can consider when we want to achieve more specific—and more effective—questions.

A quick fix is to get rid of the generic qualifiers from questions like “good,” “well,” “nice,” “bad,” “okay,” and” cool.” For example, asking,” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is this interaction good”? is it possible to look specific, but you can spot the “good” qualifier and make the question” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is it clear what the next action is” look like?

Sometimes we actually do want broad feedback. Although that’s uncommon, it can occur. In that sense, you might still make it explicit that you’re looking for a wide range of opinions, whether at a high level or with details. Or perhaps just say,” At first glance, what do you think”? so that it’s clear that what you’re asking is open ended but focused on someone’s impression after their first five seconds of looking at it.

Sometimes the project is particularly broad, and some areas may have already been thoroughly explored. In these situations, it might be useful to explicitly say that some parts are already locked in and aren’t open to feedback. Although it’s not something I’d recommend in general, I’ve found it helpful in avoiding falling into rabbit holes like those that could lead to further refinement but aren’t what’s important right now.

Asking specific questions can completely change the quality of the feedback that you receive. People with less refined criticism will now be able to provide more actionable feedback, and even expert designers will appreciate the clarity and effectiveness gained from concentrating solely on what’s needed. It can save a lot of time and frustration.

The iteration

Design iterations are probably the most visible part of the design work, and they provide a natural checkpoint for feedback. Many design tools have inline commenting, but many of them only display changes as a single fluid stream in the same file. These types of design tools cause conversations to end after they are resolved, update shared UI components automatically, and require designers to always display the most recent version unless these would-be useful features were manually disabled. The implied goal that these design tools seem to have is to arrive at just one final copy with all discussions closed, probably because they inherited patterns from how written documents are collaboratively edited. That approach to design critiques is probably not the best approach, but some teams might benefit from it even if I don’t want to be too prescriptive.

The asynchronous design-critique approach that I find most effective is to create explicit checkpoints for discussion. For this, I’m going to use the term iteration post. It refers to a write-up or presentation of the design iteration followed by a discussion thread of some kind. This can be used on any platform that can accommodate this structure. By the way, when I refer to a “write-up or presentation“, I’m including video recordings or other media too: as long as it’s asynchronous, it works.

There are many benefits to using iteration posts:

• It creates a rhythm in the design work so that the designer can review feedback from each iteration and prepare for the next.
• Decisions are always available, and conversations are also made accessible for future review.
• It creates a record of how the design changed over time.
• It might also make it simpler to collect and act on feedback depending on the tool.

These posts of course don’t mean that no other feedback approach should be used, just that iteration posts could be the primary rhythm for a remote design team to use. From there, there can be additional feedback techniques ( such as live critique, pair designing, or inline comments ).

I don’t think there’s a standard format for iteration posts. However, there are a few high-level components that make sense to include as a baseline:

1. The goal
2. The layout
3. The list of changes
4. The querys

Each project is likely to have a goal, and hopefully it’s something that’s already been summarized in a single sentence somewhere else, such as the client brief, the product manager’s outline, or the project owner’s request. In every iteration post, I would copy and paste this, so I could do it again. The idea is to provide context and to repeat what’s essential to make each iteration post complete so that there’s no need to find information spread across multiple posts. The most recent iteration post will have everything I need if I want to know about the most recent design.

This copy-and-paste part introduces another relevant concept: alignment comes from repetition. Therefore, repeating information in posts is actually very effective at ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

The design is then the actual series of information-architecture outlines, diagrams, flows, maps, wireframes, screens, visuals, and any other kind of design work that’s been done. It’s any design artifact, in essence. For the final stages of work, I prefer the term blueprint to emphasize that I’ll be showing full flows instead of individual screens to make it easier to understand the bigger picture.

Because it makes it easier to refer to the objects, it might also be helpful to have clear names on them. Write the post in a way that helps people understand the work. It’s not much different from creating a strong live presentation.

For an efficient discussion, you should also include a bullet list of the changes from the previous iteration to let people focus on what’s new, which can be especially useful for larger pieces of work where keeping track, iteration after iteration, could become a challenge.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, a list of the questions must be included in order to help you guide the design critique. Doing this as a numbered list can also help make it easier to refer to each question by its number.

Not every iteration is the same. Earlier iterations don’t need to be as tightly focused—they can be more exploratory and experimental, maybe even breaking some of the design-language guidelines to see what’s possible. Then, later, the iterations begin coming to a decision and improving it until the design process is complete and the feature is ready.

I want to highlight that even if these iteration posts are written and conceived as checkpoints, by no means do they need to be exhaustive. A post might be a draft, just a concept to start a discussion, or it might be a cumulative list of all the features that have been added over the course of each iteration until the full picture is achieved.

Over time, I also started using specific labels for incremental iterations: i1, i2, i3, and so on. Although this may seem like a minor labeling tip, it can be useful in many ways:

• Unique—It’s a clear unique marker. One can quickly say,” This was discussed in i4″ with each project, and everyone knows where to go to review things.
• Unassuming—It works like versions ( such as v1, v2, and v3 ) but in contrast, versions create the impression of something that’s big, exhaustive, and complete. Attempts must be exploratory, incomplete, or partial.
• Future proof—It resolves the “final” naming problem that you can run into with versions. No more files with the title “final final complete no-really-its-done” Within each project, the largest number always represents the latest iteration.

The wording release candidate (RC ) could be used to describe a design as complete enough to be worked on, even if there might be some bits that still need more attention and in turn, more iterations would be required, such as” with i8 we reached RC” or “i12 is an RC” to indicate when it is finished.

The review

A back-and-forth between two people that can be very productive typically occurs during a design critique. This approach is particularly effective during live, synchronous feedback. However, when we work asynchronously, it is more effective to adopt a different strategy: we can adopt a user-research mindset. Written feedback from teammates, stakeholders, or others can be treated as if it were the result of user interviews and surveys, and we can analyze it accordingly.

Asynchronous feedback is particularly effective around these friction points because of this shift’s significant benefits:

1. It removes the pressure to reply to everyone.
2. It lessens the annoyance of snoop-by comments.
3. It lessens our personal stake.

The first friction point is having to press yourself to respond to each and every comment. Sometimes we write the iteration post, and we get replies from our team. It’s simple, straightforward, and doesn’t cause any issues. But other times, some solutions might require more in-depth discussions, and the amount of replies can quickly increase, which can create a tension between trying to be a good team player by replying to everyone and doing the next design iteration. If the respondent is a stakeholder or a person directly involved in the project, this might be especially true. We need to accept that this pressure is absolutely normal, and it’s human nature to try to accommodate people who we care about. Responding to all comments at times can be effective, but when we consider a design critique more like user research, we realize that we don’t need to respond to every comment, and there are alternatives in asynchronous spaces:

One is to let the next iteration speak for itself. When the design changes and we publish a follow-up iteration, that’s the response. You might tag all the people who were involved in the previous discussion, but even that’s a choice, not a requirement.
• Another option is to respond politely to acknowledge each comment, such as” Understood. Thank you”,” Good points— I’ll review”, or” Thanks. These will be included in the upcoming iteration. In some cases, this could also be just a single top-level comment along the lines of” Thanks for all the feedback everyone—the next iteration is coming soon”!
• Another option is to provide a quick summary of the comments before moving on. Depending on your workflow, this can be particularly useful as it can provide a simplified checklist that you can then use for the next iteration.

The swoop-by comment, which is the kind of feedback that comes from a member of a team or non-project who might not be aware of the context, restrictions, decisions, or requirements, or of the discussions from earlier iterations, is the second friction point. On their side, there’s something that one can hope that they might learn: they could start to acknowledge that they’re doing this and they could be more conscious in outlining where they’re coming from. Swoop-by comments frequently prompt the simple thought,” We’ve already discussed this,” and it can be frustrating to have to keep coming back and forth.

Let’s begin by acknowledging again that there’s no need to reply to every comment. However, a brief response with a link to the previous discussion for additional information is typically sufficient if responding to a previously litigated point might be helpful. Remember, alignment comes from repetition, so it’s okay to repeat things sometimes!

Swoop-by commenting can still be useful for two reasons: first, they might point out something that isn’t clear, and second, they might have the power to fit in with a user’s perspective when they are seeing the design for the first time. Sure, you’ll still be frustrated, but that might at least help in dealing with it.

The personal stake we might have in relation to the design could be the third friction point, which might cause us to feel defensive if the review turned out to be more of a discussion. Treating feedback as user research helps us create a healthy distance between the people giving us feedback and our ego ( because yes, even if we don’t want to admit it, it’s there ). In the end, putting everything in aggregate form helps us to prioritize our work more.

Always remember that while you need to listen to stakeholders, project owners, and specific advice, you don’t have to accept every piece of feedback. You must examine it and come up with a conclusion that you can support, but sometimes “no” is the best choice.

As the designer leading the project, you’re in charge of that decision. In the end, everyone has their area of specialization, and the designer has the most background and knowledge to make the best choice. And by listening to the feedback that you’ve received, you’re making sure that it’s also the best and most balanced decision.

Thanks to Mike Shelton and Brie Anne Demkiw for their contributions to the initial draft of this article.