Friday the 13th: The Series

"Lewis Vendredi made a deal with the devil to sell cursed antiques. But he broke the pact, and it cost him his soul. Now, his niece Micki and her cousin Ryan have inherited the store... and with it, the curse. Now they must get everything back--and the real terror begins."

—The Opening Narration

Despite its title, Friday the 13th: The Series (1987-1990) had nothing to do with Jason Voorhees or any of the characters or events of the Friday the 13 th movies. Instead, it followed Micki Foster and Ryan Dallion as they attempted to track down all of the cursed artifacts that their uncle Lewis Vendredi had sold out of his antiques shop as part of his Deal with the Devil.

After their uncle broke the pact and the Devil claimed his soul, Micki and Ryan inherited "Vendredi's Antiques" and renamed it "Curious Goods." It became their base of operations as they set out to reclaim all of the cursed antiques with the help of Jack Marshak, a friend of their uncle. Marshak was an expert in the occult who had acquired many of the antiques for Vendredi during his world travels, and therefore was often familiar with their magical attributes.

Typically an artifact would grant some supernatural power to its owner, but the price of using the power would all but inevitably be someone's life. There was the scalpel that could be used to cure any disease after it was used as a murder weapon, the scarecrow that would produce good crops after killing three sacrificial victims, etc.

A textbook case of Gotta Catch Them All.

Tropes used in Friday the 13th: The Series include:

• Age Without Youth: How Uncle Lewis' Deal with the Devil falls apart.
• Artifact Collection Agency
• Artifact of Doom: One of the series' central tropes.
• Astral Projection: The modus operendi of the wheelchair in "Crippled Inside"
• Attempted Rape: The episode "Wedding in Black" had Micki being captured by the Devil in a fantasy world from inside a magical snow globe and that he had attempted to impregnate her with a demonic child. Fortunately, she was able to get away before things got worse.
  • The episode "Crippled Inside" had a young girl named Rachel Horn being attacked by four boys during a "supposed date" with one of them. When the leader of the group holds her down on the ground and attempts to have his way with her, Rachel knees him in the groin and is able to get away from him and his friends.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: When you have a slew of Artifacts of Doom which either require someone to die in order to grant miracles to their users, or it just makes it easier to straightout kill someone, it is nearly impossible to use any of these items to do good, and the villain of the week is usually some unrepentant sociopath who uses the artifact to kill people or kills people to use the item.
• Back From the Dead: Some of the antiques allowed this. One in particular, the Coin of Ziocles, killed and then later resurrected a main character.
• Baleful Polymorph: "My Wife As A Dog", where one man uses it to turn his wife into a dog, and his dog into a wife.
• Bilingual Bonus: "Vendredi" happens to be French for "Friday."
• Body Horror: Notably "Faith Healer," directed by David Cronenberg.
• Brown Note: Sometimes, the objects will control an innocent into doing something terrible, even committing murder or suicide.
• Butt Monkey: In the first season, if something bad happened, it was generally to Ryan. Later, Mikki began to show signs of Butt Monkey-hood, repeatedly getting the dirty end of whatever Artifact of Doom they were after that week.
• Car Fu: "Night Hunger"
• Cartwright Curse: If you date a main character on this show, make sure your life insurance is paid up.
• Clip Show: "Bottle of Dreams"
• Contractual Immortality: Again, Lewis Vendredi.
• Cool Old Guy: Jack Marshak.
• Creepy Doll: The pilot episode. Ironically, this was one of the very few items where it didn't actually require a death to operate (though it did kill people)
• Christianity Is Catholic
• Deal with the Devil: Lewis literally did this, which is how the objects got cursed in the first place. But each cursed object is effectively this as well, as its user is tempted into doing evil for the sake of using its power. Unfortunately for Lewis and the vast majority of cursed object users, these deals work out like all deals with the Devil do... badly, for everyone but the Devil.
• Death by Materialism: If not used to get revenge against a greedy individual, the cursed object may provide some sort of material gain to the user. In other words, your death is used to satisfy someone else's material gain.
• Death by Mocking: This is why you shouldn't pick on customers of Vendredi Antiques.
• Deliberately Monochrome: During Time Travel episodes, the past is in black and white.
• Demonic Dummy: Surprisingly, the dummy itself wasn't one of the cursed items. Rather, the curse was on the boutonniere it was wearing, which brought it to life.
• Devil but No God: Usually played straight, but notably averted in one episode, when the Virgin Mary appears and acts as a literal Deus Ex Machina.
• Dolled-Up Installment: The show was originally titled The 13th Hour, but executives forced a renaming to draw in audiences.
• Eighties Hair
• Everything's Worse with Bees: "The Sweetest Sting"
• Fantastic Racism: "The Shaman's Apprentice" had a Native American doctor who faced discrimination from his fellow doctors who had disrespected his Shamanist faith.
  • And of course, there's "Hate on Your Dial".
• Finger-Twitching Revival - Ryan gets one in "Vanity's Mirror", followed by a case of Worst Aid from Micky, who jerks him to his feet without checking the extent of his injuries at all (He fell a good 20 feet, had a bleeding head wound, and could very well have had a broken neck.)
• Groin Attack: Happens in "Better Off Dead" and "Crippled Inside".
• Gotta Catch Them All
• Halloween Episode: "Hellowe'en"
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The show's villains frequently die when their own evil antiques backfire on them.
• Hollywood Voodoo: Utterly averted in "The Voodoo Mambo".
• In Name Only: The series' tenuous connection with the movies.
• Instrument of Murder: One episode featured a cursed violin. The violin itself wasn't used as a weapon, but the hidden blade in the bow certainly was.
• Jack the Ripper's scalpel was the artifact in "Dr. Jack", and a syringe supposedly belonging to him was the artifact in "Better off Dead."
• Liquid Assets: "A Cup of Time"
• Living Shadow: "Shadow Boxer"
• Necromantic "Epitaph for a Lonely Soul"
• Noodle Incident: Occasionally we get a mention of a cursed antique that isn't the focus of an episode-for example, the start of "Wedding Bell Blues" has Jack and Ryan dressed in cold weather clothing and Ryan complaining about chasing after cursed snowshoes.
• Ominous Jack-in-the-Box Tune: In this case, "What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor." Usually a cheery shanty, it becomes much more sinister when played slowly.
• Only One Name: Louise Robey who plays Mikki Foster is only in the opening credits as "Robey"
• Our Vampires Are Different: "The Baron's Bride" and "Night Prey."
• Paranormal Investigation
• Portal Picture: Used in the last episode. A painting that allows a obsessed history professor to contact the Marquis de Sade in the past, where the two exchange bodies of their victims.
• Politically-Correct History: Beyond averted in "Hate On Your Dial"
• Psycho Electro: "The Electrocutioner"
• Scary Scarecrows: "The Scarecrow"
• Shower Scene: Micki gets one in the second episode.
• Stage Magician: "The Great Montarro"
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: When actor John D. LeMay left the show at the end of the second season, his character Ryan was written out of the series (by being transformed into a little boy!) and replaced by Steve Monarque as Johnny Ventura (who had appeared as a Sixth Ranger in previous episodes).
• Sympathetic Murderer: Occasionally. "Badge of Honor" and "Crippled Inside" are two examples, with the added bonus of all of the victims being deserving of their fates.
• Tele Frag: A combination of this and Portal Cut happens to the villain in "Eye of Death". The slide projector he'd been using to travel to the past gets shut off just as he tries to jump through the portal to the present, leaving him embedded in his wall. Ouch.
• The One With...: The one with the cursed [X].
• The Power of Blood: Often, this is used to make an object work when simply killing someone isn't enough.
• Time Stands Still: "13 O'Clock"
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Book of Lucifer.
• Victim of the Week
• What the Hell, Hero?: Near the end of the episode "Shadow Boxer", the villain breaks into Curious Goods and takes Micki hostage, threatening to hurt her if Ryan and Jack don't give back the cursed boxing gloves. Ryan gets the gloves from the Vault and instead of giving it to the villain, he decides to use them in order to help save Micki. Of course, Ryan must've forgotten earlier on that in order to make the gloves work, he needs to use a random opponent as a punching bag so that his shadow can simultaenously attack its targeted victim and since Jack was near him during the time of the incident, it's safe to say that Jack got the short end of the stick and that he wasn't too pleased by Ryan's actions.
  • Another example of this trope is Johnny during Season 3 of the series. He was able to get the cursed wheelchair in the episode "Crippled Inside", but decided to give it back to the Sympathetic Murderer of the episode out of sympathy and pity of her plight. "Hate on Your Dial" had Johnny carelessly selling a cursed car radio to the brother of a racist man and "Bad Penny" had Johnny getting the cursed coin from the villain of the episode, but instead of giving it to Jack and Micki, he decides to use it in order to resurrect his dead father.
• Who You Gonna Call?
• You Look Familiar: Several actors were recycled.
• Your Worst Nightmare: "The Quilt of Hathor" and "And Now the News"