Friday the 13th Part 2[a] is a 1981 American slasher film produced and directed by Steve Miner in his directorial debut, and written by Ron Kurz.

Adrienne King, Betsy Palmer, and Walt Gorney reprise their respective roles from the first film as Alice Hardy, Pamela Voorhees, and Crazy Ralph.

Like the original film, Friday the 13th Part 2 faced opposition from the Motion Picture Association of America, who noted its "accumulative violence" as problematic, resulting in numerous cuts being made to allow an R rating.

Two months after the murders at Camp Crystal Lake, sole survivor Alice Hardy is recovering from her traumatic experience.

In her apartment, when Alice opens the refrigerator to get her cat some food, she finds the severed head of Pamela Voorhees and is murdered with an ice pick to her temple by an unknown intruder.

The camp is attended by Sandra, her boyfriend Jeff, Scott, Terry, the wheelchair user Mark, Vickie, Ted, and Paul's assistant Ginny, as well as many other trainees.

The killer then moves upstairs and impales Jeff and Sandra with a spear as they have sex, then stabs Vickie to death with a kitchen knife.

First acquiring the worldwide distribution rights, Frank Mancuso, Sr. stated, "We wanted it to be an event, where teenagers would flock to the theaters on that Friday night to see the latest episode."

The initial ideas for a sequel involved the "Friday the 13th" title being used for a series of films, released once a year, that would not have direct continuity with one another but be a separate "scary movie" in their own right.

Steve Miner, associate producer on the first film, believed in the idea and would go on to direct the first two sequels, after Cunningham opted not to return to the director's chair.

Adrienne King was pursued by an obsessed fan after the success of the original Friday the 13th and purportedly wished her role to be as small as possible,[8] though in the documentary Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th, it was stated that King's agent had asked for a higher salary, which the studio could not afford.

Fullerton's look for the adult Jason was abandoned in the sequel, Friday the 13th Part 3, despite the fact that the film took place the following day and was helmed by the same director, Steve Miner.

Some fans have theorized that the sequence showing Jason with a beard and long hair reflects a "dream" rather than a reality because the following sequel picks up with the events showing his face having not happened, and therefore what was represented was Ginny's guess at what he looked like under the burlap sack rather than what he actually looked like, which would excuse the break in continuity.

During the subsequent shoot, Daskawisz was forced to wear a piece of rubber over his finger, and both he and Steel insisted on reshooting this scene.

[citation needed] During one take of Alice being killed by Jason, the ice pick prop didn't retract, injuring King.

Daskawisz received rug burns around his eye from the tape from wearing the rough flour sack material for hours.

[9][18] In September 2020, it was announced that the uncut footage had been located by Samuelson Studios and was included as an extra on the upcoming box set release from Scream Factory.

[20] After Paramount discovered actress Marta Kober was only 16, a scene showing her with full frontal nudity was completely deleted.

[9] In September 2020, cult horror movie distributor Scream Factory announced in conjunction with Samuelson Studios that cut footage from the film, including Marta Kober's full frontal nude scene had been found on a VHS owned by FX artist Carl Fullerton, who had saved the footage for his own portfolio.

[9] In 1982, Gramavision Records released an LP album of selected pieces of Harry Manfredini's scores from the first three Friday the 13th films.

[24] On January 13, 2023, La-La Land Records released an expanded "Ultimate Cut" edition of the score, featuring a new remaster sourced from the original master tapes, which were considered lost at the time of the 2012 box set’s creation, as well as music cues not used or heard in the final film.

[30] In 2009, Paramount issued a "deluxe edition" of the film on both DVD and Blu-ray, which included several documentary featurettes along with the theatrical trailer.

It was the 35th highest-grossing film of 1981, facing strong competition from such high-profile horror releases as Omen III: The Final Conflict, The Evil Dead, The Howling, My Bloody Valentine, Happy Birthday to Me, Graduation Day, Halloween II, and The Burning.

"[39] The Dayton Journal Herald's Terry Lawson deemed the film a "special effects freak show for an audience immune to violence," and "exploitative and gratuitous.

"[41] Howard Pousner of The Atlanta Constitution was less laudatory, deeming the return of the Jason Voorhees character as a "ludicrous arrangement...  before you know it, eight more people have been murdered in virtually every manner: a neck sliced by barbed wire, a skull smashed, a jugular macheteed sic, a heart speared, et al."[42] When reviewing the film's Blu-ray release, David Harley of Bloody Disgusting said, "It doesn't exactly stray far from the formula of the original film — neither do most of the other sequels — but Friday The 13th Part II still stands as an iconic and important entry in the series due to the introduction of Jason as the antagonist of the series and the usage of Italian horror films as an inspiration for its death scenes — most notably, the spear copulation death from Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood.