Production notes

Following the success of Friday the 13th in 1980, Paramount Pictures began plans to make a sequel. 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. Phil Scuderi—one of three owners of Esquire Theaters, along with Steve Minasian and Bob Barsamian, who produced the original film—insisted that the sequel have Jason Voorhees, Pamela (Betsy Palmer)'s son, even though his appearance in the original film was only meant to be a joke. Steve Miner, associate producer on the first film, believed in the idea and would go on to direct the first two sequels. At the time Friday the 13th Part 2 went into development, Cunningham opted not to direct as he was directing A Stranger Is Watching (1982). Miner would use many of the same crew members from the first film while working on the sequels. Cunningham had mixed feelings about the entire Friday the 13th enterprise that he outlined for film critic and author Stephen Hunter in an interview for a book Hunter wrote on violent films. Hunter stated that Cunningham "wasn't particularly proud" of his work on these films, and Cunningham bluntly said that the only thing that seemed to reach a teenaged audience at that time involved high levels of gore and graphic violence.

Adrienne King was pursued by an obsessed fan after the success of the original Friday the 13th and purportedly wished her role as Alice Hardy to be as small as possible, 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. The film's heroine, Ginny Field, is played by Amy Steel, who won the part through an audition. "At the time of [making the film], it was before the genre really picked up so I didn't give it a lot of credit or take it seriously. For me, it was just another audition because I had no idea what it would end up meaning after all this time. When I played Ginny, I was really young and different from a lot of the people working at the time so that came out in my character. I was naturally suspicious of cocky guys at that age, and you see a lot of that when I'm on screen with Paul (John Furey). I tried to put so much behind the actual words in the script just so she felt almost unreachable, to Paul and to audiences. I wanted her to have some power." Gina Gershon was offered an unspecified role, but turned it down due to a "exploitive" topless scene. Actor Warrington Gillette played Jason unmasked at the end of the film. Stuntman Steve Daskewisz (also known as Steve Dash) was credited as Jason Stunt Double but played the masked Jason throughout the rest of the film.

Principal photography of Friday the 13th Part 2 in September 1980, and finished in November 1980. Filming took place in Connecticut, primarily in New Preston and Kent, as well as at Kent Falls State Park. The opening scene of the film featuring Alice in her apartment was filmed inside a Torrington residence, while the exterior shots of the apartment were shot in a neighborhood in central Waterbury. The Waterbury residence remained until 2018, when it was razed to make way for a parking lot. The establishing scene featuring Sandra and Jeff driving toward the camp was shot in New Preston, while the central Packanack Lodge setting was filmed at a private children's camp on North Spectacle Pond near Kent. The cast and crew stayed on location at the camp, living on the premises in cabins, which executive producer Frank Mancuso Jr. described as "barracks"-like. Some lakeside sequences were shot on Lake Waramaug. The roadhouse tavern visited by some of the characters was the old Lake Waramaug Casino in New Preston, which was destroyed in a fire in 1982. The use of the burlap sack hood worn by Jason (Steve Daskewisz) bears similarity to that used by the villain in the 1976 film The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Several of the film's actors suffered injuries during filming: Daskewisz was rushed to the emergency room during filming after Amy Steel accidentally cut his hand with a machete. Steel explained, "The timing was wrong, and he didn't turn his pickaxe properly, and the machete hit his finger." Daskewisz received thirteen stitches on his middle finger. Daskiewisz suffered another injury on set after falling onto the pickaxe he was using, breaking several ribs. During one take of Alice being killed by Jason, the ice pick prop failed to properly retract, injuring King. The scene where Steel's character Ginny gets grabbed from behind by an unmasked Jason in the climax took three takes to shoot it right. Steel was tense and frightened during filming of the scene. Rumors sparked that John Furey left before the film wrapped, as his character Paul does not appear in the final scene. In truth, his character was not intended to have appeared. Furey stated, "I was there for the whole production," which director Miner verified, commenting: "John was a total professional and he did everything that was asked of him. If the ending was vague, it was the film's fault, not his."

Special effects artist Tom Savini was asked to work on the film but declined because he was already working on another project, Midnight (1982). In addition, he was not receptive to the concept of Jason as the killer in the film. Savini was then replaced by Stan Winston. Winston, however, had a scheduling conflict and had to drop out of the project. The make-up effects were ultimately handled by Carl Fullerton. Fullerton designed the "look" for the adult Jason Voorhees and went with long red hair and a beard while following the facial deformities established in the original film in the make-up designed by Tom Savini for Jason as a child. Fullerton's look for the adult Jason was abandoned in the sequel, Friday the 13th Part III, 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.

Despite Cunningham's lack of involvement, his wife, Susan, was hired to edit the film. Like its predecessor, Friday the 13th Part 2 had difficulty receiving an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Upon reviewing the film, the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA) warned Paul Hagger, an executive at Paramount, that the "accumulation of violence throughout the film" may still lead to an X rating even if substantial cuts were made. A total of forty-eight seconds had to be cut from the film in order to avoid an X rating. This film received a deluxe DVD release in February 2009, but the edited footage was not included. Most noted by censors was the murder scene of Jeff Dunsberry (Bill Randolph) and Sandra Dier (Marta Kober), who are impaled by a spear while having sex in a bed (a scene many have compared to a scene in Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood), which the censors found particularly graphic. 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. After Paramount discovered actress Marta Kober was only 16, a scene showing her with full frontal nudity was completely deleted. 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. Fullerton lent the VHS to Scream Factory, who included it on the Friday the 13th Blu-Ray Collection: Deluxe Edition, though it did not include Kober's underage nudity. Originally, the film was supposed to end with Pamela Voorhees' head opening her eyes and smiling towards the camera. This scene was filmed using actress Connie Hogan performing in makeup as Pamela's stunt head. However, Miner removed the scene from the final cut after it was ultimately decided that it would make the film's conclusion too "unserious." Footage of this alternate ending remains unreleased.

Friday the 13th Part 2 earned $6,429,784 during its opening weekend in North America, out-grossing the first film's weekend box office total. It would ultimately gross $21.7 million on a budget of $1.25 million. Though a financial success, the sequel's 7,813,948 admissions only accounted for 53% of the original film's 14,778,662 tickets sold. 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.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that Friday the 13th Part 2 is "a cross between the Mad Slasher and Dead teenager genres; about two dozen movies a year feature a mad killer going berserk, and they're all about as bad as this one. Some have a little more plot, some have a little less. It doesn't matter." He finished his 1/2-star review of Part 2 by writing "this review will suffice for the Friday the 13th film of your choice." The New York Times's John Corry was also unimpressed by the film, noting: "Friday the 13th Part II will frighten you, at least for moments, although it will be a close-run thing whether it will be fright, nausea or simple distaste that gets to you first," adding that it "exists for no other purpose than to shock." Helen Verongos of The Clarion-Ledger similarly wrote: "Friday the 13th Part 2 obviously does not pretend to be any more than it is, a cheap—dimestore cheap—thriller aimed at the adolescent market... It is designed to be predictable enough to make the average fourth-grader feel sharp-witted." 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." Jacqi Tully of the Arizona Daily Star praised the film's special effects, noting Jason as "effectively disgusting sight," and ultimately summarizing: "Gross is a pretty good way to describe it. Scary, bloody and violent come to mind, too. Also very effective." 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."

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 27% of 104 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.6/10. The website's consensus reads: "Mistaking an escalating body count for effective horror, Friday the 13th Part 2 recycles the original's lack of suspense and overkill of gory effects to diminished results." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 26 out of 100, based on 100 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. 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." Scott Meslow of The Week described it as a transitional film that blended elements of the original film and those to come later in the series. Jeremiah Kipp, reviewing the film for Slant Magazine in 2009, commented on the film's visual elements favorably, writing: "The gore set pieces are handled in workmanlike fashion, with POV shots and heavy breathing slowly building up to a false scare (with a cat or best friend jumping out), followed by a mortifying glimpse of sadistic killing. By now, everyone knows what to expect from this kind of movie, but what’s surprising is how the low-budget rawness, cheap film stock bubbling over with grain, and washed-out lighting schemes give the film a kind of base in reality." Time Out gave a mixed assessment in a 2012 review, noting: "This first sequel to Friday the 13th opens with mild panache when a summary recapitulation of the story so far ends with the sole survivor of the previous massacre being unexpectedly despatched by a new killer (the grief-crazed woman's supposedly dead son). The script then jumps five years, assembles a new set of victims at the summer camp, and repeats the gory carnage as before."