In 1993, the end of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, the ninth installment in the Friday the 13th franchise, teased a crossover between horror icons Jason Voorhees and A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger. Fans wouldn’t get to see the epic showdown until Freddy vs. Jason hit theaters on August 15, 2003.
With New Line Cinema owning the rights to Freddy and Paramount Pictures owning the rights to Jason, among other things, the horror flick went on a rough journey. Beginning in the late ’80s, various creatives and studios tried and failed to get the highly anticipated film made. Rejected pitches included Jason on trial for his countless murders, a cult called the “Fredheads,” Satan-sanctioned fights, and retcons like Jason being another child abused by Freddy.
Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (2009’s Friday the 13th) won over the studio executives with their take on Freddy vs. Jason, and for the most part, that’s what audiences saw on screen. David S. Goyer (The Sandman) was brought in to significantly cut down the script, resulting in cringy dialogue and glaring plot holes, like how characters travel from Ohio to New Jersey in an implausibly short amount of time. According to Shannon and Swift, there was a longer sequence of them making the long road trip.
This was just one of New Line’s controversial choices that angered diehard fans. They also replaced fan-favorite Jason actor Kane Hodder and hired Ronny Yu (Bride of Chucky), who hadn’t seen the previous films, to direct. Yu wasn’t a fan of either franchise but was confident in his ability to make something entertaining.
The movie opens with Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) telling his backstory in a montage of previous Nightmare kills. Since the young residents of Springwood, Ohio, don’t know about or remember him, he can’t get to them in their dreams anymore. His solution is to use someone else to spark fear, specifically Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger), who he found in “the bowels of Hell.” Freddy enters Jason’s dreams masquerading as his deceased mother Pamela (Paula Shaw) instructing her special boy to keep killing irresponsible teenagers.
Over on Elm Street, in what is implied to be Nancy Thompson’s (Heather Langenkamp) old house, Lori Campbell (Monica Keena) chills with friends Kia Waterson (Kelly Rowland) and Gibb Smith (horror queen Katharine Isabelle). Boys show up unannounced with beer, the power goes out, and a resurrected Jason brutally kills Gibb’s toxic boyfriend Trey (Jesse Hutch), all without making any noise.
Later that night, Trey’s friend Blake (David Kopp) really goes through it. He’s briefly tormented in a dream by a less powerful Freddy, wakes up to find his dad decapitated, and then quickly gets slashed by Jason himself. It’s nothing spectacular but the series of events in such a short amount of time is just funny.
After the bloody events, the adults in town spring into action gaslighting the victims and covering up the murder. Why? Because it’s a town-wide conspiracy to pretend Krueger doesn’t exist so the teens don’t have nightmares. Kids who’ve seen the dream demon, like Mark Davis (Brendan Fletcher), are locked up in Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital where they’re kept on an anti-dreaming drug called Hypnocil, hence Freddy’s diminished powers.
Unbeknownst to Lori, her former boyfriend she’s still pining for Will Rollins (Jason Ritter, recently seen in Gen V) has also been there for years because he claimed he saw her dad kill her mom.
Although Jason gets the most kills and the final match takes place at the camp, overall it feels more like A Nightmare on Elm Street movie. The characters are more fleshed out like Nightmare protagonists. It also becomes the classic teen vs. adult dynamic with kids dying at an alarming rate while parents dismiss them and eventually cover everything up.
In contrast, the majority of Friday victims have no characterization. They arrive at the cabin, start partying, and soon wander around in the dark searching for their missing/dead friends, ultimately dying (save for a few final girls). Or they’re just introduced and dispatched in the same scene.
But no one watches Freddy vs. Jason for the character arcs. It’s all about the wise-cracking dream demon battling it out with the mindless killing machine. Of course, the increasingly brutal ways they kill teenagers are also a large draw. Kia has a subplot about considering a nose job, seemingly to establish her as insecure. But really, it’s just to give Freddy a chance to quip, “Got your nose!” before slicing it off with his razor fingers.
Jason gets some relatively creative kills: using a mattress to fold someone in half; impaling two people with his machete, sending one flying through the air. But his coolest kill is the all-out massacre at a rave in a cornfield (hosted by Springwood teens honoring their horrifically murdered classmates). And he does it while he’s on fire!
Freddy and Jason’s villain origin stories determine who is considered the worst, meaning when compared to a child killer, a helpless boy who drowned is the lesser of two evils. In the dream world boiler room, Freddy weaponizes Jason’s aquaphobia, a debilitating fear of water that was never previously established in the franchise (and contradicts canonical events). But the writers only implied it in their script; Yu put a literal wall of water around Jason that causes him to revert to his whimpering younger self. So, Jason Voorhees essentially becomes an anti-hero.
One of the criticisms of Freddy vs. Jason is that the acting leaves a lot to be desired. The performances aren’t…the best, but the actors did what they could with the overly expository dialogue in the script. In a 2016 interview with Bloody Disgusting, the writers explained, “In the end, you had characters explaining the plot to each other, rather than talking like real people, which is a real pet peeve of ours.”
After the small group of surviving teens band together and go over the histories of their tormentors, Kia says, “Oh, God, y’all, two killers? We’re not safe awake or asleep.” Just in case someone still didn’t understand what they were up against. However, there are some true gems in there like when Freeburg (Kyle Labine) says, “Dude, that goalie was pissed about something.”
On the topic of Kia’s lines, we have to talk about her embarrassing taunting monologue to Freddy. You know, the one where she casually calls him the f-slur. It’s random and obviously offensive (even by 2003 standards) but what makes it so jarring is the character and actor saying it.
If the cinematic history of teen movies has taught us anything it’s that male bullies call male nerds all kinds of slurs, mainly the one uttered here. But even the jocks messing with Charlie Linderman (Chris Marquette), the designated nerd of the film, don’t even call him that. Kia is one of the two Black characters with lines and to have one of them be the unnecessary homophobic slur is as disappointing as it is baffling.
Freddy vs. Jason is an early-’00s slasher with laughable dialogue, creative kills, and tons of blood dripping, spraying, and gushing everywhere. It may not offer much more than two horror icons going head-to-head (or machete-to-glove) in violent, cartoonish fight sequences. It’s the gory good time that fans wanted and remains an entertaining end to two long-running franchises. Given the many, many versions of the screenplay with a revolving door of writers and directors, a finished Freddy vs. Jason film is impressive.
Freddy vs. Jason is currently streaming on Max and Prime Video (via AMC+ subscription).
