Freddy vs. Jason was first proposed at least as early as 1987. It came out in 2003. What took so damn long?!
Well, different studios owned Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, so there was that impediment. But New Line Cinema got their hands on Friday’s Jason in late 1989, after Jason Takes Manhattan convinced Paramount to orphan their beloved mongoloid. And to be certain the waters were right, New Line produced “Final” entries to each series solely as a lead in to this project: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. That last one was in 1993 – still ten years out of the film’s actual release. What took so damn long?!
It’s called development hell. There was one underlying problem with a Freddy vs. Jason project: There’s actually no reason to make it! That’s from a storytelling point of view, where the mash-up doesn’t further illuminate either character, merely satisfies (or doesn’t) an old playground argument about who could win in a fight – that’s something us kids would debate before turning our attentions to pitting RoboCop against the Terminator, or velociraptors against xenomorphs, or any number of other crossovers they’ve never actually made. (Though FvJ DID somehow get the wheels started on AVP, so we have that to “thank” it for.)
Still, Freddy vs. Jason for ages remained horror’s Holy Grail, if for no other reason than so proponents of the modern slasher movement could crow that it’d produced something as iconic and lasting as the Universal monsters – by putting together their very own House of Frankenstein. Never mind that’s the point of no return where a franchise has lost all credibility, it still remained a goal.
The challenge fell to assorted screenwriters, and reportedly 18 different scripts costing New Line a total of somewhere around $20 million, all of them rejected! The question fans of either series never seriously asked now needed answer with utmost urgency: How do you actually combine these two fellows, and cohere two continuities which are already hopelessly frayed?
Frederick J. Kreuger – A child murderer as a mortal, he was killed in flames when the parents of Springwood sought their vengeance. Under an armistice with three free-floating ancient dream demons, Freddy stalks his survivors’ dreams, killing them there, as he passes down from consciousness to consciousness.
Jason Q. Voorhees – Has a mask, stabs people.
Here are a few of the rejected screenplays. To wit (having actually read through these things when I was younger and dumber, and before Freddy vs. Jason existed), here are some of their ideas:
- Freddy and Jason are each unleashed on the dawn of the new millennium, 2000 A.D. [sic], to perform some ridiculous series of bullshit magical ceremonies in order to bring forth ultimate evil – a series of ceremonies which largely involved following genre formula to a T.
- A cult called the Fredheads (oy!) resurrects Freddy. Then a group of Mensa reject teenagers make the inexplicable decision to go snatch up Jason to combat him. As the “funny” one, the title fight is literally a boxing match.
- Jason is captured and put on trial! His defense team makes the inexplicable decision to pull Freddy out of dreamland as a part of the immortal “insanity plea.” Freddy, able to conjure waking nightmares in this one, pays a bloody visit to a shopping mall, which (if filmed) would’ve been the stuff of legend.
- A serial killer named Freddy, but not that Freddy, terrorizes a group of teens. Then, for no reason, they all get ridiculously high on drugs, and battle Freddy and Jason in a completely sanity-free nightmare scenario.
Oh, and those (not even 25% of the overall scriptitude) are the best of the lot. Pondering all of them, one constant is clear: Presumably by producer insistence, each features the same twist. Freddy, when mortal, was one of Jason’s counselors, and is largely responsible for Mr. Machete’s turn to mass murder. Giving the killers a shared past was an effort to give this project some meat, some something. Oh well, none of these things was used…and then Scream happened, changing the horror landscape. Hopeful crossover producer Sean S. Cunningham (Robert Shaye was too busy seeing the Lord of the Rings trilogy get made to care) fell into a great, depressive madness with his baby aborted. In such a state, men do illogical things. Cunningham financed Jason X.
Then came the project’s saviors, Damian Shannon and Mark Swift.
Even though Freddy vs. Jason was deader than the assorted hundreds of murdered teenagers shared between the two icons, this first time screenwriting duo swore not only to write a functional script where so many others had failed, but to jumpstart interest in the effort entirely. Against all odds, they succeeded!
Forget millennial cults and drug trips and shared backstories. These jokers did the elegant instead, and simply merged the idealized versions of the two franchises into one, marrying tone and plot construction and all else in something as close to a 50:50 split as is possible. It cuts through the chaff, and gets both Freddy and Jason on screen in under five minutes. The result is a funky hybrid, a Nightmare the 13th, a Friday on Elm Street, which doesn’t wholly satisfy contingents on either side, but gets the job done as damn well as we could possibly hope for.
Of course, with a 2003 release date, the timing couldn’t have been more random for Freddy vs. Jason. Both had been gone for around a decade (except for the seven people who actually saw Jason X), and horror was already ramping up for the new Saw torture pornography phase. To hedge his bets, producer Cunningham hired Hong Kong maestro Ronny Yu to direct, seeing as he’d already done the impossible and revived the Child’s Play series in 1998 with Bride of Chucky.
Unexpectedly helping the project further, 2003 was the dawn of the current horror remake mania that only now seems to be dying off – hopefully. Occurring only two months before the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, Freddy vs. Jason benefited from an unexpected nostalgia for the form it follows. With only a few exceptions (i.e. Seed of Chucky), it is the dead last original (i.e. non-remake) horror film from its generation. And astoundingly, Freddy vs. Jason was the most financially successful of either franchise, an accomplishment which stands to this day, if I am not mistaken.
Both killers emerge quickly, established in their most basic forms. Freddy (Robert Englund’s final stint) is chattier than usual, even, and directly informs us (how thoughtful) about his current predicament – Trapped in dream limbo, shut off from his would-be victims of Springwood by town-wide forgetfulness. Having “searched the bowels of hell” (and presumably passed over Michael, Leatherface and the Candyman), Freddy summons Jason (Ken Kirzinger, because somehow Kane Hodder wasn’t adequate) to go give the kids of Elm Street a machete spanking, as part of a generic notion to reinstall fear – “fear” getting treated only slightly less often here than in Batman Begins.
Before you even realize you’re actually watching Freddy vs. Jason, Jason Voorhees is strolling down Elm Street with his “ki ki ki.” With unerring plotdar, Jason happens upon a mass of vice-happy teens in 1428 Elm. Because this is a Friday movie, there are many, many teenagers, mostly the familiar Jock, Stoner, Nerd, Bitch, etc. Because this is an Elm Street movie, Final Girl Lori (Monica Keena’s distractingly fake breasts) is plagued by angst, ennui, and a ridiculously complex backstory. In fact, the exposition in Freddy vs. Jason is pretty intrusive altogether, largely because Shannon and Swift want to make damn sure we all follow what’s going on. So time and again characters repeat Freddy’s fear-based plan to reinsert himself into their lives and…
You know, hopefully the plot of this thing is familiar enough I don’t have to dwell upon it too much. There’s more interesting things in a Freddy vs. Jason – namely, Freddy vs. Jason. Let’s just give story a quick run through…
Jason gives one teen a quick run through – with extraordinary serendipity, it’s one teen, dead in a bed in 1428 Elm. Lucky for Freddy that Jason’s actions always seem somehow Kreugerific, ignoring his Voorheesian instincts to just heedlessly slay the entire town. Anyway, as Jason’s antics continue, word spreads about Freddy, to the point where finally he is lethal again in dreams, only…Only Jason keeps on killing Freddy’s prey first, because Jason isn’t wont to “entertain” his victims for ten straight minutes, or usually even let ‘em know he’s there. Though by the time Jason is recklessly slashing down an entire cornfield rave – a scene as awesome as it is illogical – it’s hard to figure anyone in town could attribute this all to a dream killer.
So…Freddy wants to start killing kids, but he can’t start killing kids because Jason won’t stop killing kids, so Freddy has to stop Jason from killing kids so by killing Jason, so that he can start killing kids. Got that? Basically, it’s a turf war.
(Oh, and there’s this Springwood conspiracy about suppressing Freddy info, and institutionalizing any kid who dreams too much, except it all distracts from the psycho vs. psycho mano a mano we’re really here to geek off on.)
I was curious to see how Freddy vs. Jason would read having more recently plowed through the Elm Street series. Previously, in my junky cinematic diet, I’ve watched it in tandem with the Fridays, so I always found myself siding with Jason – and always felt he was a little underutilized, despite Cunningham’s producer credit. (For one thing, why is it always the machete this time around?!) Now I cannot help but focus upon Freddy, which is easy to do since he is one outgoing Bastard Son of a Hundred Maniacs. In contrast, Jason comes across as a complete blank slate nonentity – and I mean even more than usual.
The thing is, the Elm Street series never wanted for imagination, with its ambitious special effects and set pieces. The Fridays were always so much more streamlined, minimalist, that for all their myriad flaws, the brain compensates by engaging them more critically. (At least that’s my experience.) Jason is an empty ewer, able to take whatever personification you wish to bestow upon him – I think of him as the avenging angel against whatever jerks I know (who are mostly engineers). Freddy is a punster, trickster, speedster…a Napster, given the whole dream thing. With the exception of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (and possibly the first Nightmare on Elm Street), he lacks a mythic stature, because his movies explore him so thoroughly. Jason transcends his series, which has no single definitive entry – sorry, Jason Lives.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Though I’m mostly in Jason’s camp (heh!), I’ve now seen Freddy vs. Jason from the other side, and actually cheered Freddy on – and no one series really gets the edge. Though Springwood is our setting for most of the flick, Crystal Lake hosts the climax. There’s a good mixture of dream sequences and stalk sequences, and even if Freddy scores a paltry one kill, he was barely making it over three in his proper movies anyway. Give Jason his two score strewn, dismembered corpses!
The titular slash bash occupies the final thirty minutes of Freddy vs. Jason, which is actually about right to ensure we get plenty of each franchise’s generic formula first. Orchestrating this rumble was always the mightiest hurdle for screenwriters, for one reason: Freddy exists in dreams, and Jason evidently never even snoozes (he prefers sawing teens to sawing logs). Shannon and Swift must transport each murderer to the other’s locale, dreamland and reality, to really explore their strengths and weaknesses. They do this quite well.
Okay, so things start out with the kids – the inevitable true winners of this match-up, the Final Girl and Boy (the supremely irritating Jason Ritter) at least – debating their multiple multiple-murderer morass. They go about this in equal parts “Scooby Doo” and “That ‘70s Show,” which is a little distracting. Hilariously, one kid even apparently plans to avoid Jason by sleeping, which seems a most fool idea, except therein lies Freddy. “We’re not safe awake or asleep.” But for how little impact he’s actually had, Freddy is deemed the greater threat, and the gang heads off in their Mystery Machine van to procure delicious Hypnocil from Westin Hills (see A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors), so they can get their beauty sleep.
Wouldn’t you know it, this is now the place Jason has chosen to go – his trip has gone “house, house, cornfield, psychiatric hospital.” There’s no rhyme or reason to Jason’s wanderings today! And because stonedness is functionally equivalent to dreaming, the standard Stoner character (Kyle Labine, also fulfilling for no reason one half of an ersatz Jay and Silent Bob duo) zonks out there on the linoleum floor, to encounter Freddy. Given the scenario, I guess we can give Fred half credit for the Stoner’s halving – Possessed by Freddy (see Freddy’s Revenge, I guess), said pothead injects Jason with tranq. Which proves fatal. To the pothead.
First up, dreamworld. Boiler room. Jason, as is his habit, just slashes away like there’s no tomorrow. It plays out like the Black Knight routine in Holy Grail, except Freddy regrows his limbs, undoubtedly indestructible. And he pimp smacks Jason all about, even through a pinball routine (the closest to the latter Elm Streets’ love of bad comedy, in a film which mostly does a respectful job of keeping Freddy menacing). Jason proves equally indestructible, purely by dint of being Jason – it’s immovable object against irresistible force. But Freddy’s attack is mental, and there’s gotta be something left in that cephalic zombie’s deformed noggin Freddy can latch onto.
Indeed, Jason is scared of water – at least in his subconscious; alive, he rather revels in the element. (It’s to contrast with Freddy’s anti-love of fire, which is just too convenient.) By subjecting Jason to a replay of his 1957 drowning – which is astoundingly the first time we’ve actually gotten a good look at that defining event in Friday lore – Freddy stands a chance of victory.
But the teens have to a one sided with Jason, even though he just recently killed dozens of their friends. Go figure! It’s that lovable puppy dog look in his eyes – or so Yu claims. So they scheme to draw Freddy into the real world (something we’ve seen work at least twice in prior films), where Jason has home field advantage. And hope Jason simply ignores them (he won’t). Furthermore, they’ve lugged the lug back to Crystal Lake, for dubious logic, though one welcomes it nonetheless. (Yu keeps things engaging enough that we never stop to ponder how they got from Ohio to New Jersey so effortlessly.)
So Jason survives long enough to face Freddy in the real world, with a slight assist from Lori & the Gang – they help Jason rather too often, which gives me the sickening sense that maybe Freddy is otherwise superior. Though in the corporeal realm, Freddy ought to be a pushover, especially when he’s mortal and Jason remains an immortal golem.
Except who wants to see that? Instead, stripped of his dream powers (but with enough other nuttiness going on for it not to be a problem), Freddy has but his knife glove to counter Jason – and it’s plenty. That’s what people want to see when promised a Freddy vs. Jason, the simplest slashdown possible, no dream-based equivocation. And the main thing protecting Freddy is that Jason is sloooooooooooow. Freddy gets countless hits in with nary a scratch, because one lop from that omnipresent machete would K.O. Kreuger.
The title fight is maybe a little problematic, because Yu uses his Hong Kong pyrotechnics to reimagine it as wire-fu crossed with WWF – the WWF thing being something Jason’s embodied ever since the Kane Hodder days. Though the action movie stuff isn’t too aggravating, if we accept such lunacy is inherent in a Freddy vs. Jason, just as Live Free or Die Hard HAD to be insane by the mere nature of Die Hard sequel escalation. Besides, the alternative would be an Itchy & Scratchy-esque exchange of stabbings, which could get old eventually. And we do sort of get that at the very end, when the blood and dismemberment truly reaches 11 – I recall seeing this thing in 2003, and finding its unironic embrace of blood and tits surprisingly refreshing after a decade of tamer exploitation.
The very end is inconclusive, which is proper. There’s no way Freddy vs. Jason could ever side wholly with one party, so it offers up a stalemate so proponents of either side can make counterarguments for their side’s superiority. Such a flaw was inherent from the mere concept. In fact, a majority of Freddy vs. Jason’s flaws derive from its nature as a crossover – such as watching a villain fight a villain, or the strange tonal combination, or any of that. For what it is, this is damn well the best thing we could’ve hoped for, I honestly feel, and it’s better to have scratched that itch than to have left each franchise unfulfilled.
One further problem plagues the franchises, however, once each has committed to Freddy vs. Jason. There is no more room open for independent sequels; now aligned, they have to stay as one. At least, ignoring reboots, the final refuge of a scoundrel.
Among known crossovers, and what’s become of them afterwards, there are few apparent options. Godzilla alone weathered his King Kong vs. Godzilla with genuine sequel proliferation, though practically each follow-up was another ostensible crossover, with more in-house Toho beasties. The Universal monsters continued with their crossover frenzy into House of Dracula, and from there to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Slasher-wise, such intentional undermining of seriousness would come to resemble Austin Powers Meets Freddy and Jason, or some shit like that, ‘twere it to happen (that one being possible, as a New Line property).
But comedy so blatant is the final, final, final straw. There’s still a universe of modern horror icons to plunder, and fanboys love weighing in with grotesque abominations like Freddy vs. Jason vs. Leprechaun. Among serious considerations, rumor has it Hellraiser’s Pinhead was pondered for Freddy vs. Jason’s final shock – they both plunge into Hell, where everyone’s favorite Cenobite asks “Gentlemen, what seems to be the problem?” Of course, legal entanglements prevented that, just as they held up the earliest Freddy vs. Jason schemes. So Halloween, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, you name it, none of those was really viable.
Then there’s Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, the one which came the closest to becoming an actual thing – it made it to the treatment phase, employing Evil Dead’s Necronomicon Ex Mortis to pit Freddy against Jason against horror’s greatest hero, Ashley Williams, he of the boomstick and chainsaw arm! Groovy! Of course, for such a thing to work, you’d need the OK from both Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi, and…well…there’s those damn legal entanglements again! A shame, really, because the only inherent flaw in this scheme would be the fact that everyone would root for Ash. Oh well. They still made a comic book out of it (which even got a sequel), so that’s something.
So ends the idea of direct follow-ups to Freddy vs. Jason, especially as we’re nearly a decade away from it now. Remakes have emerged in this absence, which pretty much signals the end of an era. Sequel hopes now lie in new hands…a doubtful notion.
RELATED POSTS:
• Friday the 13th No. 1 Friday the 13th (1980)
• Friday the 13th No. 2 Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
• Friday the 13th No. 3 Friday the 13th Part III (1982)
• Friday the 13th No. 4 Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 1 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
• Friday the 13th No. 5 Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 2 A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
• Friday the 13th No. 6 Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 3 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
• Friday the 13th No. 7 Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 4 A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
• Friday the 13th No. 8 Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 5 A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 6 Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
• Friday the 13th No. 9 Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 7 Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
• Friday the 13th No. 10 Jason X (2002)
• Friday the 13th No. 12 Friday the 13th (2009)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street No. 9 A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
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