The Friday the 13th Franchise Needed Freddy vs. Jason 's Big, Dumb, Glorious Shot in the Arm

This is the 11th article in a series revisiting one Friday the 13th movie every Friday the 13th. Read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and 10.

King Kong vs. Godzilla. Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. Kramer vs. Kramer. Over the years, Hollywood internalized and cashed in on a simple lesson: If you take one extremely popular character, and pit them against another extremely popular character, audiences will show up with fistfuls of dollars.

That’s why a crossover battle between Jason Vorhees and Nightmare on Elm Street baddie Freddy Krueger was proposed as early as 1988, serving as an easy way to inject some new hotness into the increasingly old-and-busted Friday the 13th formula. It’s also why the creative team behind the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise—which, at the time, was topping Friday the 13th by millions and millions of dollars every year—initially turned their noses up at the idea.

Fortunately for horror fans who wanted a little peanut butter mixed into their chocolate, by 2003, Nightmare on Elm Street no longer had the upper hand. Yes, Jason Vorhees was coming off 2002’s Jason X, his lowest-grossing movie ever. But Freddy Krueger hadn’t graced the big screen since 1994’s fascinating, polarizing Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. In between, Scream had arrived and made Hollywood question whether any of the old horror icons were even relevant anymore.

New Line Cinema decided—not incorrectly—to gamble anyway, banking on the idea that two slasher icons going head-to-head was still potentially lucrative. And if this big horror crossover made a cynical kind of sense from the perspective of the bean-counters, it also provided an intriguing creative opportunity. For two of the biggest horror villains in recent Hollywood history, Freddy and Jason could hardly have less in common. Freddy Krueger is a smirky quipster whose murders are psychological and surreal. Jason Vorhees is a silent killer whose murders are single-minded and straightforward. Even if you didn’t care about the other Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th movies, who wouldn’t be curious about these guys going toe-to-toe?

So, 15 years after it had first been proposed, and 10 years after it had been explicitly teased at the end of a Friday the 13th movie, Freddy vs. Jason was finally bound for theaters. There was only one problem: No one could figure out a good way to bring the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street universes together. By one count, a dozen different screenwriters turned in 18 different drafts of potential Freddy vs. Jason movies before the final version—from a 130-page script by Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, whittled down to 90 by future Batman Begins screenwriter David S. Goyer—was finally put into production, with Bride of Chucky director Ronny Yu at the helm.

So what ideas didn’t make the cut? In the series retrospective book, Crystal Lake Memories, screenwriter Ronald D. Moore—best known today as the creator of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica—describes his rejected pitch: A Freddy vs. Jason inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial, in which Jason Vorhees was tried for the dozens of murders he committed over the course of the Friday the 13th franchise. Horror writer David J. Schow pitched a movie about a teenage cult of Freddy Krueger fans called the Fred Heads. Several screenwriters proposed retcons that would knit the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises together by revealing that the teenaged Freddy Krueger had actually been a counselor at Camp Crystal Lake, and played a role in Jason’s childhood drowning.

The Freddy vs. Jason that ultimately hit theaters in 2003 went with a simpler explanation than all of that. A clumsy (but probably necessary) opening monologue lays out the stakes. It starts with Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund, reprising a role he had held since the original Nightmare on Elm Street). As always, Freddy draws his power from being feared—but in 2003, no one remembers him anymore. So Freddy uses the minimal power he has left to pop into the dreams of an undead super-killer: Jason Vorhees (Ken Kirzinger, replacing fan-favorite Kane Hodder, a move that remains extremely controversial among Friday the 13th diehards).

In the dreams, Freddy pretends to be Jason’s mother (Paula Shaw, replacing Betsy Palmer). He orders Jason to travel to Springwood, Ohio, wander over to Elm Street, and slash up some teenagers. Freddy figures that the teens who don’t get killed by Jason will be scared they’ll be next. From there, he can feed on that fear, get his power back, and pick up where Jason left off.

Who are our mostly-doomed teenagers this time around? There’s Lori (Monica Keena), a virginal horror protagonist in the "final girl" mold, who grieves the bizarre death of her mother and a subsequent ghosting from her boyfriend. There’s Lori’s best Kia (Kelly Rowland—yes, that Kelly Rowland), who is doing her best to cure Lori’s grief by getting her some action. And there’s Gibb (Katharine Isabelle), an unapologetic party girl who drinks and chain smokes and has sex with an asshole named Trey. Guess which one gets murdered first?

As the movie begins, the three girls are doing what teenage girls always do at slumber parties: Debating which of the Three Stooges they’d fuck, marry, and/or kill. Boys show up with booze, there’s some sex, and then—when Jason Vorhees crashes the party as Freddy’s puppet—there’s some murder. (Specifically: The murder of Trey, who is enjoying a postcoital beer when Jason guts him with a machete and folds the mattress in half, snapping his spine like a twig.)

The sudden and gruesome murder of a teenager would probably be a news story in any small town. But it means something different to the older adults in Springwood, Ohio, who remember the heyday of Freddy Krueger—particularly since this murder occurred at 1428 Elm Street, where Freddy’s reign of terror originally began in 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.

In case it wasn’t already obvious: Even for a fairly corny mid-aughts slasher movie, there’s a lot about Freddy vs. Jason that is absolutely ridiculous. The movie is set in the ancient era of 2003, so it’s not like these kids can use high-speed WiFi to queue up a Making a Murderer-esque true-crime documentary about Freddy Krueger on Netflix. But there’s also no chance the elderly Springwood watch-dogs could keep a bunch of bored suburban teenagers from finding out about the literal dozens of murders Freddy Krueger committed in their own town a few decades earlier.

As usual with the Friday the 13th franchise, the real solution is not to think about anything too hard. And to Freddy vs. Jason’s credit, it is certainly a busy enough movie to keep you distracted. As the Elm Street teens freak out over the first phase of Jason’s murder spree, the movie whisks audiences away to the Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital, where Lori’s long-lost boyfriend Will (Jason Ritter) has been institutionalized, without her knowledge, all along. At the hospital, Will and his friends are regularly dosed with a drug called Hypnocil that prevents them from dreaming, keeping Freddy at bay.

Will eventually manages to bust out of the hospital, and there’s a lot of soapy hand-wringing about his relationship with Lori that’s not really worth unpacking in detail. (The short version, if you really care: Will thought he saw Lori’s dad murder her mom, and Lori’s dad had him committed for it; the murderer was actually Freddy, and there are literally no consequences for anybody involved.)

But you’re not here for sub-The O.C. relationship drama, right? You’re here for Freddy Krueger vs. Jason Vorhees, baby. And while there’s some pretty fun stuff leading up to the big clash—including a brutal massacre in a cornfield that ends with Jason hacking up a high school kegger while he’s on fire—the movie doesn’t really roar to life until Freddy and Jason are laser-focused on killing each other. In the early stages of Freddy’s plan, Jason is a useful idiot, but Freddy quickly gets tired of the unstoppable guy in the hockey mask who keeps stealing his kills. Jason, for his part, realizes that Freddy has been impersonating his beloved mother. He’s less than pleased about it, as anyone who saw Friday the 13th Part 2 could have guessed.

The first battle between Freddy and Jason takes place in the dream world, where Freddy has absolute power. Jason—who is too dumb to tell the difference between dreams and reality—is baffled and frustrated as the cackling Freddy regrows any limbs Jason hacks off with his machete. After a lengthy battle, Freddy eventually beats Jason by exploiting his aquaphobia. (For the record: This phobia was mentioned in none of the 10 previous Friday the 13th movies, and is directly contradicted by most of them.)

But the real battle takes place at Camp Crystal Lake, where the surviving teens cleverly drag Jason’s sleeping body for the final showdown, hoping that he’ll benefit from home-field advantage. While Kia distracts Freddy with a Don Rickles-esque roast that includes one extremely jarring homophobic slur, Jason creeps up behind and murders her, clearing the stage for Freddy vs. Jason to do, well, Freddy vs. Jason—but this time, for real.

Even on a rewatch in 2019, the Big Fight delivers. When asked by the special-effects team if the fake blood should be ordered in buckets or gallons, director Ronny Yu insisted on gasoline barrels, and boy, does it show. There are a lot of flames. There are several makeshift missiles. At one point, Freddy steals Jason’s machete and repeatedly stabs him in the chest and face. At another point, Jason steals Freddy’s spiked glove and punches it straight through his chest. \

But when the dust finally settles, there’s one pivotal question for Freddy vs. Jason to answer: Who wins? The final battle between Freddy and Jason is designed to please everybody, but selecting either baddie as the victor would definitely alienate a sizable chunk of the audience. Then again, at best, an all-out stalemate would feel like cynical bait for a sequel. At worst, it would feel like a cop-out from filmmakers who were too cowardly to make a real choice.

What to do? One screenwriter proposed a Clue-esque gambit, where two endings would be filmed and screened randomly for audiences: one with Freddy winning, and one with Jason winning. There were also proposals that would have punted on the ending by distracting audiences with another crazy twist. The craziest (and, frankly, coolest) idea found Freddy and Jason fighting until another baddie interrupted at the last second. The screenwriters’ first choice was Pinhead from the Hellraiser franchise. When rights issues got in the way, they proposed sending Freddy and Jason back to Hell, to brawl for all eternity in front of Satan himself.

In the end—and after one totally different, very dumb ending was filmed, tested, and scrapped—Freddy vs. Jason finds a clever way to strike a balance that pleases fans, honors both franchises, and dodges the question of which horror baddie would actually win in a fight. In the morning, after a battle that seems to end with both Freddy and Jason dying and sinking to the bottom of Crystal Lake, Jason reemerges on the shore toting Freddy’s severed head. It looks like a total victory…

…until Freddy’s severed head winks at the camera:

Yes, it’s a dodge. But it feels like the right outcome for both characters. Jason’s "win" is based on brute strength and unstoppability, as it should be. Freddy’s "win" is based on an elaborate mind game, as it should be. Neither is so dominant that he—or his fans—can claim a total victory.

So where was the sequel? After all, in an instant reversal of fortunes for both Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy vs. Jason earned $114 million worldwide—the highest gross, by tens of millions of dollars, for either franchise.

If that happened today, you can imagine Freddy vs. Jason becoming the first installment in the horror equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But this was 2003—an eternity ago, in Hollywood years—so Freddy vs. Jason went nowhere. Ignoring clear, empirical evidence that audiences were primed for more Freddy vs. Jason, this crossover marked the end of both the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises. (Until, of course, both franchises were independently rebooted. More on that later.)

The story of Freddy vs. Jason would eventually continue in the comic-book spinoff Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, which paid off an easter egg from Jason Goes to Hell by bringing the Evil Dead franchise into the mix. But for all intents and purposes, Freddy vs. Jason marks the end of the Friday the 13th franchise. At last, Jason Vorheees had murdered his last horny teenager.

There’s one curious footnote left to explore before we finally close the book on the long, strange history of Friday the 13th. Just a few months after the release of Freddy vs. Jason, an upstart production company called Platinum Dunes, which was co-founded by Michael Bay, partnered with New Line to remake the horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And when both the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a similar remake of The Amityville Horror cleaned up at the box office, Platinum Dunes decided to take a crack at one of the most lucrative slasher movies in history: The original Friday the 13th.

Coming next Friday the 13th (March 13, 2020): The Friday the 13th series concludes—for now—with a one-off remake that attempted to distill all the best parts of the franchise’s 29-year history into a single movie.

Originally Appeared on GQ