For those of us of a certain age, it’s hard to process that Freddy Vs. Jason turns 20 this year.
While the remake cycle had already begun with other horror properties, such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre; New Line Cinema wanted to milk the last of the cash from Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees original incarnations.
If you want to hear the long road to the film, I would highly recommend Dustin McNeill’s excellent book Slash of the Titans, which covers 10 scripts that almost got made over a number of years.
Here, I want to speak about my own experience of Freddy Vs. Jason, probably one of my first experiences of a cinematic event in horror.
The internet was fairly established by this point, and New Line made the most of this with plenty of publicity opportunities including a weigh-in event in Las Vegas.
When it came time for the film to arrive, something unexpected happened; the film leaked on the internet. Being the overeager fan, I did see parts of the film online in a fuzzy Windows Media Player file before convincing my friend to go to the cinema to see it.
I was 19 at the time, and given the timelines of other franchises, this would be my first experience of seeing one of the big three (Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street) on the big screen.
Did it live up to the hype? I have to say at the time, yes, although I did think this would be a jumping off point for more films and now 20 years on, we’ve had just two films between either franchise and both were remakes.
My main takeaways at the time were how Freddy was made a bit more sinister than previous recent films, with an extremely uncomfortable sequence with Monica Keena’s Lori, where he looks to violate her sexually using his finger knives.
The random casting of Kelly Rowland, at a time when we were seeing more black artists such as LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes and Usher featuring in genre affairs, is a positive in terms of representation but not in execution. Rowland feels considerably older than her counterparts. Her death scene is rather amusing though, after she uses a homophobic slur.
The other performance I found so jarring was Jason Ritter’s portrayal of Will who felt like he was in a completely different film to everyone else. His counterpart Brendan Fletcher is far better, and feels like he belongs in a Nightmare film.
When it comes to the villains, Englund is so used to play Krueger at this point he can almost sleepwalk through this, and while he isn’t on the par of his New Nightmare role, he is probably at his best since Dream Warriors as pure Freddy, if you catch my drift.
Ken Kirzinger came into the role as Jason, with his standout sequence being the cornfield rave massacre where Voorhees is truly unleashed on a large number of people, slicing and dicing whilst ablaze; a truly iconic image.
Ronny Yu’s direction is slicker than previous entries of either franchise, giving it a polish that probably blunted a few too many edges. This is very much a horror franchise movie of the 2000s, with its metal soundtrack, over saturated colours and a long list of insufferable characters (Trey, Blake etc.).
After the brutal final battle I have to admit leaving the cinema satisfied, as I got exactly what I paid for, and the crew clearly went out of their way to create some great action set pieces, including ‘man the torpedoes’ plus Krueger being dragged through the side of an entire cabin.
I was also at the beginning of my DVD collecting phase and snapped up the 2-disc special edition DVD on the first day of release, hoping to see a rumoured alternate ending with Pinhead, which was never filmed. I still own that DVD to this date, which probably says more about its sentimental value than its overall quality. Who’d have thought we’d have 2000s horror nostalgia?
Can you recall your first screening of Freddy Vs. Jason? How did the film age for you? Let us know in the comments.
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