Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

Freddy vs. Jason (2003) is the slasher crossover that finally put Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees in the same movie. Directed by Ronny Yu and written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, it treats the long-delayed matchup as a story problem, not just a poster: Freddy is powerless in Springwood because the town has trained its children to forget him, so he reaches into hell and points Jason at Elm Street. The murders bring Freddy’s name back. Jason, once loose, will not take orders. New Line Cinema released the film in the United States on August 15, 2003.

At a glance

Release date	August 15, 2003 (United States)
Director	Ronny Yu
Writers	Damian Shannon and Mark Swift
Starring	Robert Englund, Ken Kirzinger, Monica Keena, Jason Ritter, Kelly Rowland, Katharine Isabelle
Runtime	97 minutes
Rating	R
Genre	Slasher, crossover horror
Budget	About $30 million
Box office	About $82.6 million domestic; about $116.6 million worldwide

Plot summary

Springwood has spent years wiping Freddy Krueger out of its public memory. Hypnocil, a dream-suppressing drug, and a wall of silence have left him stranded, still vicious and almost unable to kill. In the opening narration he explains the fix he has chosen. Jason Voorhees is dragged back from his own afterlife and aimed at the teenagers of Elm Street. A killing spree, Freddy calculates, will make the town say his name again. Fear is the battery he runs on.

The plan works badly for everyone except the body count. Lori Campbell is haunted by the night her mother died, and by a boyfriend, Will Rollins, who was locked in a psychiatric hospital after that night. Will breaks out with a friend when he hears Lori may be in danger. Around them, classmates including Kia and a nervous stoner named Freeburg start dying in ways that do not look like ordinary Springwood nightmares. Jason is doing the cutting. Freddy is only borrowing the panic.

Once the town is afraid again, Freddy wants Jason gone. Jason does not leave. The survivors piece together that the two monsters are not allies, and that the only way to corner Freddy is to pull him out of the dream and into a place where Jason can reach him. The last act moves the fight from Elm Street bedrooms to Crystal Lake.

Spoiler section: the ending

Lori pulls Freddy into the waking world at the camp. Jason and Freddy tear into each other on the dock and in the water. Lori finishes Freddy with his own glove, and Jason sinks into the lake with him. The next morning Jason walks out of the water carrying Freddy’s severed head. The head winks. The film leaves both of them, in different ways, still in play.

Production and behind the scenes

Fans had been pitching the fight since the late 1980s, when both series were still annual events. New Line, which owned the Nightmare films, spent years trying to make a deal with Paramount, which then controlled Friday the 13th. A late-1980s treatment even imagined the matchup as Freddy’s next movie. Rights, tone, and studio politics stalled it. After Paramount sold the Friday rights, New Line could finally put both characters under one roof. Shannon and Swift’s spec script, written in the late 1990s, became the basis of the film that got made. Earlier drafts had wandered through other horror crossovers. The version Yu shot stays with one idea: Freddy needs Jason, then cannot control him.

Yu, the Hong Kong director of The Bride with White Hair and the 1998 Bride of Chucky, was hired to give the fight a cleaner visual line than a standard slasher. He pushed for a simple color split, red for Freddy and a colder look for Jason, and he treated the last battle like a martial-arts climax dragged into a campground. Robert Englund returned for what became his last performance as Freddy in a feature film. Kane Hodder, who had played Jason in four straight Friday films, was not cast. Ken Kirzinger, a much taller Canadian stunt performer who had doubled Jason once before, got the part. The switch is still argued about by fans. Kirzinger’s height was the practical reason most often given: next to Freddy, Jason had to look like a wall.

Principal photography ran in Vancouver in the fall of 2002, on a budget of about $30 million, large by either franchise’s old standard. The Crystal Lake locations were built rather than borrowed from the earlier Friday films. Englund has said Yu let him play Freddy as a schemer again, closer to the first two Nightmare movies than to the cartoon puns of the later sequels. The score is by Graeme Revell, folding in pieces of the familiar Freddy and Jason themes without turning the film into a clip reel.

Release and reception

New Line opened the film wide on August 15, 2003. It made about $36.4 million in its first weekend and finished around $82.6 million in the United States and Canada, with a worldwide total near $116.6 million. That was enough to make it the highest-grossing entry in either series at the time. Reviews were mixed. Critics who wanted a straight Nightmare or Friday film found the teen plot thin. Audiences who had waited fifteen years for the poster to become a movie were largely satisfied by the last half hour. A follow-up crossing both killers with Ash Williams was discussed and later became a comic series instead of a film.

Cast

Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger
Ken Kirzinger as Jason Voorhees
Monica Keena as Lori Campbell
Jason Ritter as Will Rollins
Kelly Rowland as Kia Waterson
Katharine Isabelle as Gibb
Brendan Fletcher as Mark Davis
Christopher George Marquette as Charlie Linderman

Trivia

Englund’s Freddy makeup had to be reworked so the burned face would read against Yu’s heavier red lighting.
Kirzinger is about 6 feet 7 inches. Hodder, the previous Jason, is closer to 6 feet 3. The production cited the height difference as a reason for the recast.
The film is set after Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and Jason Goes to Hell, and it ignores the future setting of Jason X.
Kelly Rowland’s Kia was written as the friend who says what the audience is thinking. A late trailer line of hers, about Jason standing there while Freddy talks, became the film’s most quoted joke.
New Line marketed the film with a fake boxing weigh-in and a campaign that let audiences “vote” for a winner, then never declared one.
The closing wink was shot so the studio could claim either monster for a sequel. No sequel was made.