Freddy vs. Jason

Freddy Krueger has been stuck in Hell since his last defeat. The adults of Springwood have wiped out every trace of him. Anyone who dreams about him is locked up at Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital and given Hypnocil, a drug that stops dreams. With nobody afraid of him, Freddy is too weak to get into anyone's dreams. He finds Jason Voorhees, who was also dragged down to Hell. Using the last of his strength, Freddy takes the form of Jason's mother, Pamela, and tells Jason to go to Elm Street and kill. He figures the town will blame Freddy, the fear will come back, and so will his power.

Jason rises and heads to Springwood. Lori Campbell lives on Elm Street in the house where Nancy Thompson once lived, with her widowed father. Lori has her friends Kia and Gibb over, along with Gibb's abusive boyfriend Trey and his friend Blake. Jason stabs Trey over and over and folds him in half in the bed. At the police station Lori dozes off and Freddy stalks her, but he is still too weak to hurt anyone. Blake gets home, wakes to find his father's head cut off, and Jason kills him too. The police assume Freddy is back, and Lori overhears his name. At Westin Hills, Lori's old boyfriend Will Rollins and his friend Mark Davis see the news. Both were locked up after run-ins with Freddy. They escape to warn Lori. The police tell the town Blake killed his father and Trey and then himself. At school, Mark tells everyone about Freddy, which spreads exactly the fear Freddy needs. Lori faints when she sees Will again.

That night Lori and her friends go to a rave in a cornfield. Gibb passes out and Freddy goes after her in a dream, but in the real world Jason drives a pipe through her and the raver trying to take advantage of her, then goes on a rampage through the party. He kills Shack with a flaming machete and cuts down a group of ravers. Freddy is furious. Jason is taking the victims Freddy wants for himself. Lori, Will, their friend Kia, school nerd Charlie Linderman and stoner Bill Freeburg escape. Will tells Lori he saw her father kill her mother and thinks he was locked away to keep him quiet. The group gets to Mark's house in time to watch Freddy kill him in a dream. Freddy slashes his face, sets him on fire and burns the words "Freddy's Back" into his back.

Deputy Scott Stubbs, new in town and sure the police are hiding something, joins the teens. Lori dozes off and is attacked by Freddy, and when she wakes she pulls a piece of his ear into the real world. Will remembers he never dreamed while he was on Hypnocil at Westin Hills. The group realizes there are two killers and goes to Westin Hills to steal Hypnocil. Freddy possesses Freeburg and pours the drug down the drain. Jason shows up and kills a guard with a door. He gets shocked at a computer station and pulls Stubbs into the current, killing him. The possessed Freeburg sticks Jason with two tranquilizers, but Jason cuts Freeburg in half before he goes down.

The survivors decide to pull Freddy out of the dream world and make him fight Jason on Jason's home ground. They haul the knocked-out Jason toward Camp Crystal Lake in a van. In Jason's dream, Freddy learns that Jason is still traumatized by drowning as a boy and uses it to torment him. Lori takes a sedative and goes into the dream to face Freddy herself. There she learns Freddy killed her mother, and that Will misunderstood what he saw: her father was only trying to wake her. Jason wakes up in the van just as Kia is about to give him mouth-to-mouth, and the van crashes at the camp. Lori's sleeping hand falls into a fire, and she wakes up holding Freddy and drags him into the real world.

At Camp Crystal Lake the two killers tear into each other. Charlie tries to hold Jason off to protect Kia and is thrown onto a shelf bracket and killed. Kia taunts Freddy to buy Lori and Will time, and Jason kills her with a machete blow that throws her into a tree. Freddy gets the upper hand until Lori steps in. Jason punches through Freddy's chest and tears off Freddy's gloved arm, while Freddy drives Jason's machete into his side. Lori and Will soak the dock in gasoline and set it on fire. Propane tanks explode and blow both killers into the lake. Freddy climbs out and goes after Lori and Will, but Jason rises behind him and stabs him with his own severed arm before sinking back under. Lori picks up Jason's machete and cuts off Freddy's head.

The next morning Jason walks out of the lake holding his machete and Freddy's severed head. Freddy's head winks at the audience and laughs. Director Ronny Yu has said he felt it was clear Jason won.

Story notes

• Freddy Krueger manipulates Jason into killing teenagers on Elm Street so fear of Freddy will return.
• When Jason becomes impossible to control, the two killers turn on each other.

Release facts

• Rated: R for pervasive strong horror violence/gore, gruesome images, sexuality, drug use and language
• Budget: $30,000,000 (Box Office Mojo). The Numbers lists $25,000,000.
• Domestic: $82,622,655 (The Numbers). Box Office Mojo lists $82,633,448.
• Worldwide: $114,576,403 (The Numbers). Box Office Mojo lists $116,643,421.

New Line held a Las Vegas pre-fight press conference at Bally's to promote the film. The film premiered on August 13, 2003. It opened in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom on August 15, 2003, and in Australia on October 23, 2003. It played festivals including the Hamburg Fantasy Filmfest on August 17, 2003.

The film opened at number one with $36.4 million from 3,014 theaters. It stayed at number one its second weekend with $13.4 million, then fell to sixth with $7.1 million. It finished with about $83 million in North America and about $117 million worldwide against a budget of $30 million, per Box Office Mojo. It is the highest grossing Friday the 13th film and the second highest grossing Nightmare on Elm Street film, behind the 2010 remake.

Reviews were mostly negative. Rotten Tomatoes lists 42 percent positive from 166 reviews, averaging 5 out of 10. Its consensus says fans of both series will enjoy the showdown but everyone else gets the same old slice and dice. Metacritic scored it 37 from 29 critics. CinemaScore audiences gave it a B plus.

Kim Newman gave it three stars out of five in Empire and noted it picks up threads from Freddy's Dead and Jason Goes to Hell. Sacha Molitorisz of The Sydney Morning Herald called it a solid effort. Robert K. Elder of the Chicago Tribune gave it two and a half stars and called it a guilty pleasure that beat the recent sequels in both series.

It was nominated for Best Horror Film at the 30th Saturn Awards. In a 2023 Entertainment Weekly interview, Englund said he was proud of the film and credited Ronny Yu.

Press and marketing

• Theatrical key-art / poster campaign reference: IMP Awards — Freddy vs. Jason poster archive.

Cast

Crew

Production

Fans wanted a Freddy and Jason fight for years. New Line Cinema and Paramount Pictures first tried to make one in 1987. Frank Mancuso Jr. brought in Tom McLoughlin to broker it, but the studios could not agree, and Paramount made Jason Takes Manhattan instead. After that film was released in 1989, the rights reverted to Scuderi, Minasian and Barsamian, who sold them to New Line. Joseph Zito tried to revive the crossover two years later with no luck. Wes Craven's return for New Nightmare put it on hold, which let Cunningham make Jason Goes to Hell in 1993. In a 1995 Fangoria interview Craven dismissed the crossover idea. Cunningham's frustration led him to make Jason X to keep the series going.

New Line reportedly spent $6 million on scripts. Lewis Abernathy wrote the first, Nightmare 13: Freddy Meets Jason, and wanted to direct it. David J. Schow revised it with a cult that worshipped Freddy. In 1994 Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore wrote Jason vs. Freddy. Peter Briggs followed with a draft full of returning characters. In 1996 Cunningham hired Cyrus Voris and Ethan Reiff for Freddy vs. Jason: Millennium Massacre, with makeup artist Rob Bottin set to direct. Bottin wrote his own treatment, David S. Goyer and James Dale Robinson turned it into a script nobody liked, and Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger wrote another. Bottin eventually left. Mark Verheiden pitched releasing two versions with different winners in 1999. Mark Protosevich wrote a new script in 2000, and Jason X writer Todd Farmer also took a pass.

Newcomers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift pitched a take that studio executive Michael De Luca liked, and they were hired in March 2002. They wrote nine drafts. Goyer came back to cut their 120-page script down. The writers said one ending under discussion had Pinhead from Hellraiser appear, but New Line did not want to pay for the rights.

Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson had earlier turned the film down. Wes Craven, del Toro and Ronny Yu all passed on the version that got made, Rob Zombie chose House of 1000 Corpses instead, and Jaume Balagueró lobbied for the job. Yu finally signed in May 2002 after being promised a lot of creative freedom. The budget came in higher than New Line expected, and the studio took three weeks to approve it.

Robert Englund signed in 1999, his eighth time as Freddy. In August 2002 Entertainment Weekly reported Kelly Rowland and Brad Renfro were cast and that Kane Hodder would return as Jason. IGN reported the studio wanted a new Jason. Monica Keena won the lead after a long search. Most of the supporting cast came from Canada. Betsy Palmer was asked to return as Pamela Voorhees but turned it down over money, and Paula Shaw took the role. One week before filming, Jason Ritter replaced Renfro.

Cunningham wanted Hodder, who had played Jason in the four previous films. Hodder got a script and met with Yu and New Line executives, but Yu and casting director Matthew Barry decided to recast. Hodder said New Line never told him why. Yu said he wanted a taller, slower, more deliberate Jason who towered over the 5-foot-9 Englund. The part went to Canadian stuntman Ken Kirzinger, who is 6 foot 5 and had doubled for Hodder in two scenes of Jason Takes Manhattan. New Line did not officially cast him until they saw him on film. His first scene was Jason walking down Elm Street.

Filming began in Vancouver on September 9, 2002, on a planned 55-day schedule, and wrapped December 10, 2002. The big fight scenes were shot on very cold nights in September and October. The shoot ran through cold, rainy nights, and Yu used a lot of blood every night. Test audiences were confused by the original ending and thought Will was turning into Jason, so the ending was reshot. As late as June 2003, one actor was called back to redo a scene that changed that character's fate. Douglas Tait played Jason in the new final scene. Tait said he had been up for the whole role, but once production moved to Canada the job went to Kirzinger, who lived there.

Filming locations

• Vancouver, British Columbia: Main filming, September 9 to December 10, 2002
• Camp Crystal Lake location near Vancouver: The final fight, shot on cold nights in September and October 2002
• Springwood, Ohio, and Crystal Lake, New Jersey: Story settings
• Production used Buntzen Lake in Anmore, North Shore Studios in North Vancouver, and locations in Vancouver and Toronto.

Effects and makeup

WCT Productions is credited with special makeup effects, and Jamie Salmon supervised prosthetics.

Ronny Yu said he wanted the two killers to really chop each other up rather than rely on wire work, and he used World Wrestling Federation matches as his model. Stunt coordinators Monty Simons and Scott Ateah and fight choreographers Chuck Jeffreys and Leslie McMichael staged them. Doug Chapman did most of Freddy's physical stunts. Englund did some rolls off a building onto a mattress himself and swam in an icy lake for close-ups. He had practiced swimming before the shoot because he knew those scenes were coming.

Doug Chapman and Glenn Ennis were nominated for Best Fire Stunt at the 2004 Taurus World Stunt Awards for a double full-body burn on wires. Chapman doubled Englund and Ennis doubled Kirzinger.

Yu said the crew used a lot of blood every night and the body count got so high he lost track. Visual effects supervisor Ariel Shaw said shots would be planned perfectly in prep and then get ruined by pouring rain on the day. Yu spent months in post-production blending the live action with the visual effects.

For the reshot ending, Douglas Tait was padded with extra clothing because he looked too thin when wet. To walk along the lake bottom holding the machete and Freddy's head, he pulled himself forward on a rope tied underwater.

WCT Productions is credited for special-effects makeup, alongside multiple visual-effects vendors used for the crossover’s larger supernatural set pieces.

Props and costumes

Jason's costume, per the Horror Costume Index, was a production-made tattered brown burlap jacket over a distressed gray thermal and a dark blue undershirt, black Dockers trousers, black gauntlet gloves and black STC Gore-Tex boots with a custom platform sole. The custom machete was about 29.5 inches long with a 23.5-inch blade.

Englund said Freddy's boots and sweater got waterlogged fast during the lake scenes, and he had to keep swimming through take after take.

The crossover used multiple Jason hockey-mask states from clean through claw-scratched to heavily battle-damaged. Jamie Salmon's underlying cowl work and the mask progression were designed to keep the hockey mask visually dominant while still showing accumulating combat damage.

Jason's costume uses a production-made tattered brown outer jacket over a distressed grey thermal and dark-blue undershirt, black Dockers trousers, black gauntlet gloves and platform-modified Gore-Tex boots. The production machete was custom-made, roughly 29.5 inches overall with a 23.5-inch blade.

A complete hero Jason costume with New Line provenance has survived in collector hands, including the platform boots, distressed layers, outer jacket and gloves; it was used for publicity photography and principal close-up work.

Production artifacts

Scripts and documents

The killers

Deaths

Graeme Revell composed the score. Varèse Sarabande released the score album on CD on August 19, 2003. Varèse included it in its 8-CD A Nightmare on Elm Street box set on October 16, 2015, with a different track count. Death Waltz Recording Company and Mondo released it on vinyl in 2021.

Freddy vs. Jason: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack came out from Roadrunner Records on August 12, 2003. It runs 77:59 with twenty tracks, fourteen of them previously unreleased. Singles were "How Can I Live" (July 22, 2003) and "Sun Doesn't Rise" (August 12, 2003).

Soundtrack tracks: 1 "How Can I Live" by Ill Niño; 2 "When Darkness Falls" by Killswitch Engage; 3 "The Beginning of the End" by Spineshank; 4 "Sun Doesn't Rise" by Mushroomhead; 5 "Condemned Until Rebirth" by Hatebreed; 6 "Snap" ('97 demo) by Slipknot; 7 "Army of Me" by Chimaira; 8 "The After Dinner Payback" by From Autumn to Ashes; 9 "Leech" by Sevendust; 10 "Bombshell" by Powerman 5000; 11 "Welcome to the Strange" by Murderdolls; 12 "Out of My Way" by Seether; 13 "Inside the Cynic" by Stone Sour; 14 "Swinging the Dead" by DevilDriver; 15 "The Waste" by Sepultura with Mike Patton; 16 "The Middle of Nowhere" by The Blank Theory; 17 "Ether" by Nothingface; 18 "Trigger" by In Flames; 19 "11th Hour" by Lamb of God; 20 "(We Were) Electrocute" by Type O Negative.

Ill Niño's "How Can I Live" music video is on the DVD and Blu-ray extras.

Home Media

• January 13, 2004: VHS and two-disc DVD in New Line's Platinum Series. Extras include commentary by Ronny Yu, Ken Kirzinger and Robert Englund, deleted and alternate scenes with commentary, the Ill Niño "How Can I Live" video, trailers, TV spots, soundtrack promotion and behind-the-scenes featurettes.
• October 4, 2005: Universal Media Disc (UMD) for PlayStation Portable.
• September 8, 2009: Blu-ray from Warner, with the same extras as the Platinum Series DVD. Wikipedia reports $722,874 in Blu-ray sales; The Numbers estimates $724,954.
• 2013: included in Friday the 13th: The Complete Collection, the Blu-ray box of all twelve films in the series.
• October 13, 2020: Scream Factory's 16-disc Friday the 13th Deluxe Edition Blu-ray set. The Freddy vs. Jason disc has the Yu, Englund and Kirzinger commentary, 21 deleted and alternate scenes including the original opening and original ending with optional commentary by Yu and executive producer Douglas Curtis, featurettes on development, set design, makeup, stunts, principal photography and visual effects, a visit to Camp Hackenslash, the Bally's pre-fight press conference, the trailer, TV spots and the Ill Niño video.

• Freddy vs. Jason novelization by Stephen Hand, from Black Flame, July 29, 2003.
• Soundtrack CD from Roadrunner Records (2003) and score CD from Varèse Sarabande (2003); score LP from Death Waltz Recording Company and Mondo (2021).
• NECA Ultimate Jason 7-inch scale figure from Freddy vs. Jason, released July 2019, with three removable masks, regular and bloody machetes, a teddy bear and a fire effect.
• CR Freddy vs. Jason pachinko machine from Sammy, May 2006.
• Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash comic book limited series and the follow-up The Nightmare Warriors, made from a planned sequel that was never filmed.
• NECA / Reel Toys Freddy vs. Jason 19-inch Jason Voorhees action figure, based specifically on Jason's appearance in the 2003 crossover; removable hockey mask and machete.

Books and publishing

The catalog

Trailers & clips

Gallery

Posters & Key Art

Film Stills

Press & Promo

Merchandise & Collectibles