Jason X

In 2008 the government captures Jason Voorhees and holds him at the Crystal Lake Research Facility. By 2010 nothing has managed to kill him, and facility head Rowan LaFontaine wants him frozen. Dr. Wimmer and Sergeant Marcus arrive with soldiers to take Jason away instead. Wimmer wants to study how he heals from fatal wounds. Jason breaks his chains and kills the soldiers and Wimmer. Rowan lures him into a cryogenic pod, but he pushes his machete through it and stabs her in the stomach. The freezing fluid floods the sealed room and freezes them both.

Around 2455, Earth is too polluted to live on and people have moved to a planet called Earth II. Professor Lowe brings his android KM-14, his intern Adrienne and students Tsunaron, Janessa, Azrael, Kinsa, Waylander and Stoney on a field trip to the ruins on Earth. At the old research facility they find the frozen Jason and Rowan. They take both bodies back to their ship, the Grendel. Rowan is revived. Jason is declared dead and put in the morgue.

Lowe is deep in debt. He calls his backer, Dieter Perez, on the nearby space station Solaris, and Perez says Jason's body could be worth a lot to a collector. Rowan warns everyone that Jason is not dead. Nobody listens. Adrienne is left to dissect him. While Stoney and Kinsa have sex, Jason wakes up, shoves Adrienne's face into a tray of liquid nitrogen and smashes her frozen head on the counter. He finds Stoney and Kinsa and kills Stoney with a machete-shaped surgical tool. He walks into a holographic game, breaks Azrael's back over his knee and crushes Private Dallas's head against the wall. Sergeant Brodski splits up his soldiers to hunt Jason, and Jason picks them off one by one. Sven's neck is snapped, Condor is impaled on a giant floor screw, Geko's throat is cut, Kicker is cut in half and Briggs is impaled on a spiked chandelier.

Lowe orders the pilot, Lou, to dock at Solaris. Jason hacks Lou apart, and the Grendel with nobody at the controls rams straight through Solaris and destroys it. Jason takes back his old machete from the lab and cuts off Lowe's head. With the ship crippled, the survivors head for the shuttle while Tsunaron works on KM-14. Jason electrocutes the engineer, Crutch. Kinsa panics and launches the shuttle by herself without releasing the fuel lines, and it crashes into the hull and blows up.

Tsunaron shows up with KM-14, who he has upgraded into a fighting machine with guns and combat moves. She shoots off Jason's right arm, his left leg, part of his ribs and part of his head and knocks him into a medical station full of nanites. The survivors send a distress call and start setting charges to break off the undamaged section of the ship. Meanwhile the nanites, trying to repair Jason, rebuild him as a cyborg.

The new Jason punches off KM-14's head. Tsunaron grabs the head, which still works. Waylander stays behind and sets off the charges on himself while the others get away. Jason survives the blast and punches a hole in the hull, and Janessa is sucked out through a grate into space. The docking door jams, so Brodski puts on a spacesuit and goes outside to fix it.

To stall Jason, Tsunaron and Rowan load up a holographic Camp Crystal Lake with two virtual teenage girls. Jason bashes the two girls into each other, then realizes the camp is fake just as the door is fixed. Brodski, still in his spacesuit, holds Jason off while Rowan, Tsunaron and KM-14's head get away. When the separated section explodes, Jason is flung toward the survivors. Brodski catches him in midair and steers them both into Earth II's atmosphere, where they burn up.

Tsunaron promises KM-14 he will build her a new body. On Earth II, two teenagers camping by a lake see a shooting star come down and go to look for it, while Jason's burned mask sinks to the bottom of the lake.

Story notes

• After being cryogenically frozen in the 21st century, Jason is revived aboard a spacecraft hundreds of years later.
• He attacks the crew and is eventually rebuilt into the cybernetic Uber Jason.

Release facts

• Released: 2001-11-15 (Spain premiere); 2002-04-26 (United States)
• Runtime: 92 min (Arrow Video lists 91, the AFI Catalog 93)
• Budget: Reported between $10 million and $14 million (Box Office Mojo lists $11 million)
• Worldwide: $17,077,882 (includes $3,956,327 international)
• Studio: Crystal Lake Entertainment; Friday X Productions

A theatrical trailer came out November 9, 2001. The film premiered in Spain on November 15, 2001 and opened in the United States on April 26, 2002.

It opened with $6.6 million and finished with $13.1 million in the United States and $3.96 million overseas, for $17.1 million worldwide. Against its budget that made it a flop.

American critics hated it. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 20% from 108 reviews and Metacritic at 25 out of 100, and CinemaScore audiences gave it a C. Roger Ebert gave it half a star and quoted the film's own line that it sucks on so many levels.

British critics were kinder. Total Film and Empire both gave it good reviews, and Kim Newman of Empire called it wittily scripted and smartly directed.

Its reputation has grown since, especially with younger fans who like that it makes fun of itself and the series. Adrienne's liquid nitrogen death is the kill most people bring up.

Press and marketing

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

Cast

Crew

Production

Freddy vs. Jason was stuck in development in the late 1990s. Sean S. Cunningham got tired of waiting and decided another Jason film would keep the character alive. He brought in director Jim Isaac. Isaac has said he told Cunningham it was time to dust off Jason.

Todd Farmer came to the project through Dean Lorey, the Jason Goes to Hell writer, who introduced him to Sean Cunningham. Farmer and Isaac kicked around several ideas. One had Jason breaking out of hell with Gilbert Gottfried as his sidekick. Farmer steered toward the future so the film would not step on Freddy vs. Jason. The first version was a Blade Runner-style world, which cost too much, so the story moved to a warehouse-style ship in the mold of Alien. At one stage there was a school bus in space. Farmer has said space was the only direction left for the series.

Farmer wrote the script in about three weeks, and New Line liked it. Noel Cunningham, Sean's son, came up with the liquid nitrogen kill and added dialogue. Isaac later said he wished they had stayed with Farmer's first draft, which was grittier, and felt the script got gutted along the way. New Line's Mike De Luca turned down a lightning resurrection and a Camp Crystal Lake setting. Robotic spider sequences were cut for money and because De Luca thought they were too close to Lost in Space.

Isaac wanted a lighter, more tongue-in-cheek film than the earlier sequels because he was tired of dark, dirty horror films. Kane Hodder came back for his fourth film and said this was his favorite Friday script. Hodder also set a rule that Jason is never shown getting back up after he is knocked down. David Cronenberg took the role of Dr. Wimmer after Isaac, who had worked on Cronenberg's eXistenZ, asked to use his effects people. According to Farmer, Cronenberg agreed on the condition that he be cast. Cronenberg rewrote his own dialogue.

The film was shot on soundstages at an abandoned air force base outside Toronto, from March 6 into May 2000. It was shot on 35mm, transferred to high definition so Toybox could work on the images digitally, then recorded back to film with an ARRILASER.

Isaac has put the budget at $14 million, the most any Friday film had cost, with most of it spent on the space sets and effects. Farmer has cited $10 million, and Box Office Mojo lists $11 million.

De Luca, who greenlit the film, left New Line two days after it was delivered. With nobody at the studio pushing it, Jason X sat on the shelf. It premiered in Spain in November 2001 and did not open in the United States until April 2002. Farmer said there were maybe 15 minutes of worry after 9/11 about the scene of the ship destroying the space station, but nobody complained.

Filming locations

• Abandoned air force base outside Toronto, Ontario: Soundstages for the Grendel, Solaris, the research facility and the holographic Crystal Lake
• Toronto, Ontario: Principal photography, March 6 into May 2000
• Principal photography took place in Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario, Canada, from March 6 through April 30, 2000.

Effects and makeup

Makeup supervisor Stephan Dupuis, who shared an Academy Award with Chris Walas for The Fly, designed a new Jason and the cyborg Uber Jason. Isaac knew him from CWI and eXistenZ. Dupuis said he wanted Uber Jason to feel art deco, with dynamic anatomy and powerful body lines.

The Horror Costume Index lists three Dupuis sculpts, all worn by Kane Hodder: an early stunt effects head, the final regular Jason with a skull flap that grips the hockey mask, and the Uber Jason hood. The Uber Jason costume was built entirely by the production, half cyborg armor and half jumpsuit.

Uber Jason came out of the story meetings. The team thought it would be cool to kill Jason partway through the film, and they brought him back with nanotechnology.

Kelly Lepkowsky supervised visual effects. Toybox in Toronto, led by Dennis Berardi, did the digital work. Berardi said the film had around 200 computer-generated effects shots, covering creatures, the virtual reality game rooms and spaceships.

Adrienne's frozen face shattering is the best known effect in the film. MythBusters tested it in a 2009 episode to see whether a head dipped in liquid nitrogen could shatter.

Makeup supervisor Stephan Dupuis designed both the revised 'classic' Jason and the film's cyborg Uber Jason. Production notes describe the Uber build as a hybrid creature/costume system conceived to push metal and synthetic anatomy through the character rather than treating the transformation as a purely digital effect.

The Uber Jason suit combined vacuum-formed metallic sections with silicone tendril details mounted to a wearable body suit; zipper access let Kane Hodder get in and out relatively quickly. Kelly Lepkowski's visual-effects unit then integrated the practical creature/costume work with miniatures and CG for the futuristic death gags.

Props and costumes

The Horror Costume Index lists five regular Jason masks (one hero and four stunt) and one hero Uber Jason mask. Mario Kirner owns the regular hero mask and the Uber mask, and Damon Bishop owns one of the stunt masks. Nobody knows where the other three stunt masks are.

Regular Jason wears a badly distressed brown leather straitjacket over a light grey MillWorks Mandarin-collar shirt and MillWorks pants, fingerless black leather gloves and black leather Thinsulate work boots.

Three custom machetes were cast from production molds: the regular Jason machete, the surgical machete Jason grabs in the lab, and the Uber Jason machete.

Tom Spina Designs conserved an original Uber Jason glove worn by Kane Hodder. The urethane fingers had come apart, so they fit them back in place on a custom insert, cast a new fingertip for the missing one and mounted the glove for display.

Jason X created two distinct mask families: five documented 'regular' Jason hockey masks and a separate futuristic Uber Jason hero mask. The regular look also uses a distressed brown leather restraint/straightjacket layer, light-grey MillWorks shirt and trousers, fingerless black gloves and heavy work boots.

The cyborg costume was entirely production-built rather than assembled from recognizable retail clothing. Custom machetes were made for regular Jason, the medical/surgical sequence and Uber Jason, giving the film multiple weapon silhouettes tied directly to the transformation arc.

Tom Spina Designs conserved an original Uber Jason glove, supporting the fragile material for a custom display. Its later conservation photographs preserve construction and surface details.

Production artifacts

Scripts and documents

The killers

Deaths

Harry Manfredini composed and performed the score, his second film in a row after Jason Goes to Hell.

May 14, 2002: Jason X original motion picture soundtrack released by Varèse Sarabande.

Manfredini talks about the score in Scoring the Stars on the 2025 Arrow Video 4K release.

Home Media

• October 8, 2002: New Line VHS and DVD.
• September 13, 2013: Friday the 13th: The Complete Collection Blu-ray box set from Paramount and Warner Bros.
• The film was also released on Blu-ray as a double feature with Jason Goes to Hell.
• October 13, 2020: Scream Factory Friday the 13th Collection Deluxe Edition, disc 12. New 2K scan of the interpositive, new introduction by Kane Hodder, new commentary by Todd Farmer and Peter M. Bracke, the archival commentary by Jim Isaac, Todd Farmer and producer Noel Cunningham, Outta Space: The Making of Jason X, In Space No One Can Hear You Scream with Farmer, Kristi Is a Headbanger with Kristi Angus, Jason Rebooted with Sean S. Cunningham, The Many Lives of Jason Voorhees, a production documentary, the club reel, vintage interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, the electronic press kit, theatrical trailers, TV spots and galleries.
• May 20, 2025: Arrow Video limited edition 4K Ultra HD, one disc, Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible), 1.85:1, 91 minutes, lossless stereo and DTS-HD 5.1. Three audio commentaries, Scoring the Stars with Harry Manfredini, the Hodder introduction, Outta Space and the archival documentaries and interviews. Reversible sleeve and double-sided poster with art by Gary Pullin, and a booklet with writing by Matt Donato and JA Kerswell.

• Jason X 12-inch figure, Sideshow Collectibles.
• Jason X novelization by Pat Cadigan, Black Flame, 2005.
• Jason X: The Experiment by Pat Cadigan, Black Flame, January 25, 2005. The government tries to use Jason to make super soldiers.
• Jason X: Planet of the Beast by Nancy Kilpatrick, Black Flame, June 7, 2005.
• Jason X: Death Moon by Alex S. Johnson, Black Flame, November 29, 2005. Jason crash-lands at Moon Camp Americana.
• Jason X: To the Third Power by Nancy Kilpatrick, Black Flame, April 25, 2006.
• Jason X Special, one-shot comic by Brian Pulido with art by Sebastian Fumara, Avatar Press, 2005. A direct sequel to the film.
• Friday the 13th: Jason vs. Jason X, two-issue comic by Mike Wolfer with colors by Andrew Dalhouse, Avatar Press, 2006.
• Jason X soundtrack CD, Varèse Sarabande, 2002.
• Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle (2018) includes a Jason X version of Jason.
• MultiVersus (2024) includes Jason X as a playable character.
• An Uber Jason character and a Grendel map were teased for Friday the 13th: The Game in 2017 but never released after Victor Miller's lawsuit over the rights froze new content. A partial version of the character exists in the game files.
• Sideshow Collectibles Jason X 12-inch Jason Voorhees figure with removable mask, restraints, bloody machete and Jason X display stand.

Books and publishing

The catalog

Trailers & clips

Gallery

Posters & Key Art

Film Stills

Behind the Scenes

Press & Promo

Effects

Props