This Horror Movie Crossover With 42 Years of Lore Is Impossible To Follow Up

The same way that Marvel and DC fans spend time arguing over which character is secretly the strongest, horror fans find themselves in similar debates. Though we do have movies like Godzilla vs Kong and even Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman to satisfy some of these curiosities, unlike comics, there are seldom canonical ways to confirm who is better. That said, one of the only real modern horror movie crossovers was able to not only satisfy fans but utilize the decades of material that preceded it to tell its story and push both franchises forward. It’s a feat that may never happen again.

By the time Freddy vs Jason was released in 2003, the two franchises that it was intertwining had decades of lore behind them. Friday the 13th alone had 23 since its first movie, which premiered in 1980, while A Nightmare on Elm Street had 19 years of material to mine from, the first film having debuted in 1984. This is what makes Freddy vs Jason so impressive; not only is it a movie that at least makes sense from a narrative perspective, but it was able to incorporate major elements from two different sets of lore and make it all make sense.

How Freddy vs Jason Used 40 Years of Lore Correctly

For starters, Freddy vs Jason has a grand set-up, where Freddy, in Hell, revives Jason using the disguise of his mother, Pamela, and sends him to Elm Street in Springwood to kill some teens. This not only builds on the final scene of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which teased Freddy’s glove grabbing Jason’s mask, but also fully acknowledges the influence that Pamela Voorhees has had on her son, even in death. It’s a set-up that kickstarts the movie on the right now, showing that they’re fully respecting the lore for both.

Freddy vs Jason also uses iconic moments from the previous movies in both franchises as callbacks to those films and to continue fleshing out its own story. The “no dreaming” drug Hypnocil and Westin Hills Asylum, both used in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, make a major appearance in the film as key plot points to try and stop Freddy. Naturally, the 1428 Elm Street house, and, of course, the young girls jumping rope and singing the Freddy Krueger rhyme, also appear. Furthermore, the origins of both killers are revisited, including Jason’s drowning as a boy and Freddy’s fiery death by Springwood parents, and used as a springboard to make the fight between them have a little more weight.

One of the most important pieces of lore that is used precisely by Freddy vs Jason is one established by the first A Nightmare on Elm Street: anything that you’re holding in your dreams as you wake up can be brought into the real world. In the film, Lori (Monica Keena) goes to sleep to lure Freddy out, holding onto him just in time for her friends to wake her up and complete their plan of bringing Jason back to Camp Crystal Lake. While being tormented by Freddy in her dream, Lori grabs onto him just as she wakes up, bringing Freddy along with her into the real world and setting up the big final battle between the two killers.

All of this, perhaps, sounds like nonsense to non-fans. Deeper pieces of lore from both franchises are ignored, like Jason Voorhees‘ trip to Manhattan, his fight with a psychic young girl, and Freddy Krueger’s secret daughter, but the framework of both franchises remains intact. In the end, it’s an impressive amount of legwork utilized by the crossover film to not only acknowledge everything that came before it, but to use it as a basis for its own story.

Freddy vs Jason Was Over a Decade in the Making

The biggest challenge in getting a movie like Freddy vs Jason made can be summed up in a word: rights. For characters in two different movies to suddenly appear next to each other, it requires a studio owning (or licensing) both, which is exactly what happened. For the first eight movies featuring Jason, the Friday the 13th series was distributed by Paramount Pictures, while A Nightmare on Elm Street was the crown jewel of New Line Cinema. Despite fans hoping for a fight, it was something that couldn’t happen for the first decade of both franchises.

After Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan failed to make a real dent at the box office, the series rights were sold to New Line with franchise producer and creator Sean Cunningham hoping to finally make Freddy vs Jason. This led to another key component of a movie crossover: right place, right time. Before the film could be made, Wes Craven returned to the “Nightmare” franchise to make 1994’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, prompting the development and release of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which set up the clash of the two slashers.

Freddy vs Jason was in development on and off for years after the big ending of “Goes to Hell” sent shockwaves through the horror fandom. It’s been reported that as many as 18 unused scripts were written for the movie before the version that actually got made was produced. Even with that layup out in the world, the film needed years to percolate.

Freddy vs Jason Is Impossible to Follow-Up, Even 20 Years Later

The box office success of Freddy vs Jason dictated that it couldn’t be a one-and-done kind of deal. Upon its release, the film made over $114 million at the global box office and became the highest-grossing movie in both the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises (it still holds that title for the Jason side of things, but 2010’s remake of the original “Nightmare” is now on top of that series). Even with the monetary success of the film, it has to be reiterated that the development process for Freddy vs Jason took years to climb over, so a sequel faced similar hurdles.

An attempt was made to get a second film off the ground, with the idea of folding in Bruce Campbell’s Ash Williams from the Evil Dead franchise and making Freddy vs Jason vs Ash. That film failed to happen because two sets of lore are one thing, but adding a third (with its own interested producers) would complicate matters even more. That idea did eventually become a comic book series from Dynamite, but another feature film crossover stayed buried, with no sign of another.

That said, even though a Freddy vs Jason 2 never came about, the success of the movie did prompt 20th Century Fox to finally make an Alien vs Predator film (it premiered one year after Freddy vs Jason). In the two decades since, though, major franchise crossover movies have largely been limited to the interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe, though we have gotten the likes of Godzilla vs Kong, which has proven to be a worthwhile franchise in its own right.

The singularity of Freddy vs Jason in that regard makes it even more interesting as a pop culture object. There are still plenty of modern horror franchises that could very well crossover with each other in the same way as Freddy vs Jason. Fans would no doubt love to see M3GAN and Chucky go at each other, or maybe even Art the Clown taking on another slasher icon. The truth of the matter is that there’s no shortage of potential crossovers that could happen, but Freddy vs Jason remains the only one that’s actually gotten over all its hurdles, and it may be the last to ever do it.

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