Trick or Trailers: Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

Two titans of terror coming together in one historic, long-awaited death match. Winner take all! How easy is that to sell? Even in as commercial a genre as horror, some movies still present a marketing challenge but not this one. No, once you put that vs. between Freddy and Jason, your job is essentially done. You barely even need to have a trailer.

That said, this trailer was met with a special sense of excitement:



Hard to believe that Freddy vs. Jason celebrated it's fifteenth (!) anniversary this year but when you look at the trailer, it certainly reminds you that it was from a different, distant time. First of all, it was from back in the day when New Line Cinema was still a thing. I know we still see that logo pop up here and there on new movies but it's not like it was when a movie was specifically a New Line Cinema film. That logo conjures such a sense of nostalgia for me. During the '80s and '90s, when times were sometimes lean for genre films, when I would see the New Line logo come up on the front of a trailer, I got pumped because I knew it was a good chance it'd be a horror trailer.

Either that, or a House Party sequel.



Either way I was happy!

And thank God Freddy vs. Jason came out during an era where FANGORIA was still a robust presence. It would have been a crime had this movie, a film for the Fango crowd if there ever was one, had come out with no accompanying Fango cover story to mark its arrival.

Awwww yeeeah!

For a movie that had so many expectations to live up to, I feel like Freddy vs. Jason mostly satisfied. Mostly. But while I'm grateful that they made this before Robert Englund aged out of the Freddy role, I feel like had this been made in the late '80s, at the commercial peak of both franchises, whether the movie was good or bad it would have been - I don't know - more pure. Well, as "pure" as a shameless cash grab can be. But hey, what they came up with in the early 00's was just fine. By now, this movie has its own retro-charm going for it.

With Michael Myers killing it at the box office again, Robert Englund donning his Freddy make-up for a guest spot on The Goldbergs, and LeBron James rumored to be getting a new Friday the 13th going, you've got to wonder if another big slasher vs. might be in the cards.

Given how hard it was to make Freddy vs. Jason happen in the first place, I'm gonna guess no. Seems like a real long shot. So until the day should ever come when another movie attempts to bring two or more icons together in bloody battle, Freddy vs. Jason will continue to wear the crown as the uncontested champ of slasher throwdowns.

Franken-Freddy

Over the course of the eight films that featured actor Robert Englund as the sweater-garbed, razor-fingered Freddy Krueger, the make-up was tweaked from film to film but the essence of Freddy remained constant - a face that appeared on everything from bubble gums cards to lunch boxes (but curiously, no bed sheets!) during the character's heyday. Although the upcoming A Nightmare on Elm Street remake starring Jackie Earle Haley superficially sticks to those same essentials, with the costuming retaining the classic fedora, sweater and glove, the new Freddy's burned-scarred mug just doesn't look like the Freddy we're familiar with. In going forward for a new generation, making adjustments to an icon's appearance may have been necessary but it's still jarring to go from this:

To this:


As clearer views of Jackie Earle Haley's fried face have come to light, I finally clicked on who his Freddy reminds me of - Christopher Lee's Frankenstein Monster from 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein:

For fear of copyright infringement, Hammer Studios had to get as far away as possible from the flat-top, bolts-in-the-neck Jack Pierce make-up known from Universal's Frankenstein films. The look invented by Pierce was instantly iconic, the look devised by Hammer, far less so. It worked in the context of the film, it just didn't have that classic feel to it. Pierce's Monster was such a familiar sight, a viewer could recognize it even in shadow or silhouette. In contrast, Hammer's Monster looks ghastlier but less distinctive. The Universal Monster had a glowering, cadaverous look, Hammer's was just ugly - like an unfortunate accident victim.

Going from Englund's Krueger (designed by make-up artist David Miller) to Haley's, there was no copyright issues at work - just a different conceptual agenda. Just as Hammer's Frankenstein strived to be a grittier movie than James Whale's 1931 original, one that had to distance itself from the camp of the Monster's last onscreen appearence - 1948's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein - so too were the makers of the 2010 Elm Street determined to restore the character's darker shadings rather than remind viewers of Freddy vs. Jason (2003).

It remains to be seen how well recieved the new Nightmare on Elm Street will be - but it seems certain that regardless of the merits of the film as a whole, the new Freddy is destined to go down in history, much like Hammer's Frankenstein Monster, as a crude likeness of an icon.

Golden Slumbers

Due on DVD May 4th, riding on the heels of the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, is the documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy. The box art for the DVD has recently been revealed and, as drawn by original Elm Street poster artist Matthew Joseph Peak, it looks awfully sweet. I'm actually more excited to see this franchise-spanning doc (produced by the same team responsible for My Name Is Jason) than I am to see the remake.

Unlike Halloween or Friday the 13th - series that I had to catch up with on TV because I was too young when the early entries of each series came out - I hit the ground running with Nightmare and saw the 1984 original in theaters. Being able to watch the Nightmare movies from the beginning gave me both a fondness for the series but also a little contempt towards it as well. I suspect it's a common reaction among fans to feel that, with rare exception, once they're old enough to see horror movies on the big screen unsupervised the movies don't seem as cool as the ones that came before their time.

The original A Nightmare on Elm Street, however, definitely lived up to the minor maelstrom of hype that accompanied it (hype was harder to generate in those pre-internet days). Every sequel after that, though, was an exercise in disappointment. Even the much-admired Dream Warriors seemed jarring to me at the time as that's where the Freddy one-liners started to take on a life of their own (although, admittedly, the one-liners in Dream Warriors are classic).

Still, time has made me fonder of The Gloved One and the carefree era that he reigned over. At the height of the Nightmare series' popularity, it seemed galling to this serious-minded fan to have horror's flagship character be all about buffoonery and MTV-style razzmatazz. Now I wish horror could have some of that love of pure entertainment back. Even the most moronic genre films today - such as The Unborn or Daybreakers - have a dunderheaded earnestness to them that's just boring. Freddy, on the other hand, was always ready with a quip and a cackle. Freddy may have been seldom scary but in retrospect, I realize that it was always a kick to have him around.