Structurally and stylistically, Freddy vs. Jason is far closer to the A Nightmare on Elm Street side of its family than anything hailing from Camp Crystal Lake. So, as well as focusing on hallucinations and the special effects showcases they can facilitate, this film's prospective victims are much more emotionally damaged than the mosquito country regulars. Instead of stoner teens knowingly circling the drain, Freddy vs. Jason's cast are tranquilised, middle-class children; double-damned by parents who conjured up a vengeful ghost then lulled their offspring into an addled fog in their attempts to frustrate it. This idea of unwilling subordination extends to the title characters as well, with Ken Kirzinger's Jason Voorhees tricked into the role of an understudy, toiling on behalf of a truly noxious interpretation of Freddy Krueger.
As if to vanquish all memory of the quipping slasher that found purchase in 80s pop culture, Robert Englund's movie maniac is re-introduced in a sequence that elevates the paedophilic underpinning of the character from unspoken (but obvious) into vivid, repulsive text. It's not enough to imply that Krueger has murdered a little girl then cremated her body in his furnace, we have to see him licking a copy of her school portrait before stamping the image into his serial killer scrapbook. The uncomfortable darkness emanating from Krueger, which elsewhere demands that a father jab his tongue at his daughter's screaming mouth, is offset by the comparatively humdrum fantasies coursing through Jason Voorhees' skeletal remains. Six feet under, Jason dreams of chasing topless co-eds through endless woods, their flight thwarted by the kind of ineffectual motion found in real-life night terrors.
In director Ronny Yu's film, Jason is a violent, lumbering expression of childhood helplessness. Even freed from memories in which this physically disabled boy is bullied to his death, Jason's feedback loop is one premised on expectation and denigration. His mother, a screeching phantom conjured by Krueger, screams at him to redress her own demise while Freddy himself is positioned as a repellent, patriarchal influence that demands Jason labour, thanklessly, for his new master's gain. Yu, a Hong Kong film industry veteran responsible for The Postman Strikes Back and The Bride with White Hair, approaches these creatures with neither the scraping awe of a fan or the bored indifference of a jobbing director. He's here to work, finding new perspectives on everything from the killers themselves to the steaming environments they inhabit. In one instance, when Krueger has an advantage over a soaked, cowering Jason, Yu and cinematographer Fred Murphy dial up the shadows then blasts Elm Street's broiled menace with greens, transforming Freddy into Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West.
Similarly, the tracks of repetition that have been worn into Jason's decayed mind are framed here as almost Sisyphean in their monotonous and unending futility. While at the mercy of a gloating Krueger, Jason retreats into his safe space: imagining himself relentlessly gathering the bodies of brutalised, naked teens only to hurl these cadavers into an infinite void that lingers just beyond the confines of his well-stocked wardrobe. This en suite exists in the kind of comfortably well-off, suburban boy's bedroom that this engorged, single-parent child has, likely, never actually inhabited. A dream inside a dream then. For Jason the nascent twang of an adolescent sexuality - denied not only by Jason's childhood death but an overbearing, nagging mother - has curdled. The drive to embrace and hold onto someone has been transformed into something horrible and inhuman. Similarly, an idea of clashing objectives, to be expected in a film titled Freddy vs. Jason, is expressed here in stronger terms than a simple, blood-splattered battle. These two invincible sex criminals track in on this film's unusually unhappy cast (cosmetic surgery and substance abuse are recurring fascinations), each vying to be that special someone who will snuff out their miserable little lives.
