That Goalie Was Pissed: Why Jason Voorhees is the Final Girl of ‘Freddy vs. Jason’
In horror movies, the “final girl” is traditionally the last one standing. She is tormented by a monster, physically, often psychologically, but she must confront her fears and face down her demon to emerge as a lone survivor. The final girl is a staple of the slasher genre, often branching out to many other sub-genres of horror as well. There is almost always one person remaining, however intact, and they are almost always a woman. The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is unique in that nearly every single film in the series involves a switch in its protagonist, a kind of passing of the torch. In the original film, Tina is our protagonist at the start, before dying twenty minutes in, at which point Nancy becomes our heroine for the rest of the film. In the second, Freddy manipulates Jesse, intent on possessing the boy. Once that happens, while Jesse continues the struggle from within, Lisa fully steps into the role of heroine and fights Krueger to save Jesse’s life. In the third, Nancy returns and passes the torch to Kristen. In the fourth, Kristen passes the torch to Alice.
The Dream Child is one of the few exceptions, as Alice is a fairly concrete protagonist, but both Yvonne and Alice’s ghostly unborn son, Jacob, develop strong arcs and complete their own objectives to face down Freddy in the second half of the film. Freddy’s Dead returns to the classic structure, our John Doe is the hero for the early stretch, believing himself to be Freddy’s child only to die as the protagonist role shifts to Maggie, Freddy’s actual child. New Nightmare is another one that has a clear protagonist from the first scene in Heather Langenkamp, but her son, Dylan, does have to face down Freddy on his own a few times by the end. That’s not quite a full shift, but the plot of that one actually makes it work as an outlier. It’s designed to be that way. Still, almost all of the rest of the movies follow this trend.
Freddy vs. Jason is very much designed to be a return to the classic formula of both franchises, yet with a distinct visual style all its own thanks to director Ronny Yu. It takes the standout elements of both series, pop culturally, and puts them in a blender with a few thousand gallons of blood and then spits them out with a sheen and style more befitting a summer blockbuster. It features major elements from both franchises, classics such as Crystal Lake, Springwood High and the house on Elm Street, but also leans into parts of the lore of each title that audiences had not seen in a while. Both Westin Hills and the drug Hypnocil from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and Jason’s mother, Pamela Voorhees, play a sizable role. It’s only natural that, in that sense, Freddy vs. Jason would follow the traditional structure of an Elm Street movie. And it does, by ultimately making Jason the protagonist.
It’s not obvious. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard anyone else bring it up, but all of the elements are there. Plot-wise, even though both slashers are certainly tearing it up, it is already essentially a Nightmare on Elm Street film. Screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift made sure to lean into the strengths of both series. The storylines of Elm Street were usually much more involved, the teenage characters often a little more well-rounded, while Friday the 13th had the body count and the fun, party-going popcorn element. Now, those things are combined. The story goes to Freddy and the body count goes to Jason, but those two things are actually much more intrinsically linked than they initially let on.
Before I get into that, though, I do have to stress that the movie does of course have a normal, human protagonist. Lori is very much a classical Elm Street heroine. She lives in the house, in 1428 Elm Street, like Nancy and Jesse before her. She has a past connection to Freddy that is being kept from her, her father is hiding things from her, just like nearly all of the Elm Street kids before her, she cannot trust any adults. She touches on so many of the traits of Nightmare protagonists that had come before. And she embodies yet another of these traits in that eventually, she passes the torch.
By the time Freddy and Jason finally square off, once Freddy tranquilizes Jason hoping to either tame or slay the wild beast, Lori’s role in the story shifts into being much more of an observer, and the torch is passed to Jason. She’s not killed off, like Tina had been in the original, but she nonetheless becomes a much more passive character, even if she reaches major revelations about her own past. As soon as Jason and Freddy start fighting, Jason shifts easily into that protagonist role, and it is not nearly as jarring as you would think.
If Lori touches upon some of those traits of previous Nightmare on Elm Street heroes, Jason embodies them, at least in this film. He is being manipulated from the start. Freddy exploits Jason’s only connection in life or death, his mother, to get him to do his bidding. He is not strong enough to resume his reign of terror in Springwood by himself, so he lures Jason there to spread fear. Because that’s how Freddy spreads, like an infectious disease, and these kids have been in quarantine without even knowing it. This manipulation is, if not identical, so similar to the way Freddy had used Jesse in Nightmare on Elm Street 2. He’s effectively doing the same in both, using one as a vessel to kill before he gains enough strength to fully take over and do it himself.
Freddy’s manipulation of Jason is also highly reflective of the way he used Alice in Nightmare on Elm Street 4. There, Alice had — by no will of her own — inherited her friend Kristen’s power to bring people into her dreams, which Freddy exploits, using Alice to inadvertently bring new victims to him. There, Alice had no control, she was in danger of luring another friend to Freddy every time she fell asleep. Here, Jason is being controlled, as he does not know Freddy is the one pulling the strings. Freddy urged Jason to go to Springwood in the guise of Jason’s mother, and Jason simply thinks that, like always, he is making his mother proud. It’s only once Freddy has regained power and is pissed that Jason is not backing down that he actually makes himself known. That’s when Jason realizes he’s been had, is not happy about it, and the title goes into full effect.
Freddy vs. Jason leans into the defining qualities of not only both series, but both characters, and pushes those to the forefront when pitting them against each other. One might think this is simply embodied in the unfortunate line “Freddy died by fire, Jason by water, how can we use that?” But no, it’s doing something much more interesting than that. There’s a clear and specific understanding in this movie of what truly sets these two characters apart, of their defining difference. Freddy was burned alive by an angry mob. Jason drowned after being pushed into the lake by a group of laughing peers, totally unsupervised. Those two deaths, both pointedly shown in flashbacks or dreams, highlight the ultimate contrast, which is that from the beginning, Freddy has always been a child predator, while Jason was originally a young victim.
It’s brutally and perfectly simple. Freddy kills kids. Jason is a kid that was, either through intent or neglect, killed. That informs the characterization of both slashers throughout the entire film. Freddy’s characterization is a throwback to the franchise’s peak of popularity, movies like Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and 4, which is perfect for Robert Englund’s swan song as the character, even though it was not planned to be such at the time. But this Freddy is crueler, cruder, and nastier than ever before. All of the sexual undertones, all of the subtext is now basically text. He’s absolutely disgusting and that’s good, because he gets his ass kicked — and, yes, does a fair bit of ass kicking in kind — in ways never achieved by the franchise before.
While this is the nastiest Freddy we’ve ever seen, it’s also the most sympathetic Jason we’ve ever seen. Yes, he kills quite a bit of people. In fact, Freddy only actually kills one person, while Jason kills lots. Thanks to Freddy, however, we get a look inside of Jason’s mind, at how drastically different the two slashers really are, and the notion of one being a predator at his core and the other a victim is truly made explicit through this sequence. It could not be better represented than Freddy reducing Jason to his cowering, crying childhood self, laughing over him, torturing him, and mocking him with his dead mother’s head. He’s not just disgustingly tormenting a kid, he’s resorting to prop comedy. The peek into Jason’s mindscape is a legitimately gorgeous sequence. He is alone in an isolated, twisted version of Crystal Lake, adding bodies into the water like putting logs on a fire, completely passive about the work. It showcases Jason in direct opposition to Freddy, as Jason barely thinks twice about what he’s doing while Freddy of course relishes in it.
Yes, Lori has her own revelations in the second half of the film, realizing that Freddy killed her mother years earlier, but Freddy has been pulling Jason’s strings the entire time. He’s been manipulating him from minute one. We’ve seen Jason take a lot of hits in the Friday the 13th movies. We’ve even seen someone use the image of his mother to trick him, but that was only for a moment. We’ve seen Jason burned, impaled, sliced and diced, and literally blown to smithereens, but up until this movie we had never seen him psychologically tortured.
Freddy spends most of the movie controlling him, but when he finally gets the upper hand and finds Jason’s weakness, he truly exploits it. Many people interpret that weakness as Jason’s fear of water (again, I blame the “…Jason died by water…” line) but it’s actually the memory of Jason’s drowning that causes him to clam up, which makes perfect sense as it is the memory of that drowning and his mother’s death that fuel Jason in the first place. That fear is made explicit when Freddy forces Jason to relive that memory, with Freddy now holding Jason underneath the water. Nothing could be more emblematic of that predator vs. victim dynamic than that.
There were a few out of the many, many unused scripts for Freddy vs. Jason over the years that actually revealed that Freddy was the one to cause Jason’s drowning in the first place, which would have been interesting to explore, but I think putting Freddy in that memory and relishing in Jason’s trauma is plenty enough to get the point across.
From the moment this happens, no matter how many of our heroes he’s killed, once Jason has been controlled, tortured even reverted back to the point of his childhood trauma and abused by Freddy, this is truly Jason’s fight. He is the one who has to turn the tables on Krueger, he is the one who inadvertently saves the day by allowing Lori and Will to escape simply by being too focused on Freddy to even notice them. Even if Lori comes back to deliver the final blow, this fight is Jason’s right. Yes, there’s a great deal of debate as to who actually wins the battle. People have been debating that for over twenty years. Jason walks out of the water holding Freddy’s head, but Freddy winks. My take on that is the same as it has always been: both of them are alive, but Jason lost four fingers and Freddy lost everything below the neck. That makes Jason the clear winner.
Still, Jason living through the end of the fight only to learn that he may not have defeated Freddy is simply par for the course for a Nightmare on Elm Street protagonist. Nancy turned her back on Freddy only to be drawn back into the nightmare in the very next scene. Jesse fought back from inside Freddy only to relive his nightmare from the beginning of the movie, stuck on a bus ride descending into Hell, and that was the last we ever saw of him. Jason continuing to live within that nightmare as Freddy’s severed head winks at the camera only respects what had come before.
Everyone in Springwood has a bone to pick with Freddy in Freddy vs. Jason, but for Jason it is truly personal, and it takes a whole lot to get Jason to that point. Jason is the survivor, Jason is Freddy’s focus, and Jason is the one who has to fight back in order to bring Krueger down and make some semblance of peace with his own trauma, as evidenced by Jason slipping contentedly back into the water at the end. This is a crossover that succeeds in perfectly combining both franchises by taking the slasher icon of one and simply slipping them into the protagonist role of the other, only emphasizing the contrasting strengths of both franchises and characters in the process.
