Slasher crossover Freddy vs. Jason features an epic battle between the two horror icons, but a weakness given to Jason creates a Friday the 13th plot hole. While far from a critical darling, Freddy vs . Jason proved to be a sizable hit upon its 2003 release, earning $115 million worldwide on a budget of $30 million. That made it the highest-grossing film to date in both the A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises, only eventually being surpassed by 2010’s mostly forgotten A Nightmare on Elm Street remake.
It must have been quite the relief for everyone involved when Freddy vs. Jason made bank, as the project had been in some form of development since all the way back in 1987. In fact, the original idea for what eventually became 1988’s Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood was to make a Freddy and Jason crossover film, but studios New Line Cinema and Paramount couldn’t come to terms on a script, leading the sequel to be reworked into Jason fighting a knockoff version of Stephen King’s Carrie.
As fun as the movie can be, it’s unlikely anyone would ever confuse Freddy vs. Jason’s script for an Oscar winner, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as that’s not what fans were looking for. However, it would’ve been nice if a particularly big Jason plot hole was fixed on the journey from script to screen.
Freddy vs. Jason: Why Jason’s Fear of Water Makes No Sense
In the third act of Freddy vs. Jason, once Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger have fully become enemies, their fight begins inside the dream world. Naturally, Freddy uses his dream powers to lay a beatdown on Jason, but the problem is that Jason’s lack of fear and near invulnerability make him hard to do any more to than annoy. That is until Freddy happens upon Jason’s apparent weakness, water. This makes sense in a vacuum, as the original Friday the 13th lore had Jason drown in a lake as a boy. Even if he didn’t actually die, it’s not hard to imagine it traumatizing him. It also makes for a good dramatic counterpoint to Freddy’s death by fire.
Where the logic of Jason’s water fear falls apart is when the viewer stops to consider the prior Friday the 13th films, even the later ones produced by New Line Cinema. Jason ventured into the water multiple times over the course of the series, both as a human and as a zombie. Jason even killed people in the water, and needless to say, showed absolutely no fear of it in any film made prior to Freddy vs. Jason. While it’s a minor miracle that Damian Shannon and Mark Swift were able to craft a script as coherent as they did while combining two very different franchises, making Jason afraid of water was perhaps their biggest error in judgment.
More: Why Freddy Vs. Jason 2 Hasn’t Happened
