The Best Horror Crossover Ever Officially Confirms Its Halloween Comeback

Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider‘s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.

Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees spent years terrorizing teenagers in their own franchises before Hollywood finally let them turn on each other. Freddy vs. Jason delivered that confrontation in 2003, bringing Robert Englund‘s nightmare killer face-to-face with Ken Kirzinger‘s masked murderer. The appeal was right there in the title, and director Ronny Yu understood how much of the movie depended on delivering that fight.

More than two decades later, the crossover still makes an easy addition to a Halloween watchlist. It combines the elaborate nightmare sequences of A Nightmare on Elm Street with the physical brutality of Friday the 13th, giving both villains opportunities to do what made them famous. Their eventual clash turns those differences into the main attraction, with everyone caught between them struggling to survive.

Freddy vs. Jason has climbed to No. 5 on HBO Max’s U.S. movie chart, according to FlixPatrol’s October 23 rankings. That is a three-place jump from No. 8 on October 22, putting the slasher crossover in the platform’s top five just eight days before Halloween. The rise moves it ahead of Corpse Bride, Evil Dead Burn, and The Departed on the daily movie ranking. The chart has plenty of room for seasonal viewing elsewhere, too. Coraline sits immediately above the crossover at No. 4, while Backrooms holds No. 3. Those placements put several generations of horror alongside one another, although the rankings do not provide viewing totals or establish what prompted the increase for Freddy vs. Jason.

Four franchises, four completely different ways of getting underneath
your skin. This is the one built out of your particular fear, why it works so well on you, and what
it would leave behind.

Your nightmare does not wait outside the door. It waits for you
to close your eyes, which you are going to have to do eventually, because nobody has ever
won that particular argument.

• Freddy is horror’s cruellest idea: a threat that lives in the one place you cannot
  guard, cannot lock, and cannot avoid forever.
• You are the one who is fine during the film and wide awake at two in the morning. Your
  own head is where this does its damage.
• These films understood exhaustion as a horror engine. The kids on Elm Street do not lose
  because they are weak. They lose because they are tired.
• You can lock every door in the house. You still have to sleep.

Your nightmare is not really the doll. It is the face of the
person you tell, and the way they decide, very kindly, that you have imagined all of it.

• Chucky works precisely because he is absurd. That is the trap: the more accurately you
  describe him, the less anybody is going to believe you.
• You are the one shouting at the screen because the characters are not listening. You
  know that feeling from real life too.
• The franchise is at its best when the adults in the room are the real obstacle, and you
  have met those adults.
• By the time somebody finally believes you, you will have handled most of it on your own.

Your nightmare has your number, knows your name, and has almost
certainly been inside your house before. The worst part is that you already know them.

• Scream is the only one of these where the killer takes the mask off and turns out to be
  somebody who was at the party.
• You are the person who calls the twist out loud before it lands. You watch people the
  same way you watch films.
• The franchise made the rules of horror part of the plot, which means the survivors are
  the ones paying attention. You would be paying attention.
• Everybody is a suspect, including the person who just offered to walk you home.

Your nightmare is not really about you. It is about the people
asleep down the hall, and the feeling that whatever is here is not interested in leaving.

• The Conjuring films are domestic horror. The house, the family, the perfectly ordinary
  room that quietly stops feeling ordinary.
• Your instinct is to get everybody into one room. Your fear is protective rather than
  personal, which is rarer than it sounds.
• This is the one franchise where belief is the weapon. The people who come through it are
  the ones who are not alone and refuse to be.
• Whatever is here did not come for you. It came for the household, and you are the one
  standing in the hallway.

‘Freddy vs. Jason’ Gives Two Horror Icons a Brutal Showdown

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    Image Via New Line Cinema</figure>