Headscratchers / Freddy vs. Jason

As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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• Where was Jason when the movie started, and how did he get to Springwood? How does Jason get anywhere that's too far to walk? Has he ever been officially acknowledged as having teleportation abilities?
  • He got to Manhattan on a boat once. Outright teleported in that movie too. In this case though, it was just a long walk.
  • Jason was in Crystal Lake which seems to not that far from Springwood since it was close enough to drive in a single night. And for Jason nothing is too far to walk/swim. He can walk quite quickly for one, doesn't get tired or bored or any of that. He could walk to China if the mood struck him. Though only a few movies have him outside Crystal Lake and they all have semi-plausible explanations. He took a boat in Jason Takes Manhattan and swims the last few miles, his body is transported in Jason Goes to Hell and his heart eaten, he's captured in Jason X and he's summoned and walks in Jason vs. Freddy and we have no idea how long it took. Freddy had been searching for years, I doubt he'd even register a few weeks or months.
    • Isn't Springwood officially confirmed to be in Ohio, and Crystal Lake in New Jersey?
    • Roughly going legally that's about 8-9 hours of driving. Barring of course over-speeding or taking less legal routes. Jason as a undead unstoppable Zombie with the ability to move fast when he wanted to, probably walked a course more littered with woods and small towns. Which while usually takes longer in a car can shave time on foot.
    • The human characters in this film clearly drove there in quicker time than legally possible though.
  • Freddy did it.
• Wouldn't it have been easier for Freddy to just manipulate somebody into spreading rumors about him or prevent the destruction of the evidence of his existence? Would've avoided the whole fiasco with the kill-steals that lead to the titular fight. Or better yet, couldn't he have appeared in the dreams of the people who knew about him and perhaps toy with them enough that they either go insane to the point of people deducing he was back or causing the person whose dreams he's in to shout about Freddy or his dream manipulations or something related to them so that people know he's back?
  • At that point, the adults of Springwood knew that Freddy was real, and had some understanding of how his "dream powers" worked. Anyone who did encounter him was institutionalized and sedated with a dream-supressing drug to prevent his influence from spreading, so Freddy couldn't rely on his old tricks and probably needed to bring in an outside party to stir up fear in the town again.
• When Freddy comes out into the real world, the dream would switch to reality, and normal rules apply (no extending arms, no teleporting). So why don't Freddy's burns hurt? He should wake up and immediately fall to the floor writhing in pain.
  • All his nerve endings have been dead for decades now.
  • He isn't godlike anymore, but he isn't human. Same reason why he can survive most of his limbs being torn off, decapitation, and is still superhumanly strong. If he were just human, his fight with Jason would have lasted about as long as it took Jason to cross the room to get to him.
  • It was implied in previous films that he retains a small fraction of his powers in the real world, even if he is forcibly dragged into it. Freddy's Dead, for example, had those scenes of him crawling on the ceiling and shifting between his burned and normal look.
  • Even if he can't manipulate reality outside of the dream world, he's still as much one of the undead as Jason.
• Why would Jason be afraid of water? He lived in the lake for years. I know its an attempt to make this a battle of the elements, but it really seems inconsistent with past movies to me. Instead of making their methods of death their weaknesses, why not make them their strengths (the drowning scene could still happen, it would just be more ironic: Freddy turning Jason's own power against him)?
  • It may be that being in water is the closest Jason gets to death. Whenever he comes back from the dead, he's come out of the water. He's been trapped underwater multiple times. His goal is to get out of that water. And usually he can stay out of it. Then Freddy, Master of Nightmares, digs in his memories, and drags out the scared little boy who drowned years ago. All that repressed fear is now being released and is giving Freddy more and more power.
  • Jason's fear of water is so deeply-rooted it takes Freddy's Reality Warper nightmare powers to bring it out at all. In the real world, Jason knows nothing can really hurt him anymore, so he just doesn't care. It takes Freddy pretty much literally regressing Jason to a child to make that fear really come up, and Freddy trapping Jason in the dream/memory of him drowning as a child to start actually harming him, and even then, Jason hangs in a lot longer than a typical Freddy victim (at least, once Freddy stops screwing around and gets to the killing).
    • Basically, Freddy uses the last time that Jason felt any real fear, which was when he was drowning. By tapping into that, he was able to use it. Essentially, like the question proposed in another film, "How do you kill a man without fear?" "By putting the fear in him."
• How did the kids get between Springwood and Crystal Lake in one night? Springwood is in Ohio, Crystal Lake is in New Jersey. That leaves at least the entire state of Pennsylvania between them, yet it seems to be implied that this wasn't that long of a trip.
  • The magic of fictional timelines. What may take hours in the real world only takes a few minutes to get from "Point A." to "Point B."
    • The writers timed out how long a trip from Ohio to New Jersey would be and wrote it into the script. It was all removed by the final edit.
  • They ran out of tranquilizers - couldn't have been too short a trip considering the dose he started with.
    • Well, they never actually said how much of the tranquillizers they took with them.
  • Or the Springwood we see is actually Springwood, NJ. Keep in mind, that states have multiple towns and some of them have overlapping names. It could be possible that the parents of Elm Street who lived in Springwood, Ohio relocated their families to Springwood, NJ in hopes of escaping the nightmares of the past (and by moving to another town with the same name, the children wouldn't be confused and think it was the same town from where they started). However, we know that Freddy was looking to expand. As he mentioned in 'Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare', "Every town has an Elm Street."
  • Traveling at the Speed of Plot. And as mentioned, it was intended to be a longer journey on-camera, but the editing makes it appear that Crystal Lake is just on the other side of the hill from Springwood.
• Also, how did the kids manage to get past the 24 hour roadblocks when they left Springwood?
• Why does the police chief discourage the young officer who thinks, mostly correctly, that the murders taking place are the work of Jason Voorhees or a copycat of Jason. Jason=/=Freddy. Hell getting the town as a whole focused on a single specific NON-Freddy entity would actually have worked to their benefit!
  • The transfer officer didn't say it was Jason. He said it was a copycat of Jason - a mortal individual, since not only has Jason been put down for years; he's known to never leave Camp Crystal Lake if he can avoid it. This was pulled off so that they were both wrong. The adults of Springwood are used to Freddy coming back though. A mortal killer is the least of their worries. Also, the adults thought that Freddy had found his fear, not that his plan was still to create it with Jason.
    • That still doesn't answer why the police chief didn't run with the Jason theory. It would have been an easier on them.
    • Because acknowledging there's a serial killer on the loose, even if it's just a mortal one, is going to make people extremely afraid. Most police chiefs try to avoid terrifying the populace anyway, for a variety of reasons, but in Springwood there's an even better reason for it. The illusion of "It's all under control" is more than a political ploy there.
    • The movie seems to imply that it's not fear that gives Freddy his power, it's fear of Freddy. "Being forgotten, that's a bitch." It's also fits with the way the town erased all records and memory of him. They could be scared out their minds about Jason, Pinhead, Michael Myers and the Deadites besides and it wouldn't do Freddy much good. Yes the illusion of we have it all under control is a good one but the truth would have worked just fine had Will and Mark not escaped and spread the fear specifically of Freddy. Though Lori seemed to be somewhat aware of Freddy already and with sufficient nudging would probably have spread the fear herself. That's yet another downside to not running with the 'it's Jason' story. Jason is just a psychopath in a mask. He's been "killed" at least twice in canon in parts III and IV and after part IV it stuck long enough for Tommy to go from a kid to a teen. A bunch of cops hunting Jason would probably go about the same way it worked in Jason Goes To Hell. One dead zombie. Jason defeated, the town has nothing to fear, Freddy's plan fails. There really was no upside to what the sheriff went through but if I had a killer ghost in my city that was defeated by ignoring it, I might not think rationally when stuff started happening.
    • One logical counterpoint to that: Freddy is KNOWN for making at least some of his kills look potentially logical or have a rational explanation (probably because that drums up the paranoia of 'is he back or not?'). So it's entirely possible if they DID say 'there's a DIFFERENT serial killer on the loose', but people would STILL think it was Freddy just playing his games like he usually does. That's the problem with Freddy: he doesn't ALWAYS go 'geyser of blood erupting from the bed', sometimes he goes 'make it look like this kid murdered this kid or this kid had an asthma attack' ect.
    • Also, the Police Chief knows Freddy is real, and knows that he needs to be dealt with. He's less interested in exploring alternate theories and more in trying to contain this problem as quick as he can, before Freddy can "spread." Yeah, if he's wrong, and it's not Freddy more people will die, but if he's right, and they don't act now to stop Freddy. . . well, remember the Childless Dystopia in Freddy's Dead (which apparently happened before this movie judging by the opening montage)?
• Why does Freddy suddenly need kids to be afraid of him to be able to kill them? Back in the original Nightmare the kids didn't know about him at first either, yet he was pretty capable of entering their dreams anyway.
  • Freddy vs Jason seems to take place in its own continuity that has several discrepancies with the original series. If that's not good enough for you the Nightmare on Elm Street series wasn't particularly consistent. The first movie allowed him to kill the children of the adults who killed him. The second (which we often try to ignore) let him possess the boy living in his house. The third returned to the original formula. The fourth saw a new girl who could open the way into other people's dreams for him, the fifth gave her unborn baby the same power and the sixth movie (which in theory happens sometime after Freddy vs Jason just like Jason X takes place some time later) gave him the ability to jump into all the children in the city. Freddy might just be the epitome of villains with plot driven powers.
    • There is nothing that would suggest this movie takes place in another timeline. The reason you get these discrepancies is because you put it before Nightmare 6, whereas it has to happen after Nightmare 6 which would explain Freddy being trapped in hell. Also it was clearly hinted in the first Nightmare that he needs fear to fuel his powers. Nancy could only escape his dreamworld in Nightmare 1 because she stopped fearing him.
  • Or, Freddy does need fear, but in the first installments, it's the PARENTS' fear of Freddy that gives him the power to come after the kids. Two is still a sticky widget (but then, it always is), but up until the fourth, there are still parents in Springwood who remember, and are likely still afraid, of Freddy. Once Freddy finishes off the Elm Street children and starts branching out, then the fear that sustains him becomes much more difficult to sustain.
    • If that was the case, then he shouldn't have needed Jason for his scheme; all of Springwood's adult population is obviously terrified of Freddy coming back or they wouldn't do everything they did to prevent it. Also, while the original Elm street parents were obviously scarred by Freddy's actions, it's doubtful they were truly afraid of him after they'd burned him.
    • Has it ever been established exactly how many "Elm Street Kids" there were? Or precisely how many of their parents participated in the death of Freddy? The series did originally attempt to have him essentially run out and have to start finding other ways to expand his victim roster. Did he kill any before the first movie began? Was there fear of him at the high school even if Nancy, Glenn, Tina and Rod hadn't heard of it yet?
    • It's possible that being "killed" in the last movie did have some lasting impacts on Freddy; whatever initial power he had to invade the Elm street children's dreams, he now has to start from scratch, so to speak. The events of that film serving as a sort of Soft Reboot to Freddy's powers would also explain why he can now leave Springwood.
• Why don't the adults of Springwood put the Hypnocil in the town's drinking water? Or find some other way to make sure it was administered to everybody? They know that it works to suppress dreams and keep Freddy from coming back. If it didn't, Mark would have died years ago because he mentioned that not only was his brother killed, or driven to suicide, by Freddy, but that he had the nightmares himself. The Hypnocil is the only reason he lived so long after going to Westin Hills. It doesn't make sense for them not to dose the whole town with it to ensure that Freddy couldn't come back at all, no matter how scared the kids were.
  • Hypnocil has been around since Nightmare on Elm Street 3 which is at minimum a decade or so before Freddy vs Jason (there isn't much to accurately give us a hint of the timeline) and in all that time it hasn't been approved for the public use for a reason. That stuff is dangerous and people NEED to dream. From what little was seen of Westin Hills, two things are pretty clear: first, Will and Mark are clearly higher functioning than most of the people interned there, and as we find out from the coma ward there are LOTS of cases of people overdosing on the stuff and that's just from the fairly limited amount of people they are dosing. Plus, in real life people need to dream and that's probably true in-universe as well. Why at no point was it decided to burn the entire city down, records and all, and leave is beyond me. It seems clear that Freddy's Dead either still takes place 'ten years from now' or can safely be considered non-canon, and either way, Freddy seems to be more or less limited to Springwood. Scorch the city and GTFO would solve the problem relatively well.
    • As long as no one from the rights holders said it's non-canon then we cannot assume that. Also this movie happening after Nightmare 6 explains why Freddy can't leave Hell. Springwood has probably been repopulated after Freddy´s defeat in 6.
  • The reason for that may have been because (and this is sort of a cop-out excuse) it would be too obvious. If the entire town stopped having dreams completely, all at the same time, that may arouse suspicion. By committing the few people who knew of Freddy, they could simply either fake those people's deaths or declare that they're psychologically unstable. Keep those people sedated and doped up on Hypnocil— nobody's really gonna make a huge fuss about a dozen or so Springwood citizens either being declared dead, insane, or missing. That happens all the time in plenty of towns.
  • With powerful medications, even tiny variations in dosage can be extremely important. Just putting the hypnocil into drinking water wouldn't allow for people drinking different amounts of water as opposed to other drinks, or for different sizes and ages of person requiring different dosages. It could also expose people who are already on other medications to dangerous drug interactions.
  • This, plus, as mentioned, Hypnocil has been around and still in the "experimental" stage for quite a while. The kids shown in the coma ward who were "given too much Hypnocil" could have had that befall them because the drug is extremely tricky to dose correctly. Too much and you end up in a permanent coma, too little and you can still dream (or maybe have even more vivid dreams, the last thing you'd want to have when being stalked by Freddy). Whatever the reason, the fact that Hypnocil has been around for ten or twenty years and still hasn't been approved says there's something deeply flawed with it, and its use at Westin Hills is the best of several bad options.
  • It's even possible that Hypnocil becomes toxic or otherwise (more!) dangerous if heated or when applied to the skin or eyes. Drinking water isn't just for drinking, after all: people boil their pasta in it, bathe in it, brew coffee with it, wash their faces with it, etc.
• A minor thing, but how does Jason know where Elm Street is?
  • Freddy might have downloaded a map into Jason's head. Or maybe he kept appearing in dreams to give Jason directions.
  • Most likely in the same dream sequence that Freddy used to wake Jason up, he "implanted" Elm Street as Jason's territory. So it's basically the same way that Jason finds his way home instinctively in Jason Goes to Hell. Basically think of it as a magic GPS or a homing signal. He knows where he's supposed to be. Not that the kids had any way of knowing, but most likely taking Jason home was at least partially unnecessary. Killing Freddy would probably have dismissed him, hell, Freddy could probably have dismissed him if he hadn't been blinded with rage after Jason stole a kill from him. I hear between serial killers Kill Stealing is serious business.
• In a flashback at the beginning where does Freddy get his victims' photos that he puts in his album? Judging by faces of the kids, he didn't take them himself, and they don't look cut from the newspapers - they are actual photos. Did all kids just happen to carry around their photos?
  • Assuming that it happened in his dream realm, he could get them easily by venturing into past events of his victims.
  • It appears to be in the real world. We only see two pictures clearly that aren't out of a newspaper. The first, of a little girl, looks like a school photo. If he's a janitor like in the remake it wouldn't be difficult for him to steal one of those. The other is of, presumably, a brother and sister. The easiest answer to buy is whichever child was the victim had brought it for show and tell and either left it someplace Freddy could get it or had it on their person when he snatched them.
• The whole conceit of the movie of no one remembering Freddy, so he no longer has power, makes no sense in the movie or the series. Will and Mark both know about Freddy at Westin Hills, even while being medicated. There is zero chance that no one has ever heard them talking about Freddy. Regardless, EVERY ADULT in Springwood knows about Freddy. Throughout the movie and TV series, Freddy has killed or attempted to kill multiple adults. There has never been anything that says he can ONLY kill kids/teens, and Freddy's Dead shows him killing an adult before he was even burned. The entire plot then makes no sense, since Freddy wouldn't need Jason to make people think he was back and therefore give him power via fear. The adults are still terrified of Freddy. And Freddy can and has killed adults. All he needed to do was kill one of the adults giving their kids Hypnocil, then go after the kid.
  • While Freddy does kill adults from time to time that's not who he wants to kill. He needs the kids themselves to be afraid of him to kill them and the only ones out of those who remember him don't dream now so he can't get at them.
  • Anything that predates Freddy being burned has nothing to do with his power set and the TV Series is soft canon at absolute best. However, while Freddy can kill adults it's fairly clear that the movie establishes some combination of child/teen fear is necessary and Hypnocil keeps him in check. It's highly unlikely that every adult actually knows about Freddy. It seems to be limited to a few people in power who keep the masquerade going.
  • It seems doubtful that there ever will be no fear at all of him, but Freddy doesn't really give us any indication "how much" he needs. Clearly at the start of Freddy vs Jason it's below where it used to be before, and the only ones who do know and are afraid are on a drug that makes Freddy unable to even get into their dreams. It mostly seems like the hallway scene was the real bit Freddy needed to get the ball rolling.
  • That also being said in this fantasy system, is it only fear in the mind or do the adults not get to give Freddy power by just telling themselves, "I'm not afraid"?
  • Does the adult fear matter or is it just teen fear? And could Freddy have gotten the ball rolling just by having one teen hearing their parents mentioning that time they killed a guy?
  • Come to think of it, this is something which is not that clear in the first film. By the time it starts Tina and Rod are apparently already having nightmares but none of the first movie kids seem to have any idea of who Freddy was. Is it fair to wonder if Nancy and friends were the first victims Freddy got to?
  • It also is probable everyone who was living in the neighborhood when they killed Freddy wasn't still living there by the time of the first film. Staying in an area where you have fond memories of roasting the local child murderer may not have been a likeable future.
• How is a stabbing death covered up as a car accident?
  • Most people will never see the body. You either have a closed casket funeral, or just dress the corpse so you can't see the stab wounds and send them out.
• Why does Jason have two eyes? It's canon, even in Jason Goes To Hell which was in it's own canon, that he lost his eye in Part IV.
  • Jason Goes To Hell is not in it's own canon. At the end of said movie there is a scene that directly leads to the events of this movie (Freddy stealing Jason´s mask).
  • According to the novelization, thanks to Freddy, his body started regenerating from all his injuries (most likely including the lost eye), and he regained his youth, strength and vitality in the process. All before he dug his way out of the ground.
• The premise of the movie is that Freddy uses Jason to bring fear back into the kids of Elm Street so he can escape Hell and reign terror once again. But if Freddy is so weak that he can’t get out of Hell, how was he able to send Jason out into the real world to begin with?
  • It's probably easier to invade the dreams of someone that's already in Hell. And Jason's been killed so many times, that willing himself into the land of the living is probably as easy as getting out of bed.
• Is it just me or is any one else on the side of the adults in the movie? They are painted in a malicious light by drugging their kids, covering up Freddy's existence completely, throwing kids that know about Freddy in a insane asylum. I acknowledge that those are highly unethical but to me those seem acceptable compared to letting a demonic serial killer kill their children in their dreams. Hell the fact that they figure out how to stop Freddy completely should be seen as a win. How are they not seen as the good guys in the big scheme of things?
  • It probably is just a matter of ethics; whether you believe in the utilitarian "ends justify the means" philosophy or the "some lines should never be crossed" philosophy. The adults in this movie seem to be depicted in a negative light because it's from the point of view of the teenagers, who don't know the full context since said adults tried to suppress all info to the point of gaslighting those who have encountered Freddy.
• How can Springwood have recovered so fast? Didn't Freddy's Dead state that all its children were dead yet there now seem to be countless teenagers? Springwood was a town full of insane parents because all of the kids had been killed by Freddy. When Freddy vs. Jason starts up, the town seems normal enough, if not a little freaky about Freddy coming back. Did they just pretend the sixth movie never happened? On that note, who renovated 1428 Elm Street? It was a total wreck ever since the third movie.
  • Presumably, prior to Freddy's Dead, once the majority of the population learned about Freddy they simply fled then returned once he had been vanquished by his daughter.
  • Presumably there was a cover-up. Just try to roll with it.
  • The text in the beginning of the 6th movie says it takes place "Ten years from now". Assuming this doesn't mean "Ten years from 1991 when this movie was released" and is instead intended to be relative to the viewer, then Freddy's Dead hasn't happened yet, just like Jason X.
    • Freddy's Dead already happened by the time the events of Freddy vs Jason start. There are some clips from Freddy's Dead included in the FvJ introduction sequence.
  • As for 1428 Elm Street renovation, maybe it was Dr. Campbell before he moved in. Or whatever heirs the Thompsons had did it and sold the house to him. Maggie's birth date and apparent age prevent Freddy's Dead from taking place later than early 2000s though. And since FvJ takes place in 2003-2004... yeah, a cover-up. That must be it.
• Why didn't Freddy just tell Jason to only target people who are awake, so that Freddy himself can target those who are asleep?
  • Freddy seemed to assume Jason would simply wander off back to Crystal Lake eventually, Springwood not being his "territory" he didn't count on Jason being so single-minded, or that he needed to clarify that he only had to kill a few then go home.

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