Editorials
This Doesn’t Suck on So Many Levels: A Look Back at ‘Jason X’
Friday the 13th franchise has gone through quite a few changes since its inception almost 40 years ago. Jason Voorhees has been to Vancouver Manhattan, fought Freddy Krueger, fought a psychic teenager, died multiple times and been resurrected multiple times, but his most outlandish outing was undoubtedly 1993’s atrocious Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which had Jason’s physical body absent for most of the film as his spirit jumped from body to body (it’s even dumber than it sounds). While the effort was somewhat commendable, the film betrayed everything that fans loved about the series (with the exception of that rather impressive opening sequence). That betrayal was met with poor critical reception and even an worse box office performance. It grossed a mere $15.9 million and earned some of the worst reviews of any film in the franchise. The next plan was to bring Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger together in Freddy Vs. Jason. While that film suffered in development hell in the late ’90s, series creator Sean S. Cunningham wanted to release another Friday the 13th installment to make sure that Jason Voorhees didn’t leave the public eye. Screenwriter and actor Todd Farmer (The Messengers, My Bloody Valentine 3D, Drive Angry) was then brought on and he pitched one idea: send Jason to space. New Line Cinema was sold and Jason X, which celebrates(?) it’s 15th anniversary today, was born.
You really have to wonder how desperate New Line Cinema was to accept the whole “Jason in space” idea so quickly. They didn’t want to hear any other ideas? Not a single one? Hell, even Kane Hodder hesitated when he read the script for the film. Who could blame him? The last horror franchises to go to space (Critters, Leprechaun, Hellraiser) were all duds. Jason X is the kind of movie that ends up on the How Did This Get Made? podcast. Nevertheless, it was made and we’re stuck with it forever. Even knowing that space is known to kill horror franchises, New Line moved forward with Jason X because they needed to make another Friday the 13th film but they had to make it different enough so that it wouldn’t interfere with any potential Freddy Vs. Jason storyline (and there were a lot of potential Freddy Vs. Jason storylines).
To stand out from earlier installments, a significant amount of self-referential humor and camp was injected into Jason X. This was, of course, influenced by the massive success of Scream back in 1996. The original script for the film was darker than the final product would turn out to be, but the studio kept insisting that the film be more like Scream. What the studio didn’t realize was that Jason X would be released at the tail end of Scream’s success. In fact, it came out two years after Scream 3 was released to a tepid critical response, and by that point that meta well had dried up. When Jason X was released on April 26, 2002, no one cared. To say the film was late to the party would be an understatement.
It is important to note that while Jason X was released in 2002, the movie was actually filmed in 2000. This doesn’t completely excuse its dated attempts at meta humor, but it does somewhat explain it’s “late to the party” feel. During filming Michael De Luca, the President of Production of New Line Cinema, left the company. Unfortunately for Jason X all support for the film left with him. You see, De Luca was one of the main reasons Jason X even got the greenlight. After he left the film was shelved for roughly 18 months before finally being released in April 2002 (though it did get released in Germany in July 2001). That delay didn’t help the film, as a copy of it leaked online, making it one of the most pirated movies of that year. Upon its American release it received even worse reviews than Jason Goes to Hell and earned its place as the lowest grossing film in the franchise. Ouch.
I’m not writing this article to tell you that Jason X is a good movie. It’s not. It’s actually a laughably bad movie. That being said, I can’t help but sort of love it. I actually rank it 5th in the franchise. I started writing this article as a defense of Jason X and about halfway through realized that I can’t really defend it. I can explain my admiration for it though, and it really all boils down to the lack of pretension in the film. Jason X is never particularly scary, and the jokes miss more than they hit, but it still feels very much like a Friday the 13th film.
Director James Isaac doesn’t really have a signature style, choosing to film the movie in as straightforward a way as possible. Isaac, who died from multiple myeloma back in 2012, has even stated that he wishes he could have filmed the script that the initially read before all of the tweaks, but the film we have is still a solid effort from the director. This isn’t to say that Isaac made a gem of a movie of course. Let’s be honest, even with its $13 million(?!) budget, Jason X looks like a SyFy movie. Would you believe that there were 800 special effects shots in the film?
The cast, which includes a pre-Lizzie McGuire Movie Yani Gellman, Peter Mensah and a cameo be David Cronenberg, is mostly made up of unknowns. They do their best with the material, but they can’t help the fact that (at the time) they were just a bunch of C-level actors trying to make a quick buck off of a dying horror franchise. Still, a handful of them really look like they are having fun, particularly Andromeda’s Lisa Ryder as the android Kay-Em 14. That’s all you can really ask from the cast of a Friday the 13th film, isn’t it? If the cast isn’t having fun, the audience isn’t either. As dumb as Jason X is, at least it’s fun and entertaining. On top of that, it knows exactly what it’s trying to be. That may not be as big a deal to some of you, but I have a great deal of respect for films that know what they are. That trait makes a film more likable, and Jason X is infinitely more likable because it doesn’t take itself seriously.
As mentioned above, the jokes are hit or miss in the film, but the one joke that really lands is the now-famous virtual reality sequence in which Jason is transported back to Camp Crystal Lake via virtual reality, in a meta sequence that comments on the more ridiculous aspects of the franchise while paying its respects at the same time. Hell, it even recreates one of the best kills of the franchise with a pair of sleeping bags.
Take 92 minutes today to rewatch Jason X. Maybe it’s not as bad as you remember. Or maybe it’s worse than you remember. Either way, try to go in with an open mind and just have fun with it. That’s the way Jason X was meant to be seen. It’s neither the best nor the worst entry in the Friday the 13th series, but it has its charms.
All facts referenced in this article were sourced from Daniel Farrands’s 2013 documentary Crystal Lake Memories.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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