Would The Pinhead Vs Freddy and Jason Movie Have Worked?

The thought of Hellraiser’s Pinhead, A Nightmare On Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, and Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees facing off in a battle Royale sounds great on paper, but that’s the only place where this version of Freddy Vs Jason‘s slasher showdown makes sense. Early on in the production of 2003’s Freddy Vs Jason, there were big plans for the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise’s crossover with the Friday the 13th series to include another iconic 80s series. Although these plans were never set in stone, the idea of involving Hellraiser’s Pinhead was incorporated into numerous drafts of Freddy Vs Jason.

Some of the Friday the 13th franchise’s later, sillier sequels featured fantasy elements such as Jason morphing from an un-killable hulking murderer into some sort of demonic monster. Meanwhile, the Nightmare On Elm Street series was always built on a mixture of straightforward slasher formula and supernatural fantasy elements since Freddy attacked victims in their dreams and boasted otherworldly powers. However, Hellraiser’s Pinhead was a totally different type of horror villain from Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, and as such, Freddy Vs Jason Vs Pinhead would never have worked.

One draft of Freddy Vs Jason ended with Pinhead intervening between the duo, setting up another fight wherein all three villains battled it out. However, this premise might not have been as successful as it initially seems. The best movies of the Friday the 13th franchise depict Jason Voorhees as an unthinking killing machine mowing down teens in a remote location, while the best of the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise similarly see Freddy use his powers to come up with sadistically inventive ways to kill off Springwood’s young citizens. In contrast, Pinhead’s best stories see the strange, otherworldly villain tempt flawed humans to the dark side, a more subtle and insidious sort of evil that doesn’t gel well with the more straightforward slasher thrills of the Friday the 13th and Nightmare On Elm Street movies.

Why Hellraiser Vs Nightmare On Elm Street/ Friday the 13th Wouldn’t Work

Pinhead wasn’t a slasher villain, even though he had a lot in common with them. While he did punish people who transgressed (like Jason), and he did use trippy supernatural powers to do so (like Freddy), Pinhead was a demonic force with a bizarre code of ethics, not a vengeance-fueled killer. The Halloween franchise’s Michael Myers was a much more fitting villain for Freddy and Jason to face off against since the slasher villain was a revenge-focused, nigh-on un-killable murderer. In contrast, Pinhead was a weird demon/angel mash-up with an army of Cenobites who was more interested in tricking people into causing their own doom than attacking them.

Where Freddy and Jason were seeking revenge against generations of teenagers, Pinhead was a strange quasi-religious figure seeking enlightenment. As such, the trio’s face-off would have likely devolved into a conversation about the ethics of evil in a morally grey world. Pinhead wasn’t the sort of slash-and-stab spree killer that made the slasher franchises of the ’80s so successful, with the character having a stranger, more thoughtful agenda than his contemporaries. Thus, although Hellraiser’s Pinhead almost faced down A Nightmare On Elm Street‘s Freddy and Friday the 13th’s Jason, it is ultimately a good thing that Freddy Vs Jason ended up taking the story in another direction.