Featured Essay: Welcome to my Nightmare

by Travis Cook

Way way back in the summer of Aught Three (2003), I was young, I was sixteen, I was dumb, and I had a car and a driver’s license. As such, I spent an exceptional amount of time sneaking into R-rated movies.

I can’t 100% recall if I told my parents what I was doing. “Going to the movies”, I would say, hopping into the car and paying the admission fee with a loose scattering of change and crumpled dollar bills. (Back in my day, the average movie ticket was somewhere around $7.50.) As a sixteen-year-old boy, I wanted to see the goriest, most offensive horror flicks of my time. I wasn’t particularly discriminating – if it looked like a thrill, I would check it out. Frankly, when you grow up in a small town in the middle of nowhere, any kind of respite from daily life looks fine.

This is how I wound up driving to and sneaking into so many R-rated movies, often more than once.

I had what I considered to be a foolproof plan. Since I wasn’t seeing anything that would sell out, and since none of the theaters I frequented had assigned seating, I would simply purchase a ticket for any PG or PG-13 movie playing at the same time or close to the same time, then I would…walk into the actual theater playing the R-rated movie I couldn’t purchase a ticket for. For 28 Days Later, I bought a ticket for Tomb Raider. School of Rock got me into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Intolerable Cruelty got me into Kill Bill Vol. 1.

And Freaky Friday got me in to see Freddy vs. Jason on three separate occasions.

Let’s be clear – Freddy vs. Jason is not a good movie. It’s not wretched, but it’s not good. But it is a lot of fun, and has some decent horror movie sequences scattered throughout. Again, even as an aspiring film major to be, I wasn’t necessarily the most discerning at the time. I simply wanted to have a good time and not be at work on the farm.

Of course, this was also during the final hey-day of the nu-metal era. Horror movie soundtracks were littered with any number of nu-metal, alt-metal, and metalcore bands, all striving to make a quick impression, maybe get a song listing on the film credits, a key needle drop during a party scene. The pinnacle of nu-metal cinema might be Mission: Impossible 2, where Limp Bizkit put together a thoroughly innovative cover of the titular TV theme, later overlapping it onto their track “Take A Look Around”. The Scream 3 soundtrack featured works by Creed, Staind, Godsmak, System of a Down, Slipknot, and more. It was a good time to like big, dumb scary movies and a great time to be a fan of big, dumb, noisy nu-metal.

If I’m being honest, the music wasn’t the full draw for wanting to see Freddy vs. Jason. I enjoyed the flick and would look for any reason to go back and see it. If a friend hadn’t seen it, I would tell them “oh, you gotta see this”, and they would agree because I had a car and going to see Freddy vs. Jason was infinitely preferable to sitting at home.

I didn’t always get off scott-free with my foolproof plan. One time, two friends and I went to see FvJ and requested three tickets for Freaky Friday. The cashier made some sort of mistake – I’m not sure if it was deliberate or if they thought we were going to see the slasher movie anyway or if it was a mistake made at peak cinema hour – and gave us three actual tickets for Freddy vs. Jason. We decided that if we’d already gotten this lucky, we would see how far it would go. We presented our tickets to the ticket taker, who eyed them suspiciously.

“Can I see some I.D.?”

We froze, but I recovered swift enough. “For Freaky Friday? I thought it was PG-13?”

The guard looked at the tickets again. “These are for Freddy vs. Jason.” 

The man looked older than us, bearded and stocky, irritated by the task at hand. I’m sure that he didn’t love being an usher, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was looking to take out that internal disappointment on some relatively powerless teenage hooligans. Or I’m sure that he cared greatly about his job and didn’t want the innocent minds of the young masses to be corrupted by the slasher mash-up. Or I’m sure he was just having a bad day and had let too many other youths into the wrong theater unknowingly. There are so many scenarios for why this man chose to be a dick, and all of them are plausible.

“Well, that’s not what we paid for.”

“OK, then.” The guard gestured at the ticket counter. “You can get that fixed up over there.”

We returned to the counter, swapped out the tickets with no trouble, and then went back to the taker, who took our tickets and tore them while staring each of us down. 

“Enjoy the movie.” Clearly, we weren’t the first bozos who’d tried this exact plan. But, in our defense, we didn’t care.

We slipped down the hallway and made a big show of stepping into the theater for Freaky Friday, waiting an appropriate amount of time (probably two minutes) before slipping out and into the FvJ theater. 

Already on edge, we tried to choose an inconspicuous part of the theater to sit in. For whatever reason, higher up in the middle of a row felt safe, with people on either side of us. 

“We’re gonna get caught,” a friend told me, his fear palpable.

“No we’re not,” I replied, my certainty also not grounded in any kind of reality.

About two-thirds of the way through the movie, right as one of the characters listens to Type O Negative while mourning their brother, we became aware of a flashlight shining on our row. None of us so much as blinked, nobody moved a muscle. We played dumb, deer caught in Jason Voorhees’ headlights. Eventually, the flashlight turned off and the guard left the theater.

I am not sure if we were caught in the act or if they were conducting a routine check of the theater. What I do know is that as soon as the movie ended, we bolted down the stairs as Ill Nino played over the credits, racing into the hallway and out of the side door of the theater. There was simply no returning to the lobby – we felt certain if we did, we’d be banned from the theater. Or worse, if there’s actually some kind of harsh punishment for a sixteen-year-old sneaking into an R-rated movie. (I haven’t done the research because…well, it no longer pertains to me.)

The thrills had to end one day, of course, and they ended specifically when I turned seventeen. At that point, there was no point in sneaking into anything. But the memory of the thrill remains.

That’s probably why I’ve remained so fond of Freddy vs. Jason, and of its corresponding soundtrack. It reminds me of being sixteen again, of unprovoked danger, of fighting back against the man. As such, when a vinyl reissue of the soundtrack was released earlier this year, I knew I had to have it. And it’s a pretty good soundtrack! Songs by Ill Nino, Spineshank, and Chimaira appear in the actual film, with the soundtrack album also containing new singles by Nothingface, Sevendust, Powerman 5000, and Lamb of God. Slipknot pop in with their “Snap ’97 Demo”, and members Corey Taylor and Joey Jordison show up in songs by Stone Sour and Murderdolls, respectively. 

I usually break out my battered DVD copy of Freddy vs. Jason around Halloween, as a treat to myself. Now, I can also throw on the blood-colored vinyls of the soundtrack, lean back and remember what it was like to be young and stupid once more.

Travis Cook is a writer, as well as a former/erstwhile musician, actor, director, and general jack of all trades/master of none. He enjoys watching baseball (go Reds), movies, movie trivia at the Music Box Theatre, and spending time with his dog, Mr. Robot. He is a graduate of BGSU and is currently workings towards a Masters in Writing at DePaul University. He and his wife live in Chicago.

Previously by Travis Cook: The Search for Desert Life