Magnetic Nipples, Liquid Nitrogen, and an Über Machete: Jason X Deserves More Love

In the early 2000s, the horror genre was a bit all over the place. Ghosts killed people 48 hours after they visited a website (presumably so that they get their affairs in order before dying?!), Snoop Dogg played a vengeful spirit, and Michael Myers faced off with a karate-kicking reality-TV star played by Busta Rhymes.

Meanwhile, New Line Cinema had a problem. They wanted to cash in on one of the pairings at the top of horror fans’ crossover wish list, with the film Freddy vs. Jason, but the project was trapped in development hell. With the script going through endless rewrites, Sean S. Cunningham decided it would be best to make another Friday the 13th film in the interim, to keep fans interested in Jason Voorhees.

Enter screenwriter (and future Jason X actor) Todd Farmer. Realising that staying in the present risked tripping over the continuity of the upcoming crossover, he pitched a workaround: have Jason X begin in 2010 (with dialogue mentioning that Jason was captured in 2008). Shifting it that way created a comfortable, multi-year period on Earth for Jason and Freddy to handle their business first, providing a continuity loophole. From there, the film could do as it pleased—which, as it turns out, was to cryogenically freeze Jason, leap ahead to the year 2455, hand him a cybernetic upgrade, and let him completely demolish the sci-fi genre in a—fairly loose—homage to Ridley Scott’s Alien (apparently Todd Farmer wanted the crew to be space truckers, more similar to the crew in Alien, but the studio vetoed the idea, wanting instead Pornhub-styled college students).

While I’d be interested to know how Todd Farmer's original gritty, blue-collar vision would have played out, the early 2000s studio machine instead handed us something unhinged: a spaceship populated by a very questionable archaeology professor who treats a university funded expedition like a party tour, a crew of horny college students who look like they just finished working on a late-90s music video, and an android who gets a leather-clad, Matrix-style upgrade halfway through the film. Jason X doesn’t just dip its toes into the sci-fi genre; it does a majestic, self-aware cannonball into it. It completely understands that once you launch a slasher icon into the year 2455, all traditional rules of slasher horror are officially off the table. The script stops trying to make you look over your shoulder in the dark and instead asks you to appreciate the sheer, unadulterated ridiculousness.

Something that sums up this ridiculousness quite well—whilst also conforming to one of the age-old slasher traditions—is the existential crisis of the android character, KM-14 (aka Kay-Em). In a futuristic riff on Pinocchio, Kay-Em wants to look like a real woman, so she persuades her creator, Tsunaron, to manually attach a pair of magnetic nipples to make her more "anatomically correct". The humorous sci-fi payoff? They immediately drop off and hit the floor with a distinct, metallic clang.

It’s a scene delivered with such straight-faced sincerity that you can’t help but respect it. It shows that Jason X isn't a failure of a horror film; it's a slasher that knows exactly what it wants to be. It isn't trying to capture the quiet, slow-burn dread of the original Alien or the psychological weight of The Shining. Instead, it fully embraces its identity as a loud, high-energy popcorn slasher, inviting you to sit back and just enjoy the ride.

But let’s not pretend Jason X is only memorable for its ridiculousness. At its core it’s a slasher, and a slasher film lives or dies by its kills, and this is where the film secures the love of—some—horror fans. It unleashes some of the most inventive kills of the entire franchise.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene that single-handedly justified the film's existence: the liquid nitrogen face-smash.

When Jason corners intern—and professor’s assistant—Adrienne in the ship's laboratory, he doesn't just swing his signature machete. Instead, he shoves her face directly into a vat of liquid nitrogen. The camera sits below the surface, forcing us to watch her skin instantly freeze solid into a pale, porcelain mask. And then, in a moment of pure, shocking theatre, Jason slams her face onto the metal counter, shattering it… creating what is quite possibly the world’s grimmest 3D jigsaw puzzle.

It’s a genuinely jaw-dropping piece of practical effects work that holds up remarkably well today. It’s brutal, it’s creative, and it provides that exact jolt of genuine horror energy the film needs to keep its slasher credentials firmly intact. The movie might be swimming in ridiculousness, but when it comes to the violence, Jason is still operating at his peak.

As if that level of brutality wasn't enough, the film decides to upgrade the man—the myth, the legend—himself. Naturally, a standard undead killer wasn't enough for a 25th-century space setting, so the film escalates things in the only logical way. After getting thoroughly blasted apart by an upgraded Kay-Em (battle-mode not new nipples), Jason is accidentally rebuilt by the ship's medical nanites. Über-Jason: a massive, half-cyborg juggernaut with a chrome mask and futuristic machete, is re-born. And he looks like a late-90s action figure brought to life!

Faced with a monstrous cybernetic killing machine of their own—accidental—making, the surviving crew panics, as you would. In this panic they use the ship’s virtual reality simulator to create an interactive replica of Camp Crystal Lake in the 1980s, complete with two camp counsellors, in the hopes of slowing Jason so they can escape (they probably should have made a dozen counsellors, at least, but they were panicking). This scene, an easter egg for long-time Friday The 13th fans, shows that the film makers know and appreciate their roots. When Crystal Lake materialises around Jason he is welcomed by the counsellors who offer him beer, weed, and premarital sex, before taking their tops off, climbing into their respective sleeping bags, and waiting for him to join. What follows is a call-back to the iconic sleeping bag kill from Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. Only this time, Jason doesn’t slam one person against a tree. He picks up one of the sleeping bags and violently beats the other counsellor with it.

It’s pure, unadulterated cinematic joy. It honours the history of the franchise yet at the same time completely leans into the absurdity of the current setting.

At the end of the day, Jason X doesn’t deserve the hate it gets. It’s a slasher movie that refuses to be boring. It delivers incredible practical effects, fun ridiculousness, and a version of Jason Voorhees who is completely unbothered by trivial shit such as the vacuum of space.

It might not have the psychological depth of a modern "elevated horror" film, but it doesn't want to. It is a loud, high-energy, unapologetic ride. It’s time to stop treating it like a franchise embarrassment (that honour should go to Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday) and start praising it for what it actually is: a great slasher film.

How the 90s Made me (pt.1): Monsters in my Cereal and Xenomorphs in my Toy Box

Looking back on my childhood, it’s a wonder I've turned out as normal as I have. Long before I was old enough to buy a ticket to see a horror film at the cinema, the genre had already slashed its way into my life. Every corner of my 90s upbringing was saturated with the macabre—whether it was monsters hiding at the bottom of my cereal boxes, the undead trying to kill a child in my Saturday morning cartoons, or Kenner action figures based on James Cameron’s Aliens in my toybox.

There’s a phrase that many of us are probably familiar with: “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”. Whilst this is no doubt just some marketing bollocks, probably cooked up by the Kellogg’s company, when I was a child the phrase actually rang true. It wasn't because of nutritional value, or the benefits of fibre in my diet, or because it gave me enough energy to play until dinner time. It was because my box of Frosties held a treasure, a small monster manufactured by Matchbox.

Back then (fuck, I sound old!), you didn’t get a cardboard cut-out puzzle on the back of the box, or a QR code for some crap app. You got a proper, physical toy. On that most glorious day, new cereal pack day, I’d thrust my arm elbow-deep into the Frosties, and rummage around until I found my—hopefully new—Monster In My Pocket figure. A small, soft rubbery plastic monster figure (the name was fairly on the nose!).

And if I got the dreaded duplicate, or if the wait to open a new pack of Frosties in a couple of weeks time was simply too much to bear, I could spend my pocket money on Monster In My Pocket blind bags at my local paper shop, or my local Woolworths. Crouched, packets spread in front of me, trying to feel the shape of the monster through the packaging, desperately hoping I wasn’t about to buy another duplicate. It was my introduction to the addictive thrill of collecting the macabre. A gateway drug made of soft plastic and potential diabetes.

On a Saturday morning, when I was sufficiently sugar fuelled and celebrating the acquisition of a new monster, or sulking about getting a duplicate, it was time to watch some cartoons. And one of my “must-watch” cartoons was Mighty Max.

Looking back, the entire premise of Mighty Max was a little unhinged for a children's franchise. Max was just a regular kid, but he had a baseball cap that could open interdimensional portals, and wherever he ended up having stepped through one, he always found himself hunted by ancient, bloodthirsty undead and cosmic horrors, all of which wanted to disembowel him.

The cartoon was brilliant, but let's be honest, like many cartoons it existed purely to sell toys, and that oh-so-clever marketing strategy may have worked on me a little bit. They too were brilliant. They were plastic skulls, monster heads, and grotesque bugs that were small enough to—almost—fit in your pocket. You’d open them up and be presented with mini-dungeon playsets of nightmare fuel, complete with monsters and a tiny little Max choking hazard.

I had quite a few of the “pocket-sized” playsets, but the crown jewel of my collection, however, was the large Trapped in Skull Mountain mega-playset. From the outside, it was a giant, menacing red mountain shaped like a screaming skull. When it was opened, it revealed a multi-level fortress of doom, complete with bridges made of bone, prison cells, hidden trapdoors, and a working lift made out of a ribcage. It was basically a body horror playset, and it was glorious.

Whilst it’s debatable as to whether Mighty Max was in reality all that child-friendly, it was at least created as a children’s franchise. One of the most curious aspects of being a child in the 90s though, looking back on it, has to be the amount of toys sold to children that were based on films that had a gore budget and an 18 certificate.

On the same toy-shop aisle that you’d find the soft and cuddly—but annoyingly vocal—Furbies, and the fuzzy-haired—but bizarrely nude—Trolls, you’d also find toys based on graphically violent films, and parents would buy these for their children without batting an eye. My own toybox was a bloodbath of adult cinematic properties, containing as it did a large chunk of both Kenner’s Aliens and Terminator 2 toy lines.

And these weren’t toys in the same way as the Monster In My Pocket range. They weren’t just a single, static piece of moulded rubbery plastic; they were the premium action figures of the day (admittedly poor by today’s standards, but still!). They were poseable and featured action gimmicks enabling you to re-enact scenes from the films (which, in hindsight, we shouldn’t have even seen, so how on earth were we able to re-enact them?!).

"Re-enacting scenes" generally meant many of them could be brutally disassembled or “blown up”. I spent hours triggering spring-loaded chest plates on Terminators revealing the damaged endoskeleton underneath, firing Chestbursters from a Killer Crab Alien towards a flamethrower wielding Ripley, and covering a T-800 endoskeleton with flesh in the Kenner Terminator 2 Bio-Flesh Regenerator Playset before cutting and tearing parts of its flesh off.

Looking back, the 90s didn't just tolerate horror; it packaged it up into colourful plastic and sold it to little weirdos like me. I was marinated in the macabre from breakfast until bedtime. And honestly? I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Step Into the Dark: An Introduction

It’s a long-established and often overused cliché to say, “I’ve loved horror for as long as I can remember.” So, I’m not going to say that. 

What I will say, however, is that I have some memory issues—thank you very much, Aphantasia!—so the only thing I can remember with a modicum of confidence is maybe the last hour or two. Which means if I were to say that often-used phrase, it would, technically, be true. 

Humour about my cognitive issues aside—you have to laugh or it’d drive you mad!—I have adored horror for a long time. Probably almost as long as I’ve adored pizza: a lifelong obsession that started in my childhood thanks to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. 

A lot of my younger days were horror-centric. From gorging on packs of Kellogg’s Frosties to get to the Monster In My Pocket toy at the bottom, to Friday trips to the video rental shop (in reality an off-licence with a relatively small but very impressive VHS selection) down the road to get horror movies and snacks for the weekend, to marathon Resident Evil sessions on my PlayStation, horror was—and continues to be—a big part of my life. 

And that’s why we find ourselves here together, dear reader. I wanted a space to muse about all things horror.