Walking into what I had (for a few years) built up to be one of those unforgettable cinematic experiences; I was getting goose bumps. This is completely serious. I am such a nerdling that the thought of seeing my favorite (anti)heroes on the silver screen for the first time in my life gave me hardcore goose bumps over at least 85 percent of my body.

A conservative estimate of how much of my life has been spent watching horror movies could range anywhere from 10 to 25 percent, with a healthy portion of that devoted to watching the entire “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Friday the 13th” canons multiple times. So this Saturday night movie outing was in many ways comparable to my own personal return to Mecca.

But my quasi-religious enjoyment of “Freddy Vs Jason” was doomed from the moment two little boys walked in with their very young-looking mother. My first and instant reaction, during which some of the more entertaining (a.k.a. more gruesome) moments from previous Freddy fares were recycled across the screen, was disgust that these innocent, clean-slate minds were going to be corrupted by slasher-film filth.

However, my more rational side quickly bitch-slapped these Tipper Goreian tendencies and I made up my mind that this was actually healthy for the boys, aged approximately three and five. In fact, this was beyond healthy.

What is there to learn from a modern slasher film? There is inherent in every formula slasher (I will not go so far as to argue that “Freddy Vs Jason” departs from formula) the nihilistic perception that inescapable death lurks around every corner.

Directly prior to the emergence of the slasher movie in the late ’70s, the dominant horror themes focused on nuclear apocalypse and mass destruction. Films like “Them!” (1954) instilled a fear that a colony of ants could, ya know, actually mutate to towering proportions and destroy New Mexico.

But then Vietnam, Nixon and the inevitable backlash to ’60s’ idealism shifted fears from the bomb to a more personal and even less escapable platform. The individual was now primarily helpless and alone. Government, police and parents couldn’t be trusted, and the usual means of escape (being sex and drugs and alcohol) now carried a high probability of fatality.

Life sucks and then you die, and nowhere was this thought process more evident and recurrent than in the horror genre, where these fears were given protective sports equipment to hide behind and perpetual chainsaws and machetes to hurl at half-naked adolescents.

“Halloween” (1978) and “Friday the 13th” (1980) set the formula and left their sequels and imitations to feed upon themselves until they gutted and self-referenced the genre into the cinematic latrines. But in 1984, Wes Craven would twist genre conventions (not for the first or last time: see “Last House on the Left” (1972) and “Scream” (1996)) with the creation of Fred Krueger.

By displacing Krueger’s crimes in the dream realm, Craven transcended the usual genre restrictions and created a new fear. Not even sleep was safe.

These two little kids wouldn’t care about Craven’s attack upon the dumbed-down horror characters of two decades ago. But anyone can revel in “Freddy Vs Jason’s” anarchic glee and red mist of destruction and bloodlust. Behind the jump cuts and computer-simulated viscera (obviously elevated by the recent gore fest”Final Destination 2″), there lies Krueger’s cruel, ironic wit and the inescapable Grim Reaper wannabe that is Jason Voorhees.

Diehard horror freaks will enjoy “Freddy Vs Jason’s” more lucid nods to its predecessors. When protagonist Monica Keena (from “Undeclared” and “Dawson’s Creek”) has an early-morning whisper-streaked conversation with her father, she perfectly channels Elm Street’s original hero Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) from a nearly identical scene.

Also a nod to previous incarnations of the series, the movie’s final battle ends in a slow-motion beheading on the exact Camp Crystal Lake dock where Jason’s mother was decapitated 25 years earlier. But these and other clues are only for those who care a bit too much.

During a particularly bloody scene involving mass slaughter at a high school rave/kegger, I had an almost uncontrollable urge to stand up and lecture the children behind me.

“Don’t worry, this is only symbolic death. It’s cinematic tradition to signify the end of youth with bloodbaths and broken necks. Maybe these kids are just joining the workforce, donning suits and ties and kicking back in a cubicle from nine to five. It’s just Ronny Yu’s directorial vision that our nation’s youth joining the never-ending chain of commerce and market forces should be represented by spewing arteries and severed heads.”

But I held my tongue, because if not in that theater, on that Saturday watching “Freddy Vs Jason,” these two boys would learn soon enough the ultimate lesson that horror and death and mass murder are no longer sexy, mysterious or at all scary, but have simply become banal, and most modern slasher flicks just add to a generation’s worth of discarded gray matter and accumulating pools of apathy.