Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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multiple times. As I began studying film, I would frequently admit to liking them
with a touch of embarrassment, dismissing them as a guilty pleasure. After
Berliner’s course, I began to ask myself why I felt the need to dismiss my enjoyment
of them. If I find them entertaining, I thought, there must be a reason why. This
stayed with me until I began to consider ideas for a Doctoral research project.
In 2008, after beginning my research on the aesthetics of the Friday the 13 th
series, I was screening a horror film from the period that I thought might give me an
indication of contemporary genre aesthetics. The film was Michael Wadleigh’s
Wolfen (1981), which tells the story of a New York policeman investigating a series
of murders that look like animal attacks. It is revealed that the murders are
committed by “wolfen” a pack of spirit wolves known in Native American legend.
My attention was drawn to the point of view shots of the wolfen, which resembled
heat-detection imagery, and the focus on some characters’ attention to the leitmotif
sound of diegetic wind chimes that occurs before each attack. These sequences
made me aware of how much of the film’s overall aesthetic hinges on the experience
of the characters within the film to create suspense and tension, and noticed this
tendency in the other films I researched.
These experiences are the foundations of this research: a formalist analysis of
the Friday the 13 th franchise, in order to determine the aesthetic development and
effect of point of view, or a relative concept that I will call “perspective”, and how
this is rendered using the film’s form. This will be used in order to pinpoint how the
franchise is both representative of, and pioneering within, the slasher sub-genre of
horror.