Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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Vice President of distribution at Paramount Pictures at the time of production, said,
“The idea for the 3-D was born out of the fact that the process is so visceral, and
horror movies are so visceral.” (Bracke; 74) The connection between the horror film
and 3-D also extends to the tendencies in the genre’s narratives, according to Kevin
Heffernan: “The generic norms of the horror film were uniquely suited to achieving
a balance between integrated narrative and scenes of shock or spectacle, an
obsession of industry discourses on 3-D during the period of House of Wax’s (1953;
dir. De Toth) production and reception.” (27) Miner utilizes such “scenes of shock
or spectacle”, or novelty shots which involve objects leaping out at the viewer 4 , in
Friday the 13 th Part III 3-D to reinforce expectations created by previous 3-D films,
thereby creating a sense of comfort in familiarity. 5
After the flashback sequence which consists of a condensed version of the
last fifteen minutes of Friday the 13 th Part 2, the opening credits, consistent with the
3-D illusion appear from a distance, moving toward the viewer, but Miner plays with
this in order to shock the audience. The final shot of the flashback sequence, as in
Friday the 13 th Part 2, is a close-up of Mrs. Voorhees’s severed rotting head on the
homemade shrine surrounded by candles. The first title, “Friday the 13 th ” comes out
of the eye to the left of the viewer, and stops at a moderate distance, and then from
the eye to the right of the viewer, “Part III” comes toward the audience. As the title
reaches the same distance as the “Friday the 13 th ” title, they both come out at the
viewer, and stop at what appears to be a close distance. As Miner has created the
4 An example of such a novelty shot from House of Wax, features a man demonstrating a paddle-ball
game to people standing in a queue to enter the House of Wax. In a sequence of little narrative
import, he spends a large amount of time demonstrating the paddle-ball game, bouncing the ball
directly at the camera.
5 To simplify the description of 3-D imagery, I will discuss the viewing experience of 3-D in terms of
proximity to the viewer, although this proximity is entirely illusory.