Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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vulnerability, such as the passive eye/camera shots from Jason in Jason X or the
eye/camera of Deputy Winslow as he pursues Jason in Friday the 13 th Part 2. Most
significantly, though there can be dominant uses of the eye/camera tending towards
either power or vulnerability for any given film, these positions can alternate not
only within a film, but at times within a sequence, as occurs in The New Blood. The
examples from the Friday the 13 th series demonstrate both a cohesive aesthetic
continuum as well as the variety provided within films with a wide range of writers
and directors, reflecting theories of pleasure through repetition that genre viewing
provides that were discussed in Chapter 2, including work by Grant, Buscombe and
Neale. Dika accurately describes this tendency in her writing about Friday the 13 th
as a model for recombining generic elements to a successful end:
(The) overall tendency in Friday the 13 th Part 2 toward the replication of
material while supplying a suitable level of variation serves two purposes
for the film-viewing audience. It facilitates the film’s game by supplying
the known ground rules, while the innovations supply the film’s interest
and shocks. This technique allows the viewer to feel secure in his
knowledge of the formula, distanced by the formulaic predictability of
the events, while nonetheless excited by the surprises and variations.
(84)
The evolution of the eye/camera within the Friday the 13 th films is exemplary of this
statement. With the eye/camera established as a generic convention on the release of
Friday the 13 th , the sequels include it as a staple of the genre while altering how the
eye/camera is framed, contextualised and used over the course of the franchise. The