Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

130
his skill to create in-shot effects infusing Friday the 13 th with an aesthetic similar to
Romero’s zombie films, but more importantly, connecting Friday the 13 th to the
aesthetic tradition of much Italian horror, including the giallo film. 4
Suspiria, as an
Italian horror film for example, contains a close up of a girl’s heart being stabbed. In
Deep Red, Professor Giordani is killed after a close up his face being smashed and
ground onto a solid desk. These visual interpretations of death and mutilation
became a featured element and a spectacular draw from a marketing standpoint.
This can be seen in Annie’s death in Friday the 13th, as she is backed against the tree
by the killer, the score tense, but quiet and subdued. In a medium shot, the killer
steps between the camera and Annie, slashes the knife across her throat accompanied
by a relevant sound effect and a sudden increase in the volume of the music. As the
killer steps away, we see the wound in her throat open and blood stream down her
front. Similarly, during Jack’s death sequence, we see bodily penetration from two
angles. He is laying on the bed smoking, and Ned’s blood drips on his forehead
from the bunk above him. He wipes the blood off and looks at it and as he begins to
sit up, a hand comes from underneath the bed and holds his head down. The image
cuts to a close up of Jack in profile, with a hand on his head as the point of an
arrowhead stretches the skin underneath, then breaks through the skin, and blood
4 Mikel Koven directly connects Friday the 13 th to the narrative tradition of what he calls “the terror
tale”. Koven includes Friday the 13 th along with Halloween and The Burning in a set of examples “in
which the killer was always the killer and the action was motivated largely by trying to avoid this
monster...” (2006; 163) However, he argues that Friday the 13 th is amongst the slashers that do not
share similarities with the giallo film, unlike Terror Train, My Bloody Valentine, and Prom Night
(1980; dir. Lynch). Koven makes this claim based on specific narrative intricacies that are validated
through his overarching argument towards generic identification. My argument is that the Friday the
13 th series is linked to the giallo tradition by the already demonstrated formal and stylistic similarities,
as well as through the overt acknowledgement by the filmmakers (Cunningham particularly) of the
influence giallo had on the films.