Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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The attack on Jack, in timing and in source, is sudden and unexpected for both the
viewer and the character. As he is pinned down, his facial expression communicates
shock, and different shots of varying lengths and ranging from long shot to close up
echoes Jack’s mental panic as he tries to understand what is happening while being
violently attacked. By contrast, Mrs. Voorhees’s death is shot in slow motion, using
shots of roughly the same length, without much variation in positioning: Mrs.
Voorhees is positioned the same in each shot of her, as Alice moves toward the
stationary camera. This timed steadiness of editing and camera positioning echoes
Mrs. Voorhees’s expression of shock as she sees the attack coming but is too stunned
to do anything about it, communicating her sense of unavoidable impending death.
Although the slow motion and protracted shots focusing on the act and gory
aftermath of Mrs. Voorhees’s decapitation are included for spectacle, they are still
aesthetic decisions that contribute to the creation and establishment of perspective in
the sequence.
The unseen deaths function in different ways where perspective is concerned.
Ned and Bill are both unaware that they are in danger, and the last time the audience
sees them alive, Ned is walking by the lake and sees someone by the cabin and
begins to walk toward it, while Bill is trying to repair the generator. Brenda,
however, is following distant cries for help and walks onto the archery range where
the lights turn on suddenly and she is unable to see anything but the lights. Although
in Ned’s case there is a character that appears far in the distance, and Brenda is
following the source of what Chion would deem an acousmêtre, they are both the
primary figures of viewer attachment in their respective sequences, and Bill is the
only character that is either seen or heard in the last sequence in which he is seen
alive. Bill and Brenda’s deaths, however, are necessary, post-mortem, to contribute