Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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A Nightmare on Elm Street (2000) 1 and Friday the 13 th (2010). 2
The iconographic
elements of the key franchises were placed within mainstream consciousness, and
the age range of consumers in the genre was wide at this point. 3
According to Rick
Altman, “To accept the premises of a genre is to agree to play within a special set of
rules, and thus participate in a community precisely not coterminous with society at
large. Choosing to view a film of a particular genre involves more than just an
agreement to purchase, consume and construe in a particular manner.” (1999; 158)
[emphasis in the original] This highlights the unique role that the viewer of a genre
film inhabits and expands upon the writing of Grant, Neale, and Buscombe discussed
on page 58 of this thesis, wherein these theorists all assert that expectation, repetition
and novelty are central to the experience of viewing genre. 4
The pleasures of generic
repetition are a major focus of Steve Neale’s writing, and he succinctly summarises
the desire for repetition thusly: “It is founded in the difference between on the one
hand the initial experience and of pleasure, the mark established by that experience
and which functions as its signifier(s), and on the other, future attempts to repeat the
experience, future repetitions of the signifier(s)” (1980; 48). The “signifiers”
discussed by Neale not only refer to elements of narrative and iconography, but also
to film form; the previous chapters demonstrate how the aesthetics of the series rely
upon both repetition and innovation in order to create a developmental continuum,
1 “Spin-offs from the Nightmare films were the number one selling merchandise of 1987...” (232)
2 “The iconic status of Jason led to Friday the 13 th related merchandise which began in the mid 1980s
with poster images of the hockey-masked killer.” (183)
3 Conrich (2000) writes of the fact that a large amount of the marketing materials centering on A
Nightmare on Elm Street were aimed at children, and some mainstream horror films were marketed
toward families, with ratings from the MPAA suitable for children, at the discretion of parents, such
as Poltergeist (dir. Hooper; 1982)
4 See Cherry 2009, pp. 19-36 for a comprehensive summary and analysis of genre theory as applied to
the slasher.