Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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persistence. And we must remember that only a handful of horror films have ever
been big office draws.” (1998; 190) 5
By contrast, there are critics that have noted that sequelisation can itself be a
question of generic tendency. Sheldon Hall writes, “One can even argue that the
sequel, once more common among Poverty Row ‘programmers’ than major-studio
A-movies, has itself become definable as a genre in its own right. Repeatable story
formulae are certainly a mainstay of blockbuster production with their guaranteed
pre-selling of a ‘high concept’.” (Hall; 2002; 23) Similarly, Andrew Tudor asserts
that sequelisation can viewed as a generic trope of horror:
While it is true that the horror movie has always worked with clearly
marked cycles (consider, most obviously, the Frankenstein, Dracula,
werewolf and mummy cycles which have recurred throughout the genre’s
history), the recent reliance on rapid sequences of sequels which, in their
marketing, are offered as precisely that, does appear to be a genuinely
distinctive feature of 1980s and 1990s horror. It is as if the concept of a
5 Budra provides no research to support his first point of audiences being baffled by later franchise
films, and I have been unable to find any concrete evidence of this. Box office receipts, both net and
gross, can be found in the appendix of Bracke’s Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of
Friday the 13 th , which demonstrates a cycle of alternating incline and decline of profits, as opposed to
a steady decline. In fairness to Budra, however, this was written in 1998, which, at least with regards
to Friday the 13 th , marks a point of low interest based on box office, between the releases of Jason
Goes to Hell and Jason X.
No research is provided for his second point, “that only a handful of horror films have ever been big
box office draws.” Again, see Bracke’s appendix which indicates substantial box office success for at
least five Friday the 13 th films, see Kevin Heffernan’s work on box office patterns of horror and
science fiction films from 1953-1968, and see Richard Nowell’s work on the marketing and finances
of the early teen slasher film (2011).