Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

185
teenager in the area, and every now and then the murders just start up.” The camera
continues past the cables to a piece of the dock that collapsed on Jason at the end of
The New Blood, with his legs and hand sticking out from underneath it, using the
method of re-staging the crime scene, as also occurs after the film clips in The Final
Chapter. The boy concludes with, “Forget about it, Suzi, they’re just stories.” It is
at this point that the anchor cuts into the cables, and the electricity produced in the
water brings Jason back to life.
As in the previous film, this story provides all the information necessary to
understand who Jason is, including the part of being a young boy that drowned
which was omitted from the beginning of The New Blood. The franchise viewer is
aware throughout the boy’s story that everything he is saying is true within the world
of the franchise, and creating the anticipation of how Jason will come back to life, as
he, a supernatural creature, in turn met a supernatural death at the end of the previous
film. Also, providing a new format for telling Jason’s story is a method designed to
retain the franchise viewer’s interest without showing them images they have already
seen. To the new viewer, the story provides enough information to understand the
narrative, without implying that there is much information lost by not viewing the
previous films. In other words, it truncates the information from previous
instalments to suit the narrative for Jason Takes Manhattan. The only thing that may
create curiosity in the new viewer, as in the three previous films, is why Jason is
wearing a hockey mask in the first place, but as it is part of the popular
contemporary iconography, this may not have even been an issue.
Jason Goes to Hell begins the film without establishing the previous films.
However, while Jason Lives!, which I will discuss later, gradually places context
clues as to the characters and backgrounds of Jason and Tommy, as well as