Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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After this, while a familiarity with genre tropes proves beneficial to
understanding the humour in Jason X for both new and franchise viewers, a
familiarity with the series itself becomes a source of humour for the franchise
viewer. In one of the climactic sequences, Jason is lured into a holographic
projection of Camp Crystal Lake circa 1980 in order to distract and confuse him.
The projection also creates two young girls who ask Jason if he wants to smoke pot
and have premarital sex, as that is what they enjoy doing, before removing their tops
and getting into their sleeping bags. Familiarity with the slasher sub-genre after the
release of Halloween will inform the viewer that these things tend to result in the
violent deaths of those that participate in such activities, and by bringing to the
forefront these elements, a self-referential humour is derived. However, in order to
enact his anticipated violent approach to these characters, Jason is shown swinging a
sleeping bag containing one of the girls into another sleeping bag containing the
other girl, crushing their bodies against each other, before finishing by swinging the
sleeping bag into a tree. This is a direct reference to a death sequence in The New
Blood, in which Jason kills a girl by swinging her in her sleeping bag into a tree,
breaking her back. This specific self-referentiality which director Jim Isaacs refers
to as an “homage” to The New Blood 7 , but more suitably settles into Frederic
Jameson’s definition of “parody” (1984; 64-65). This is one example of the ways in
which Jason X references both the genre and the series for the amusement of both
the new and franchise viewer.
In crossing Friday the 13 th with the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise,
Freddy vs. Jason inherently deals with the challenge of introducing, defining, and
combining two serial narrative storylines and their respective focal characters. This
7 Audio Commentary, U.S. DVD of Jason X