Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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hacking at Jason with a machete and screaming “Die! Die! Die!” is heard faintly
over this shot. It is at this point that some empathy for Tommy can be elicited from
the new viewer, even if he immediately stabs the corpse repeatedly with a metal
fencepost. This empathy is reinforced after this incident, where Hawes notes, “Oh
boy, he must’ve really messed you over.” Ultimately, the cumulative effect of these
contextual clues is not as powerful as foreknowledge of the events of the previous
films.
The examples of A New Beginning and Jason Lives! reveal how the
reduction of narrative context creates a disparity of experience and perspective
between the franchise viewer and the new viewer. Jason Lives! initiates the
narrative with little indication of the previous characters and plotlines in the
franchise while continuing from the events of the previous films, and therefore
creates a challenge for orientating new viewers into the narrative. A New
Beginning, however, subverts knowledge of previous films, which can potentially
disorientate the franchise viewer without creating difficulty for the new viewer.
While establishing an ongoing narrative for both new and franchise viewers, a reboot
of the franchise presents the opportunity to create and develop its own orientation for
a narrative.
Remake and nostalgia
To this point, each of the films in the series retain a semblance of selective
serial continuity, even if the overarching mythos of the backstory is altered to suit
the narrative of each text. However, Friday the 13 th (2009) does not need such
narrative links to the previous series, as the point of the film, as a remake, is to
reconfigure the initial narrative in anticipation for potential re-serialisation. The