Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

210
developments that analysis of this can demonstrate, as I’ve done here, how the horror
genre and the slasher sub-genre work, and how these aesthetic elements function
within film. My analysis only reveals a small part of the potential that research on
the Friday the 13 th films can contribute to film studies in general. In order to
understand this potential, it is of key significance to understand that the Friday the
13 th films are not autonomous products; for the most part, they make attempts to
engage simultaneously with their cultural, economic and artistic contexts as well as
their viewers.
Paramount’s Friday the 13 th films and New Line Cinema’s Jason films give
to their generic contemporaries as much as they take from them, resulting in a group
of cinematic articles that stand for the adaptability of a genre to contemporary trends
while reconfiguring these trends in a unique manner emulated by subsequent motion
pictures. These films have demonstrated the ability to develop and evolve while
retaining the core generic elements successfully enough to warrant further entries in
the franchise and repeated home video format releases. The Friday the 13 th series
has remained competitive with its generic contemporaries, and has influenced the
form of slasher films throughout its thirty-plus year span. Even the earlier Friday
the 13 th films make unique adaptations to both popular generic models as well as
other films, like those in the giallo tradition, in order to feed viewer expectation,
while advancing the aesthetics of horror.
In general, Friday the 13 th provides an excellent model to analyse the trends
of an extremely volatile genre, in terms of both financial success and formal
construction. I assert that the series can be seen as a superior representative sample
of the genre, which allows for examination, analysis, and research at a level not
provided by any other franchise. The included arguments with respect to A New