Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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Beginning also represent the potential for the creation of a difficult, challenging film
to arise out of the strictures of a formulaic model and franchise continuity.
These points regarding perspective all reveal significant yet fairly obvious
observations with regards to the aesthetic treatment of horror and slasher films.
More valuable observations can be made concerning the reading and analysis of the
Friday the 13 th films, and even the slasher sub-genre as a whole. In order to make
these observations, the focus on perspective has provided the opportunity to breach
an aesthetic analysis of these films, and has proved a useful and potent starting point
for spearheading a formalist analysis.
Reviewing criticism and analysis of the Friday the 13 th films, much written to
date tends to place the series in a negative light. Much of the writing from theorists
who focus on the message of a film, in terms of narrative, or even structural
observations regarding politics, gender, psychoanalysis, and cultural representation,
suggests that Friday the 13 th , its sequels and the remake is of little or no value as an
artistic artefact. Key theorists like Carol Clover and Robin Wood appear to make
this very argument, and writers with a focus on narrative such as Kim Newman,
while acknowledging the popularity of the series, seem to ignore the fact that these
films provide anything significant or beneficial, and leave the franchise as little more
than a series of fleeting references or footnotes. While these approaches can yield
valuable results, the Friday the 13 th series is left with little to recommend it from
such writing. However, through a review of the work of someone like Vera Dika,
who looks at the film from a genre theory perspective, breaking it down to a series of
successful generic elements that have been used as a model of reproducing previous
generic successes in a manner which provides enough variety to engage viewers, and
brings them back to such texts repeatedly, the importance of the series becomes more