Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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apparent. More recent work has been done focusing on the Friday the 13 th series’s
significance as a motion picture business model, by writers such as J. A. Kerswell
and Richard Nowell. This appears to be the beginning of an evaluation of these
films outside of previous analytical traditions that begin to touch upon both their
popularity and significance as film texts.
Throughout my research I have encountered others, such as Sarah Wharton at
the University of Liverpool and Elizabeth Dixon of Sheffield Hallam University,
who are engaging in textual analysis of the Friday the13th series in order to discover
the popular appeal and the pleasure they provide viewers. This sort of analysis is
contributing more towards situating this franchise within the realm of serious
academic focus within film studies, and demonstrating how these films contribute to
the understanding of film. This is a very general way of addressing these findings,
which leads to more specific discoveries and conclusions within this research.
First, this formalist aesthetic analysis placed in comparison with its
contemporaries has revealed how these films appeal to viewers based on aesthetic
applications in response to trends in the market. By showing how the Friday the 13 th
both appropriated and ran contrary to generic trends at certain points in its history,
one can obtain a clearer understanding of the elements to which viewers responded,
which leads to the potential for further study of historical and cultural reasons behind
these responses. For example, the extreme divergence from elements of traditional
and popular contemporary horror aesthetics, while appropriating narrative elements
of unsuccessful contemporaries resulted in relatively poor reception of Jason Goes to
Hell and Jason X, and cannot be attributed to a wane in the popularity of the genre,
as other franchises were created and thriving during this period.