Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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academic work and decrying the method because it runs contrary to personal interest,
one risks invalidating potentially useful information. As much as I have tried, I find
economic theory ponderous and boring to read. It is still a subject of absolute
necessity to everyone in some form or another.
No matter the amount of interest the subject holds for the reader, formalism,
like theory, aims to attribute value to works of art, despite claims to the contrary.
The difference lies in the criteria laid out by each method. Within this thesis I have
utilised the criteria needed for a formalist analysis, and have come to certain
conclusions, one of which attributes a large amount of value to Friday the 13 th Part
V: A New Beginning, and values some of the other films in the series rather highly,
particularly in comparison with a number of their contemporaries.
This thesis does not, by design and by virtue of its analysis, respond overtly
to the accusation that formalists either promote a problematic ideology or uphold
dominant ideological frameworks. However, my findings have responded to this
implicitly, in a way that ties in with my response to questions of artistic “value” and
“worth”. I have spent a great deal of this thesis addressing the Friday the 13 th films,
which have been assessed negatively, on primarily ideological grounds, by Robin
Wood as I addressed in Chapter 2 . This assessment is founded on summaries of the
narrative and the selective analyses of aesthetic devices, largely claiming that the
first film upholds conservative and reactionary sociopolitical ideologies. However, I
have shown that the first film, while retaining a spare and minimal narrative,
manages to be progressive stylistically, through its utilisation of European horror,
particularly Italian giallo, aesthetics, unlike the bulk of its contemporaries.
Furthermore, I have, as my primary aim, demonstrated how the Friday the 13 th film
series has contributed to the aesthetic development of the slasher film with wider