Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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the increased investments in horror films made by major studios at the time 7 , an
effort with which the Friday the 13 th series became involved.
According to the documentary Going to Pieces (2006; dir. N/A), The Final
Chapter and its success was anomalous for box office trends at the time. The makers
of the film claim that the slasher film was in decline at this point, before being
revived by A Nightmare on Elm Street, which was released later that same year.
Although A Nightmare on Elm Street revived the slasher sub-genre for mainstream
audiences, it also reinvented the genre, bringing elements of the supernatural even
more into the slasher storylines. In films like Friday the 13 th and Halloween,
supernatural elements were left either implied or ambiguous, while Nightmare
tightly bound slasher generic conventions with overt elements of the supernatural,
having a strong effect on horror film production for the next decade.
The following year, A New Beginning was released, and the narrative itself
played upon this increased tendency toward supernatural storylines, contributing
another element to the ambiguity of the killer’s identification, as suggested by the
film’s opening sequence. The central question of the film becomes ‘Who is the
killer?’, replicating the structure of Friday the 13 th . In this case, it could be Tommy,
or Jason could have come back from the dead, or it could be another less obvious
character. Though the climax reveals that it is the latter of the three, the supernatural
explanation exists as a possibility until the identity of the killer is revealed, and even
throughout the climax when Tommy is shown struggling with Jason, the
supernatural answer seems most likely. This exploitation of the trends and foregoing
7 In addition to Poltergeist and The Thing, 1982 also marked the releases of Cat People directed by
Paul Scrader and starring Natassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell, produced by Universal Pictures,
and Creepshow directed by George Romero, written by Stephen King, and featuring Adrienne
Barbeau, Hal Holbrook and Ted Danson and produced by Warner Bros. Pictures.