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Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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vengeance. The sequel, released in 1998, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer<br />

(dir. Cannon) retains the generic formula, displacing the surviving characters from<br />

the first film to an exotic island. This iterated formula was also adapted for<br />

Halloween H20 (1998; dir. Miner) which also saw the return of star Jaime Lee Curtis<br />

to the franchise for the first time since Halloween II in 1981, as well as a cameo by<br />

Janet Leigh, who is Curtis’s real-life mother and star of Psycho. In Halloween H20,<br />

Laurie Strode is now a grown headmaster of a private school after going into the<br />

Witness Protection programme following the events of Halloween II. In attendance<br />

at the school is her son, who is now in danger from the homicidal nepotism of<br />

Michael. While this return to formula was not as widespread as the postmodernist<br />

trend initiated by Scream, there were films which followed its generic reboot,<br />

including Road Kill (2001; dir. Dahl) and Valentine (2001; dir. Blanks) which both<br />

used a similar narrative structure and aesthetic form to the early slashers. Urban<br />

Legend resulted in a sequel that explored postmodernity more intricately. Urban<br />

Legends: Final Cut (2000; dir. Ottman) focuses on a series of killings on a<br />

Hollywood film set, each one based on an urban legend, with the lead character<br />

being a postgraduate student who is completing her <strong>thesis</strong> on urban legends, which<br />

closely resembles Scream 2, in which the killer is a film student. This not only<br />

establishes a character with a greater familiarity of the killing methods, but addresses<br />

the process of filmmaking at the same time.<br />

Urban Legends: Final Cut was released the same year as Scream 3 (2000; dir.<br />

Craven), which had a similar story of killings occurring on a film set. Scream 3,<br />

however, directly incorporates more self-referentiality, as the film being made is a<br />

sequel of the film that appears in Scream 2 which is an adaptation of the events in<br />

Scream. In Scream 3 all of the surviving remaining characters appear on this film set

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