Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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to become involved in the murders that are happening around fabricated locations of
events in which they participated. The film also uses the opportunity to discuss
narrative tendencies of final instalments of trilogies.
Also completed and intended for release in 2000 was Jason X, which was not
released until 2002 due to restructuring in the upper management of New Line
Cinema (Bracke 263-264). Multiple self-referential elements appear in Jason X,
which will be addressed in Chapter 5, and were it released in 2000 as intended, it
would have thematically fit alongside Scream 3 and Urban Legends: Final Cut.
Bracke writes, “By the time New Line released the film on April 26, 2002, much had
changed both in the world of digital filmmaking and in the sensibilities and
expectations of the moviegoing public.” (263) The advances made in special effects
are then addressed by Bracke, as is the questioned potential for the Friday the 13 th
franchise to still attract audiences. A 2000 release would have been a seven year
hiatus for the series as opposed to the resulting nine. Ultimately, Jason X was
released after nearly a decade since the previous film, in a franchise that had seen no
more than a four year gap between films, and this is compounded by the difficulty of
being heavily reliant on special effects that had become dated.
One year after Jason X was finally released, Freddy vs. Jason acquired a
large box office intake 15 by adapting the tendencies of the postmodern slasher to a
deceptively straightforward formula, heightened by crossover appeal. The meeting
of both the Friday the 13 th and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises allowed the
film to directly address different killing styles of the antagonists, defining their
motivations to explain this, and allowing one franchise to both inform and comment
on the other, without drawing as much attention to the artifice as Scream 3 or even
15 $82,622,655 according to Kerswell (178).