Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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Scream, which overtly addresses narrative tendencies. Freddy vs. Jason used this
postmodern approach as subtext in order to heighten the antagonism between the two
killers. This crossover of horror franchises was used again a year later in Alien vs.
Predator (2004; dir. Anderson).
This period also saw the advent of two popular movements in horror that
would dominate a large proportion of the genre’s releases. One film, The Blair
Witch Project (1999; dirs. Myrick and Sánchez) was released in 1999, which
demonstrated the potential for low-budget filmmaking in horror, as well as bringing
the victim-camera movement discussed in Chapter 2 into the mainstream. One
significant follower of this movement is Halloween: Resurrection (2002; dir.
Rosenthal), in which a group of students become part of an internet broadcast where
they are invited to stay in the Myers house with head-mounted and house-mounted
cameras recording the events. Much of the film is shot through these head-mounted
cameras incorporating this aesthetic device from The Blair Witch Project, but
Halloween: Resurrection also utilises a sense of postmodernity within the
framework, as Michael and his killings are not only general knowledge, but attained
a position of legend, much like the myth of Jason and the increased awareness of this
myth by the characters within the Friday the 13 th series. In order to increase hits on
the webpage broadcasting this, the producer/director sets up fabricated booby traps
in the house to frighten the participants. In one unsettling moment of selfreferentiality,
the viewer sees Michael from behind with a knife stalking around the
lower level of the house with everyone else upstairs, when another Michael appears
in the frame stalking behind the first Michael. The visual of seeing one Michael
following another is disorienting until it is revealed that the first Michael is the
producer/director dressed as Michael to frighten the participants, berating what he