Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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Chapter 5. In The New Blood, Jason picks up Judy while she is still in her sleeping
bag and hits her against a tree to kill her. The sequence contains a few short shots
cut together of Jason swinging the sleeping bag, the sleeping bag hitting the tree, and
then Jason dropping the bag. This was repeated for comedic effect in Jason X, in
long shot in a continuous take. The distance from the action and the reference to the
earlier film mutes the grotesqueness of the event. In Friday the 13 th (2009),
however, Jason traps Amanda in her sleeping bag, and ties it to the end of a rope
suspended from a tree branch directly over the campfire. The camera cuts between
shots of the sleeping bag as Amanda screams and thrashes trying to get out, and
shots within the sleeping bag, showing the obvious panic and desperation on her face
as she struggles. The crackling of the fire and the sizzling of her flesh are heard, and
at the end of the sequence, she falls out of the bag, her body burnt beyond
recognition. The sequence is also longer than the relative counterparts in The New
Blood and Jason X, prolonging the focus on her pain and suffering, which is the
essence of this tendency of increased discomfort in recent slasher remakes.
In addition to this, other elements of these remakes can be read as adaptations
for modern audiences. The Hills Have Eyes updated the former narrative to address
the potential ramifications of the contemporary political climate, Black Christmas
took the intrinsic aesthetic theme of vision and seeing and overtly made it part of the
narrative with the killer removing his victims’ eyes, and Black Christmas,
Halloween, My Bloody Valentine 3-D, and A Nightmare on Elm Street dedicated
more screen time to character back stories than their source texts. Additionally,
many of these have resulted in again serialising these original properties, resulting in
film sequels such as The Hills Have Eyes II (2007; dir. Weisz) and Halloween II