Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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depending on who is experiencing a violent act. In this case, however, the viewer
correctly suspects early on that the primary protagonist to be Alana Maxwell, who is
played by the most recognizable actor in the film, Jamie Lee Curtis, the star of
Halloween. In doing this, Terror Train benefits simultaneously from attachment to a
potential protagonist, and free movement of victim perspective. This movement
between protagonists is taken to its most extreme in Wolf Creek (2005; dir. Mclean),
where all the victims are developed equally and simultaneously, until they are
divided. Here the film stays with each potential protagonist for an extended period
of time until they are dispatched, or survive.
The perpetrator of the violent acts is another character to which many slasher
films attach perspective. To return to a previously mentioned film, Taxi Driver,
while traditionally considered a drama or sometimes action, despite the small
number of action sequences, shares more generic traits with the horror film than any
other genre. The bulk of Taxi Driver follows Vera Dika’s well-designed definition
of a stalker film. Dika ultimately maintains that the sub-genre commonly called
“slasher” should be given the new moniker “stalker” as the dramatic tension of the
films derives from the viewer’s awareness that there is a threatening presence
stalking characters. This stalking is then punctuated by violent acts, but the bulk of
the film is committed to acts of stalking. This is true of Taxi Driver. Three major
characters in the film: Betsy, Iris and Charles Palantine are all direct objects of
Bickle’s stalking, and between these sequences he is generally prowling the streets,
watching the people of New York City, and training himself to become a killing
machine. Bickle’s stalking of Betsy ends in an uncomfortable near fistfight in her
workplace, the stalking of Palantine ends with an assassination attempt by Travis and
the climax of the film is the culmination of his stalking of Iris, when he storms a