Friday the 13th Movies It is imp

It is impossible today to watch the original Friday the 13th with the same innocence and lack of expectations that audiences in 1980 must have brought to the film. Even so, however, Friday the 13th touched a nerve in audiences that allowed the film to generate numerous sequels, even if many could argue that those sequels never matched the scare factor of the original. This paper explores the differences between Friday the 13th, the original, and some of its sequels to explore why the subsequent films have not been as terrifying to audiences.

Friday the 13th begins with a 1958 murder in which we never see the killer. The man's murder is not particularly gory and the movie actually freeze-frames on the woman's face the moment before her death. The set-up, therefore, is both horror and suspense. The movie then uses these murders as the backstory for the camp counselors coming back to Camp Crystal Lake twenty years later and the murder of the young woman twenty minutes into the film. Once again the killer is never seen. The audience experiences the horror of this exuberant, free spirit's murder with the suspense of not knowing who is her murderer.

Much is made throughout the first half of the film of the camp counselors' innocence and inexperience of life, in general, and the woods, in particular. For example, the film portrays a scene in which the counselors react fearfully to a snake in their cabin. Also, the man in control of

. . .
invested in these films' characters. The result is a significantly diminished fear and scare factor. Jason's invincibility also makes him usually the only recurring character in the series. Thus, Jason is the protagonist in the series and the series is essentially asking the audience to identify with him from film to film. But Jason is an irredeemable, inhuman creature with no personal need to which the audience can relate. Jason X has a telling scene in which Jason murders two people inside a virtual reality game. This scene is symptomatic of the problems in the series. The murders aren't real and the players stop the game when Jason is not playing by the rules. However, when they come out of the game, Jason kills them "for real." But the emotional impact on the audience in both cases is the same. The characters in these films are like marks or targets in a video game. The audience is just waiting for Jason to knock them off one after the other. Jason X borrows significantly from Aliens in the sequence where the army-type unit goes into the body of the ship to find and kill Jason. The difference between the emotional impacts of these two sequences in the two movies demonstrates why the Friday the 13th movies have lo
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Jason Vorhees, Jason Freddy, Crystal Lake, Final Destination, Aliens Cameron, Aren't Scary, Aliens Sarge, Elm Street, Cameron Aliens, Notably Jason, freddy vs, freddy vs jason, vs jason, 13th movies, audience identify, jason vorhees, scare factor, fear audience, elm street, generate suspense, horror movies, jason freddy vs, nightmare elm street, texas chainsaw massacre, argue freddy vs,
Approximate Word count = 1833
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)