Impact
In December 2006, IGN ranked Friday the 13th seventh in the top 25 film franchises. Qualifications included: the franchise must have at least three films released before December 2006; the franchises must be either a commercial or artistic success; and the franchise must have had some form of impact on popular culture. Three senior editors, the editor-in-chief, and IGN's entertainment editorial manager judged the various film franchises. In commenting on Friday the 13th's seventh place ranking, the general consensus among the reviewers was that even though the Halloween franchise started the slasher genre, Friday the 13th became one of "the most influential franchises of the 1980s" and that its commercial success through 11 films, novelizations, comic books, and other collectables is proof of its legacy. ABC Online's Arts and Entertainment reporter, Gary Kemble, makes note of the popularity of the franchise throughout popular culture. Kemble points out that Jason's mask, which was not adopted until the third film in the series, is one of the most widely recognizable images in popular culture. Talking with Brenna O'Brien, co‑founder of the Fridaythe13thfilms.com website, the pair discusses how the fan base of the franchise has become so impassioned with the series that they have created films, latex body suits to emulate Jason's appearance, and tattoos of Jason and the Friday the 13th moniker on their body.
| "Everybody in the audience imitated hoot‑owls and hyenas. Another girl went to her room and started to undress. Five guys sitting together started a chant: 'We want boobs!'" |
| — Karnick believes that this excerpt from Ebert's review of Friday the 13th Part 2 shows how critics have misunderstood the point the Friday the 13th films have tried to make. |
S. T. Karnick, editor of American Culture, wrote an article for the National Review detailing the impact Friday the 13th has had on the slasher genre and noting that the reasons critics have deplored the films are the same reasons why the franchise has had such a strong influence. Karnick explained that Friday the 13th did not try and recreate the same "clever" film that John Carpenter made in 1978, but instead " the formula" of Halloween, and " it down to its essentials" so that it could be copied by other filmmakers. In his assessment, Friday the 13th changed the horror genre by purposefully not providing back‑stories for characters so that when the audience witnessed a character's death, they are "strangely unaffected". Instead, Friday the 13th focuses on the history and motivations of the killer, who would exact revenge not on the people directly responsible, but on innocent people—a formula Karnick notes was replicated in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child's Play, Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Saw, the Hannibal Lecter films, and the Halloween sequels. As Karnick sees it, "these films spoke directly to fears of increasing crime and social dislocation provided audiences with ways to detach from these worries and conquer their fears of violence by laughing at it."
In Karnick's eyes, contemporary critics have failed to see how the film has affected audiences and subsequently branded the film series as "both irresponsible (for numbing audiences to violence) and puritanical (for showing the murders of sexually active teens)". Quoting director John Carpenter, Karnick emphasized that "teens thus dispatched became victims not as punishment for sexual activity but simply because they were too preoccupied to notice the presence of a murderer". Pointing to Roger Ebert as a prime example of how critics have misunderstood the films (Ebert wrote that during a screening of Friday the 13th Part 2, he noticed that the audience had no sympathy for the victims and cheered during death scenes), Karnick explains that Ebert's remarks show how the film series forces "audiences to experience the very thing that motivates the murders: a lack of compassion". In closing, Karnick suggested that these films were not puritanical, but proved that audiences "could be just as indifferent and callous as the characters in the films".
Read more about this topic: The Ministry Of The Heavenly Vessel
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“If the federal government had been around when the Creator was putting His hand to this state, Indiana wouldn’t be here. It’d still be waiting for an environmental impact statement.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
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