Dr Erin Harrington of the Department of English has contributed to a new collection, Friday the 13th at 40, which marks the 40th anniversary of the release of seminal slasher film Friday the 13th. Her essay, “Peering through the trees, or, everything I’ve ever learned about American summer camp came from Friday the 13th Parts 1-4 and The Baby-Sitters Club Super Special #2”, considers the international dissemination of American popular and low culture, and the relationships of this to American cultural hegemony, transnational film studies, and spectatorship.
“The early Friday the 13th films are many things: guilty pleasures; portfolios of creative kill shots; the intersection of base instincts and opportunistic marketing. However, little attention has been paid to the way that the United States’ low, pop cultural id comes to contribute to the country’s international voice, such that one country’s margins are seen in another context as a mainstream representation of American cultural hegemony. This franchise, which at its most cynical level aimed to exploit the desires, fears, and wallets of a young audience, has indelibly contributed to broader perceptions of American adolescence and (sexual) rites of passage. Alongside other cultural exports, this in turn shapes non-American understandings of teen culture, genre, and storytelling, contributing to a circuit of meaning-making in which even the most marginal of cultural artefacts can have an outsized effect.”
