WARNING: This video contains mature content, such as graphic violence, and may be upsetting to some people. All images are used for educational purposes only.

The Friday the 13th franchise is principally defined as a dysfunctional family drama that spills into a body-count oriented slasher narrative, featuring elaborate and/or graphic killings of alterous (sexually-expressive) subjects, perpetrated (mostly) by a White, male, queer, slow-moving, mask-wearing mute-brute (named Jason Voorhees). Within Friday the 13th: The Game (2017), an online survival-horror game, these traditional 90-minute slasher films are adapted into asymmetric gameplay (i.e., eight camp counselors versus one super-powered Jason), with the stall-kill-escape contest condensed into only twenty minutes. This video presentation approaches the game as an instance of intermediality – that is, a cultural and/or commercial artifact achieved through the transmutation of an established media-property, such that the newly constructed entity functions not as an uninspired derivative but as a self-referential, intertextual, and/or reiterative expansion of the established mythos. I argue that this particular artifact is (1) self-referential of its status as a gamified simulation of a Friday the 13th fear scenario, specifically through its assortment of game objectives, trophies, and achievements; (2) intertextual with respect to the larger franchise mythos, specifically through its gamic reference to and inclusion of canonical series content; and (3) reiterative of the films’ classic movie structure, specifically through the mechanics of its game design.

In reference to this latter point, my video presentation engages four interpretative strategies of the Friday the 13th franchise (its larger themes and conventions) in order to illustrate the gamic context of Friday the 13th: The Game. These dominant metanarratives include temporal terror (trauma and retributive violence), moral deviance (behavioral norms), environmental strife (human-nature conflict), and racialized ontology (marginalization of rural whites). I demonstrate how the Friday the 13th gamemakers effectively incorporate said metanarratives into various game mechanics, modes of gameplay, in-game cinematics, music and sound design, and extra game content. Due to such intermediality, the game triumphs as an exercise in transmedia worldbuilding – that is, the use of cross-media platforms and creative synergy to reify, combine, and/or expand single-media constructions of an imaginary world. The result is then a bizarre heterotopia where eclecticism matters more than continuity.

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