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This essay argues that film music functions not only as a cross-promotional medium for marketing movies and licensed recordings, but also as a key site for effectively managing and containing processes of consumption. Heavy metal music is deployed in horror films like Freddy vs. Jason (Ronny Yu, 2003) to interpellate particular niche audiences and taste communities. Thus, soundtrack albums reveal a fundamental assumption within media firms that a manageable relationship between niche formats and consumer tastes exists to be exploited.
Minutes into the 2003 crossover horror film, Freddy vs. Jason (Ronny Yu), the audience is treated to a brief moment of "bite size theory."1 Wasting no time in serving up the slaughter, we watch (and hear) as Jason stalks, corners, and impales with his trusty machete yet another unsuspecting, lustful teen - a hapless young girl who just wanted to take a midnight swim in the nude. However, before we resign ourselves to business as usual - Jason's back again to hunt down pesky adolescents who really ought to know by now that the woods are not a safe place to be at night (didn't the poor girl hear the menacing string harmonies and Jason's signature heavy breathing?) - something uncanny happens: the victim comes back to life. Skewered to a tree, the undead girl rehearses a litany of slasher horror film no-nos: "I should have been watching the children; not drinking*, not meeting a boy at die lake." The self-reproach continues as one victim morphs into another: "I deserve to be punished; we all deserve to be punished." Next, Jason's mother appears to reassure her son (and the audience) of his trademark "gift" of imperishability - "no matter what they do to you, you cannot die" - before sending him on his way to Elm Street, where there's more carnage - and to be sure, more profits - to be had.
In case we needed catching up, this sequence does it for us by way of a savvy plot contrivance diat intermixes pop culture with pop theory. Borrowing a Cliffs Notes page from Robin Wood, the film crudely rehearses Freudian theories of the slasher killer as superego incarnate in order to reflexively comment on itself, its two ghasdy protagonists, and their (rightful)...