Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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overall effect of the horror film. The eye/camera as used in horror provides a sense
of proximity to the subject of the camera’s gaze. Whether we see the stalker’s
eye/camera with the victim as the subject or the victim’s eye/camera with the stalker
or killer as the subject, the audience is provided a clear sense of the distance from
one to the other. When we see Michael Myers’s eye/camera in the opening shot of
Halloween, the viewer is unsure who the stalker is until just before the murder, but
this disorientation does not alter the fact that we are aware that the young couple is
being watched, and separated from an ominous presence, as indicated by the music,
by only a window and a few feet of space. In the opening sequence of My Bloody
Valentine (1981; dir. Mihalka), the first victim’s eye/camera reveals the killer filling
the frame and lunging even closer to the victim in a threatening way. The audience
becomes frightened by the fact that, in those few moments, the threat is too close to
run away from or defend against. This proximity fear is much more tangible. While
the eye/camera embodies many subtle complexities involving the character
watching, the subject and the viewer, the primary effect that this device provides is
one of character and object relationship.
An extension of the proximity fear is the visceral effect of the experience.
Steven Shaviro writes of the visceral effect of watching cinema:
The antimony of cinematic perception is the following: film viewing
offers an immediacy and violence of sensation that powerfully engages
the eye and body of the spectator; at the same time, however, it is
predicated on a radical dematerialization of appearances. The cinematic
image is at once intense and impalpable. On one hand, film (even more
than other visual forms, and in sharp contrast to the articulations of