Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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to give precise spatial relationships. The film does not tell us where the stalker or
killer is, or even if there is one. What the audience does know is that the setting, an
old run down house or an empty forest at night, is a standard horror set piece, and
that there is a threat somewhere. We do not have an eye/camera to tell us where the
threat is in relation to the potential victim. In contrast, another significant modern
slasher predecessor is Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), which places heavy
aesthetic and thematic emphasis on seeing and vision. Here, the eye/camera plays a
prominent role, and is the only way to identify the stalker. Everything that is shown
of the stalker is taken from his point of view. The composition is slightly distorted,
using a wide angle lens, and is captured with a handheld camera. The image is
accompanied by the sounds of loud breathing swallowing and muttering, furthering
the illusion of being inside the eye of the character. The one time that the stalker is
seen, he is standing in complete darkness, with light shining only on a single eye.
Black Christmas gives us no bearings as to the identity or motive of the killer, and
for all intents and purposes is simply a pair of eyes, by which we know the location
and proximity of the threat to the victims at all times.
Eyes of Laura Mars is a film released at the height of this pre-modern slasher
cycle and is emblematic of the movement toward a newer, but more formulaic
approach to the horror film. Eyes of Laura Mars, which was criticised as “an inept
exercise in voyeurism and ‘punk-chic.’” (Gupta, 1978; 60) is an example of a mature
aesthetic approach to the eye/camera. The film, scripted by John Carpenter, is the
story of a photographer named Laura Mars who sees visions of the first-person
perspective of a stalker and killer. This film does not simply contain the eye/camera,
but the plot entirely revolves around it. This is distinctly different from Black
Christmas in that the eye/camera is not simply used to indicate and identify the