Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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It is here that Friday the 13 th fails to play the game. At one point a girl at
the camp goes to the toilet after having sex. The camera tracks in slowly
towards her from our point of view, as if someone is/we are approaching
her. She looks up, not into the camera but off-screen left in the direction
of a sound. This is repeated in an almost identical fashion shortly after
where another girl goes to the toilet: the character does not look into the
camera and there is no shot-reverse shot indicating some menacing figure
about to stab her. Thus the film places the spectator in a position of
potential aggressor, only to reveal that the danger lies off-screen. By so
doing it suggests that the danger exists for us too – the off-screen being
the favourite place for lurking monsters – and that our supposedly
homogenous subject position is in fact a split one, a split which
corresponds to our split position as spectators outside the text and as
spectators inscribed within the text by various modes of identification.
(144)
While the overall focus of his argument does not stay within formal analysis,
Humphries does acknowledge the challenging use of the eye/camera within the film.
His observation creates a stronger sense of how Friday the 13 th uses the eye/camera
in an aesthetically unique and innovative manner, and implying its significance to
the development of slasher aesthetics. The sophistication of eye/camera usage in
Friday the 13 th provided a strong aesthetic foundation for the following films in the
franchise.