Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

105
frequency, it can be deduced that mimic eye/camera shots, at this point in film
history, have become a new generic convention for the slasher – it acknowledges
audience recognition and expectation of this shot.
There are two significant mimic eye/camera shots in The Final Chapter. The
first is Jason’s attack on the nurse in the hospital. In this sequence, a handheld
camera approaches the nurse, first moving around a set of shelves containing
medical equipment, then slowly moving straight towards her. She quickly turns
around and Jason appears from the right of the screen and attacks her within the shot,
causing a shock stemming from an unexpected direction of attack. The second of
these significant mimic eye/camera shots takes place during Tina’s death. We see
her in the rain getting her bicycle to leave. The camera steadily moves in her
direction, but instead of going straight toward her, the camera moves behind her. At
this point, the shot could still conceivably be an eye/camera shot as it is out of her
line of sight, and the camera tracks in to a window of the house, potentially in an
attempt to view the goings-on inside. The camera stops, and lightning flashes,
revealing in shadow Jason stabbing Tina with a long object, and we hear the death
blow and her scream. The position of Jason in relation to the shadow and the camera
location reveals that the image is in no way connected to his sight, causing a
disorienting shock derived simultaneously from the discovery that the viewer is not
seeing an eye/camera shot and the unexpected stabbing of Tina, who is assumed to
be relatively safe once the camera has passed her.
The significance of these shots stems from the play on expectation based on
previous use of the eye/camera and mimic eye/camera shots. Both eye/camera and
mimic eye/camera shots are designed to create the same form of tension and