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Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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109<br />

camera. We then see through the victim-camera, complete with artificial frame and<br />

time-counter. Wayne uses the camera to identify one of his fellow students who he<br />

just shot due to his bad eyesight. The camera tilts up and Jason appears in the frame,<br />

smashing the camera, which is where the victim-camera shot ends. This is an<br />

additional aesthetic device used in order to vary the experiential positioning of<br />

victim. The use of the victim-camera in Jason Takes Manhattan is a device not<br />

frequently seen in the slasher film at this point. Although films like Peeping Tom<br />

and Cannibal Holocaust have used it before this point, Jason Takes Manhattan<br />

precedes The Blair Witch Project by ten years, which popularised this form of<br />

perspective as a dominant aesthetic positioning. Therefore, Jason Takes Manhattan<br />

serves as a significant precursor to the later victim-camera trends, particularly as it<br />

uses what was, for that time, more accessible home video recording equipment<br />

instead of the film cameras used for Peeping Tom and Cannibal Holocaust. This<br />

also brings this specific home video aesthetic to a mainstream film that was used<br />

effectively three years earlier in a sequence in the independent horror film Henry:<br />

Portrait of a Serial Killer (dir. McNaughton).<br />

Freddy vs. Jason utilises an off-model eye/camera shot at a significant point<br />

in the narrative. In a sequence similar to the eye/camera shot reverse shot<br />

conversation between Lori and her father, Gibb, in the dream-world boiler room,<br />

hides from Freddy in a locker. After a few moments, the locker door opens, and<br />

Freddy is in front of her, suspended upside down in the air. Gibb screams, and<br />

Freddy laughs, which we first see through Gibb’s eye/camera, then through Freddy’s<br />

off-model eye/camera, as Gibb appears with her head at the top of the frame, body<br />

below, instead of her head at the bottom, body above as would be seen from

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