Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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Chapter 2: The Eye/Camera Defined and Established
One recognizable trope of the slasher genre is a direct representation of
character perspective: the first-person camera. The first-person camera shows a
moving image from the point of view of a character, and attempts to replicate
movement and positioning that would connect the audience to the experience of
active human viewing. This is a device that has been the subject of academic
discourse, particularly in regards to horror and has been theorized and interpreted in
a variety of ways in terms of function and implication. Over the course of this
chapter, I first aim to describe the theoretical eye/camera model to be used in my
argument, and then clarify the significant academic discourses surrounding this
aesthetic device. I will then explore how, and to what effect, the point of view shot
has been utilised throughout the history of cinema particularly within the horror
genre and finally describe how it has evolved both technically and in terms of
representation. This will provide a historical grounding that will contextualize the
Friday the 13 th films, demonstrating the franchise’s positioning within a greater
aesthetic evolution.
Eye/Camera Definitions and Critical Understanding
“I”-Camera is a term brought to academic prominence by Carol J. Clover and
used regularly in relation to the slasher sub-genre of horror in her book Men, Women
and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992). This term is used to
describe a composition indicating a first-person perspective within the film. The
function of the “I”-Camera is to compress three visual planes so that they inhabit the