Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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Hayward makes the following statement in her discussion of the psychological
theory of cinematic voyeurism and the male gaze, the connections to the eye/camera,
specifically within horror, become apparent:
Voyeurism, at its most extreme can lead to sadomasochistic behaviour.
The man watches the woman, she may or may not know that he is
looking at her, she cannot, however, return the gaze (because it is he who
has agency over it and thus over her). Ostensibly, she is his victim and
he the potential sadist who can violently attack or even kill her. (481)
The description of this scene can be directly linked to specific sequences containing
eye/camera shots in each of the Friday the 13 th and Halloween (excluding Halloween
III: Season of the Witch [1982; dir. Wallace]) series. Hayward does not mention a
first-person positioning of the camera, but considering the mention of films that
popularly highlight eye/camera shots and as the eye/camera places the audience in
the position of a character that is watching, the reader is indirectly guided into
connecting the theme of voyeurism to the eye/camera. In these instances, while the
link is never directly made, the cognitive understanding of both concepts invariably
connects the two.
Connections between the use of the eye/camera shot and voyeurism in
Halloween have been made by numerous critics. In discussing eye/camera shots in
Halloween, Steve Neale describes “a voyeuristic gaze at the female victims in a state
of semi-nudity...” (1996; 338). J.P. Telotte writes of the opening eye/camera shot:
“After this initial, disturbing ‘eye contact,’ Halloween, following the pattern of
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, places its audience in a voyeuristic position to begin that