Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

37
...this horror formula is best identified by a predominately off-screen
killer who is known primarily by his/her distinctive point-of-view shots.
Although many of the films identified in this way have been called
‘slasher’ films (this placing the defining characteristic on the central
narrative action) the term ‘stalker’ film (which will be used here) alludes
instead to the act of looking and especially to the distinctive set of pointof-view
shots employed by these films. Distinguished in this way, then,
the resultant body of films displays an impressively coherent set of
characteristics. (1990; 14) [emphasis and parenthesis in the original]
Here, Dika shows that the eye/camera is not only important to understanding the
genre, but is a central driving factor to the narrative, without which the films could
not operate. This idea was briefly discussed almost twenty years earlier by Dennis
L. White who argued that point of view shots are an essential element to the generic
orientation of horror not to be overlooked when considering the artistic value of the
films of the genre (1971 ; 1). Similarly, Marriott, in his survey of Halloween writes
of “the killer’s point of view (POV) shots that came to characterise the genre.” This
comment is immediately followed by a discussion of voyeuristic identification,
however. (182)
While this is a small cross-section of critical writing about the eye/camera, it
represents a vast body of work that has come to haunt the technique and has
influenced the way many critics respond to it. Even writers like Wood and Fischer
and Landy that discuss the basics of the eye/camera’s relationship to narrative
replace detailed formalist analysis for an observation of the problematic