"Peeping Tom" and First-Person Horror

The Criterion Collection recently announced that they are discontinuing a slate of StudioCanal owned titles. They’ve lost the DVD rights to films like “Grand Illusion,” “Pierrot Le Fou” and Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy.

(They are having an Out of Print Sale, linked here)

I was dismayed to see “Peeping Tom” on the list. I can think of few films so essential to our understanding of contemporary horror.

The film follows the murderous exploits of Mark Lewis, a solitary photographer who preys on women. Sometimes posing as a documentarian, Mark gets his victims in front of his 16mm film camera, he kills them with his tripod immortalizing their death throes on film.

The viewer is thrust into the point of view of the camera’s viewfinder, forcing us into identification with both the deadly mechanism and the deeply disturbed Mark. We become both the murderer and the means. Even more disconcerting is the allegorical significance of this approach. The viewer is confronted with their own voyeurism.

“Peeing Tom’s” first person aesthetic takes on a new significance when we consider the current horror film fixation with POV. Camera phones, video messaging, and other portable media have provided a new awareness of the first person field of vision that the modern horror film exploits. Movies like “Quarantine” and “Cloverfield” mimic familiar digital platforms as a foray into traditional zombie/infection and monster films respectively.

These are standard genre movies but they are always seem to be reaching to a higher level of verisimilitude. Their approach assumes that the familiarity of the first person digital viewpoint is what incites fear in the viewer. The limited range of vision offered by this approach can be genuinely terrifying (see "[REC]") but a film like “Peeping Tom” exposes an oversight these recent horror films make. They do not realize that identification with the monster is far more horrifying than relation to the victim. When we are forced to identify with the monster, we are faced with out own unrepresentable dark side.

John Carpenter’s "Halloween” aligns us with the central monster to great effect. The opening tracking shot gives us the POV of Michael Myers as a child.

The power of this opener is that it gives us a greater understanding of his monstrous pervasiveness. When we find ourselves yelling at the screen at some nubile slasher victim-“Don’t go into that house, whatever you do, don’t go in that damn house!”- it’s because we have this special access to the monster that Carpenter provides.

(please refer to this great explication of the opening of “Halloween” on Jim Emerson’s Scanners website: Opening Shots: Halloween)

This does not mean that victim identification and pro-sumer video are useless as horror strategies. Perhaps more successful than the strict video mimicry of a film like “Quarantine” is the hybrid method of “28 Days Later" which replicated the lo-fi look of broadcast style video without tethering the film to a visual conceit. The flip side of this aesthetic discussion is the practical use of video. "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity" -despite all their flaws and even- made their limitations a narrative virtue, far outstripping production costs upon release.

Interview Project - David Lynch

Interviews with Americans made over the space of a road trip...

Lars Von Trier on handheld camera

From an interview with Lars Von Trier by Lars K. Anderson:

I had a discussion about it with my editor Tómas Gislason before we started working on the “The Kingdom,” and we started to move in the direction of using more handheld camera… I’ve always been very concerned, ultimately, with aesthetics: panning, dolly shots—with parallel movements especially. However what really opened things up for me was an American television series called Homicide: Life On the Streets by Barry Levinson… It’s generous view on the 180-degree rules of filmmaking was very interesting…. We’ve thrown out all those 180-degree rules, and its really so cool. … But it’s not just the 180-degree rules that are absent. We’ve also brought another great animal to slaughter: the continuity. When you do the scene you normally have one set idea about how the actors will play the scene… We asked them to play the same scene five times in five different ways—cheerfully, gloomily, et cetera—and at different places in the room every time. We then intercut these different takes, and then you watch it, you’ll perceive it as a perfectly normal take. You create the missing links in your brain. But performance-wise, you really get into some territory that makes for more interesting characters.

Shooting "The Shining"

From an interview with John Alcott, DP, The Shining, with Michel Ciment:

What lens did you use for Barry Lyndon?

A 22mm one for most of the interiors. We rarely used the 18mm as we often did on The Shining….


What lenses did you use for The Shining?

Faster lenses even than for Barry Lyndon. We used the whole range of Zeiss lenses, from 18mm to 85mm. On the other hand, we didn’t use the zoom much….

How did you envisage color for The Shining?

In two ways. For the beginning of the film, which takes place in autumn, we wanted, with natural light, to obtain a warm light. Then, with the approach of winter, we switched to one that was colder. I put blue filters on the outside of windows and used artificial lighting aside in relation to that blue.

Snorricam Tutorial

The Snorricam is named after two Icelandic cinematographers, both with the last name Snorri, who were somehow unrelated to each other. The Snorricam is a device that mounts the camera to the actors body with the lense pointed at the actor, while he moves about performing the scene. The result is that the actor appears stationary while the sorroundings move in the background. This effect is most notably used in Aronofsky's Requiem For a Dream.

Here's an entertaining tutorial made by two high school kids, explaining how you can make your very own snorricam.