Perp & Victim 1: Opening Kills in Horror (<2000s)
How are oners used to align the audience with the perpetrator or the victim?
The cold opening kill is one of The Tropes of horror cinema. It establishes the monster (and sometimes their rules), sets the stakes, and satiates the audience’s bloodlust… at least long enough for the opening act to establish some characters… that may or may not survive.
A particular subgenre of the opening kill is what I (Stu) call the 'horror oner’. These shots align us (sometimes literally via POV) with the victim or the perpetrator, making us feel with their fear or with their thrill. Being a single oner is less important the scene feeling subjective and in real-time — because that is what amplifies the anxiety.
So let us ping-pong through some examples of the ‘horror oner’ in an imprecise and inexhaustive history. Part 1 looks at films pre 2000s; while Part 2 looks at more modern horror.
We’ll start with the trope maker, the opening to John Carpenter’s classic —
HALLOWEEN (1978)
NB: we’ll be playing our examples off-speed, as I find that helps me focus on the mechanics of the camerawork and staging. Hope you agree!
The POV of an unknown, unseen perpetrator breaking into a home, grabbing a knife and murdering a semi-naked teen girl. We only break the POV shot for the reveal that the perpetrator is a child (who we’ll come to know as Michael Myers).
This shot is patient, running nearly 4 minutes, with a lot of air. But that air is thick with tension. We know we are in a horror movie, so we are waiting for the inevitable, a feeling underscored by the sustained dissonance.
And then we see the perpetrator grab a knife, presenting it to us in the classic stabbing silhouette. 🔪🔪 🩸
But for me the real genius is this moment:
Because it makes us worry that we’ve been seen by the boyfriend, and then we feel relief when he leaves. It makes us complicit with Michael.
One of the big influences on this sequence is from the proto-slasher:
BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)
Like Halloween, we see the POV of a unseen perpetrator as they break into a house. Unlike Halloween, it intercuts the wide-angle pov shots with coverage of the Christmas party going on inside. It uses dramatic irony to create tension rather than the unblinking, unbroken POV; and rather than making us complicit in the violence, it reminds us that we are observers.
The intercutting also allows the filmmakers to setup some character and plot development, rather than sitting in the ‘pure cinema’ of the POV shot. Worth noting that the obscene phone caller plot line here influenced both When A Stranger Calls (1979) and Scream (1996).
When it comes to the opening kill of Clare, Black Christmas stays with her (rather than cut away), and plays out in real-time.
Also how good is the cut to the dress? The combination of eye-trace and movement there really makes it pop.
But the big influence on both these films is the proto-slasher —
PEEPING TOM (1960)
In opening with the ECU on the eye, Peeping Tom tells us that the perpetrator isn’t us and the viewfinder overlay further distances us from what we are watchinng.
But then when the film breaks away from this POV oner, it's to reveal someone watching the film, and the shot is framed so we’re sitting with them, as another audience member. It is provocative imagery that makes us complicit in the consumption of violence. Over half a century later and it is still powerful.
Let’s take a moment to enjoy the wonderful skull-like design of the projector miniature. So great —
FRIDAY THE 13th PART II (1981)
The original Friday the 13th (1980) borrowed heavily from the cinematic language of Halloween and Black Christmas (right down to the POV shot) — although the mystery over the killer’s identity is a key part of the film’s structure, an idea riffed on in the Scream franchise.
The Friday the 13th franchise started to come into its own with Part 2. Technically the opening kill isn’t the cold open - there’s a five minute dream sequence slash recap of the previous film - but this first kill is so iconic it deserves discussion here. And not just because this sequel so casually disposes of the previous entry’s final girl.
But because it is a pioneering use of Steadicam, especially in the horror context. Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) came two years earlier, but I’d argue that the shot type seen here is more specific to horror than the long follow shots from The Shining.
What is fascinating about this sequence is that it isn’t the point-of-view of the perpetrator, nor is it the point-of-view of the victim, it is something else. As Daniel Morgan writes in The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera1:
A slight movement of the camera begins to suggest something new: the jostled frame indicates that there is movement independent of Alice’s actions, as if the camera were settling in to watch. It has, in a sense, begun to treat her as an object to be viewed rather than a subject who is pulling the camera along with her.
The slight pause before the camera follows Alice (Adrienne King) absolute 🤯. It changes how we as an audience experience the scene: we are now participants in it.
Morgan continues:
What is remarkable about the movement is that without anything else happening in the shot, we feel that we are now moving as a character… what Friday the 13th Part II shows is that nothing more than the timing of the movement of the camera, and the way it moves, is necessary to make us feel that we are with an autonomous subject moving through the hallway.
This kind of shot — where the audience is positioned as an autonomous subject within the diegetic world of the film — reaches a kind of zenith with the opening to:
SCREAM (1996)
This scene is not shot in a oner. Nor is it pretending to be. But it is using steadicam similarly to Friday the 13th Part 2. We are both watching Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) as a subject who pulls the camera with her, and as an object whom we are following.
We aren’t seeing this from Ghostface’s POV at all, yet we aren’t entirely aligned with Casey’s experience either. We know something bad is going to happen and we are watching her, powerless to stop it.
That liminal space between subjectivity and objectivity, between perpetrator and victim has become common in many modern horror films.
We’ll look at those in part two.
IMDB
Morgan, D. (2021). The lure of the image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera. Univ of California Press. pp. 63-65. See: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520344273/the-lure-of-the-image