The Image as Voracious Eye in The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, and the Paranormal Activity Series

Abstract

In this chapter I extend my discussion of the demonology of the image, addressing a recent trend in supernatural horror—cinema verité-style filming—that was popularized with the success of The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez, 1999) and continued in Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008) and the Paranormal Activity series (Peli, 2007; Williams, 2010; Schulman and Joost, 2011 and 2012). In all of these films, there is a sense that turning on the camera sets the events in motion, that the camera does not merely record events but actually makes things happen. Control over the camera and the events it films passes from the human subjects to a force emanating from the film/image itself, so that the filming seems to create the monsters that plague their human counterparts. These monsters turn the eye of the viewer back upon him or her in a violent way, ultimately killing the cameraman in Cloverfield, violently dispatching them in The Blair Witch Project and all of the Paranormal films, and often threatening to swallow the image itself. This violent reversal of the viewer-viewed relation calls into question its traditionally gendered characterization: on one side the male, active subject/gaze and on the other the female, passive object/image. In these films, the image is active, and the one behind the camera often becomes the passive victim.