(In)Stability of Point of View in When a Stranger Calls and Eyes of a Stranger

Abstract

Carol J. Clover opened the fourth chapter, ‘The Eye of Horror’, of her book Men, Women, and Chain Saws with the statement: ‘Eyes are everywhere in horror cinema’ (1992, 167), and Linda Williams (1983/1996) before her had already insisted on the importance of the male, female and monstrous characters’ ‘looks’. Both critics are highly indebted to Laura Mulvey’s famous thesis that Hollywood narrative films posit a male gaze that punishes and/or fetishizes the female body. Clover has argued that the horror genre is just as much concerned with the ‘reactive gaze’, figured as feminine, of the spectator, and thus linked to the victim, as with the ‘assaultive gaze, figured masculine, of the camera (or some stand-in)’, and thus linked to the monster or killer (181). The fact that Clover’s corpus comprises exclusively post-Psycho (1960; dir Alfred Hitchcock) and post-Peeping Tom (1960; dir Michael Powell) horror films and mainly slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s — unlike Williams, Clover has very little to say about the classical Hollywood movies — would tend to suggest that her insights are especially pertinent when considering contemporary American horror films.