The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: Handheld Horror, POV Porn, and Nausea

If you follow science fiction, movies or pop culture you’ve probably encountered the buzz around the movie Cloverfield. Produced by J.J. Abrams, co-creator of the übercult TV series LOST, Cloverfield tells the story of a monster attack on Manhattan through the “found footage” of some hapless civilian’s video camera. As such, it’s shot with a handheld camera, and CNN recently reported on a wave of violent nausea sweeping the nation, or at least those members of the moviegoing public who attend screenings of Cloverfield without having watched thousands of hours of POV porn.

But wait — I’m getting ahead of myself. The format of point-of-view handheld-camera fear-inducing mayhem has been around in horror movies for quite a time. It makes periodic appearances in American horror of the late ’50s and early ’60s, usually when someone is walking down a corridor or approaching a door behind which there might (or might not!) be a bloody corpse, raving lunatic, or monster. Interestingly, it’s largely absent in films from the major British horror studio of that era — Hammer Horror, creators of such seedy ’60s classics as Lust for a Vampire and The Evil of Frankenstein. The technique would show up in Hammer’s late ’60s and early ’70s films as the studio heaped on the sex and gore in an attempt to hold on to its slipping audience; handheld sequences are also featured prominently in the Italian school of horror and slasher filmmaking, particularly the films of Dario Argento and in the Giallo genre of sleazed-out sex-crime gorefests. Right now you might be saying “Wow, all these handheld camera techniques seem to show up before 1990 almost exclusively in weird pervy cinematic sex-and-blood orgies,” but you’ll also see it in Hitchcock, Apocalypse Now and plenty of political thrillers from the ’70s. But yeah, before the video era the handheld point-of-view shot does seem to show up in the more extreme and, well, earthy forms of horror.

In its earlier incarnations, or used in moderation, the handheld technique might pass largely unnoticed by a viewer who’s never studied film and/or never tried to hold a camera steady during their vacation and later vomited copiously on their keyboard while editing footage of Aunt Bessie at Disneyland.

But I digress — the point is, the handheld trembling-swaying camera is a time-honored technique from the film era for inducing uneasy feelings in the viewer. But the technique really came of age with the video era, with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, which made handheld shots and found-footage meta-plot devices a cliche, and in doing so provided the central conceit for Cloverfield. These two movies are distinct from earlier horror-film uses of the handheld point-of-view concept in that they do it most of the way through. Hence the nausea, and CNN ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie. How vividly I remember watching a Blair Witch pre-release screener and the violent attack of nausea that made my then-girlfriend lie down on the floor moaning for half an hour — and not in a good way.

Obviously, the handheld point-of-view shot is considered effective for horror partially because it induces motion sickness, but also because it’s immediate. That’s why, as the Blair Witch was making headlines, an entirely different but oh-so-related genre was growing: Point-of-View Porn.

In POV pornography, as you probably know, the viewer watches from the perspective of a participant in the explicit sexual action. Assuming you’ve seen little or no POV porn yourself, would it shock you to know that means there’s always a dick due South from the viewfinder? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

POV porn is a perennially popular genre of porn, and to me it seems to be getting ever more prevalent as more consumers buy video cameras — thus making the idea of being “in” the action a gimme — and as more male porn performers realize they can make just as much if not more money as “directors,” i.e., guys holding the camera, than as hired cocksmen in someone else’s movie.

Like the fictional concept of Blair Witch, POV porn could only exist with the propagation of compact video equipment. The dude getting the blowjob/inserting his turgid member has to hold the camera while performing sexually (or be comfortable with Larry the camera guy breathing down his neck, but usually it’s the former).

Some POV titles are in fact made by pornographers so mind-bendingly clueless that after an initial vomit-conjuring sweep of the female star’s attributes, they plant the cam on a tripod and just sort of forget about it. But most POV porn utilizes the format with reasonable efficiency. It starts with an obligatory establishing interview wherein the “filmmaker” asks the female star her name and age, asks her to bend over, and says “Wow, oh, wow. Oh, wow. Wow. Wow, oh wow. That is one nice butt. Nice butt. Yeah, wow, that is a nice butt, wow, oh, man, you are amazing, that butt is amazing. Oh, wow, oh, man, that is a nice butt. What a nice butt.” If you’ve never seen any POV porn, you probably think I’m overstating the matter . . . I’m not. Most POV porn sucks precisely because the “filmmaker” doesn’t have anything to say about a nice butt other than the fact that it’s a nice butt . . . which, let’s face it, we know.

After an agonizing few minutes of non-conversation, the “filmmaker,” pointing the camera, gets blown and/or fucked, or some combination thereof, and as long as he doesn’t enjoy himself too much the footage is probably not going to make you hurl. Luckily, he’s not likely to enjoy himself too much, at least not evidently. Most of what a guy does in commercial porn is stand there while the girl goes crazy; rarely in POV porn does the character need to run through the dark corridors of an ancient mansion being chased by Lovecraftian ectoplasm (though I will definitely rent that title when it becomes available). Point-of-view porn only seems to work when the guy is a wall of solid concrete with a cock sticking out: as Christopher Isherwood said, “ . . .a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” Not human, or maybe human in some strangely inorganic way.

It’s the polar opposite of point-of-view horror, where the character’s vulnerability is paramount. In the spiritual precursor of all point-of-view horror, H.G. Wells’s 1898 The War of the Worlds, the narrator is unnamed, an Everyman, but his humanity, his vulnerability and his emotional response to the horrors he witnesses, are not in question. That means that the reader can identify with him, as the viewer can identify with the hapless victims of the Blair Witch and the main characters of Cloverfield.

For the male viewers of point-of-view porn, the identification with the POV character seems to exist because he’s got a hot chick in his apartment or motel room and he’s got nothing to say to her except to reiterate that she has, in fact, a nice butt.

It’s a weird contrast, because the appeal of POV porn in the marketplace is about the viewer being “in” the action, as evidenced by the promises on the DVD covers, which generally say something like “You are IN the action!” just above the burst that says “COAT KANDY KUMMINGS WITH GALLONS OF YOUR CREAMMY BALL-SNOT!!!” Visceral stuff, that. Point-of-view horror isn’t quite that straightforward; it’s still enough of a novelty that any horror film using the handheld technique gets compared to Blair Witch — and in future months and years, presumably, Cloverfield. Point-of-view porn, on the other hand, promises to get more and more popular as more men accept one of the most dysfunctional ideas of modern sexual masculinity: you, my friend, are nothing but a hard cock and an observation that this girl has a nice butt.

What both POV porn and handheld horror offer to the viewer is the chance to step outside himself or herself by stepping into someone else. But that’s an uncomfortable, illusory, and largely impossible task, hence the motion sickness of Cloverfield and the wooden-bodied sexual disconnect of the POV porn genre. As with interactive porn, the possibilities of erotic imagination run headlong into the problem that too often male pornographers don’t have anything to say about themselves.

Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 29 January 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.