‘Presence’ and Horror’s Fascination With The Subjective POV
Steven Soderbergh’s Presence is an atmospheric, confined horror that redefines the haunted house trope with an ultra-subjective POV. Now available to buy and rent on digital, this tight ghost tale begs the question of who’s doing the haunting, and to what end.
Captured from the perspective of the spectre inhabiting the house, this supernatural presence keeps the camera firmly within the walls of a newly renovated, hundred-year-old property in New Jersey. This stylish residence now homes the dysfunctional Paynes—mom Rebecca (Lucy Liu), dad Chris (Chris Sullivan), cocky son Tyler (Eddy Maday), and grief-stricken daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), who’s mourning her best friend Nadia.
Penned by Death Becomes Her and Jurassic Park co-writer David Koepp—who’s worked with Soderbergh previously on 2022’s Kimi and the newly released Black Bag—Presence resorts to smart tricks to deliver the ghost’s POV, but never feels gimmicky.
“If I’m a ghost, what do I see?”
The movie asks this question by way of gripping long takes and a clever use of the house’s contained space. The subjective shots contribute to a unique fly-on-the-wall ambiance and hint at the presence’s motives before the finale, which demands to be enjoyed with no prior knowledge.
The past year has been fertile for exploring more personal POV techniques in horror, suggesting the genre is on the hunt for fresher eyes through which it can tell its stories. An unlikely companion piece to Presence in most respects but their first-person, antagonistic narrative, Canadian sensation slasher In a Violent Nature presents the murders from the resurrected killer’s perspective, owing a debt to John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween.
Adopting a villain’s POV is hardly a new conceit in horror, particularly in slashers. The ambiguity surrounding the murderer is instrumental to building tension, while focusing on the sheer terror on the victims’ faces provides the adrenaline kick we seek in scary movies—though this usually lasts a few frames before it returns to a more neutral angle.
Halloween opens with a memorable, nearly five-minute-long POV shot of Michael Myers spying on his sister Judith (Sandy Johnson) and her boyfriend from outside their house in Haddonfield, Illinois. As Michael goes in and retrieves his clown mask, the camera shrinks the subjective shot into a restricted, behind-the-mask viewfinder. Upstairs, he repeatedly stabs Judith with a kitchen knife and rushes outside. When their parents arrive, the unmasking of a six-year-old Michael (Will Sandin) in the reverse shot is shocking, even more so after the first-person camera concealed his appearance.
With In a Violent Nature, the POV doesn’t often coincide with Johnny’s (Ry Barrett) exactly, but the camera follows him up close for most of the 94-minute runtime. It’s a killer slice-of-life for the protagonist, a distinctive insight into his lonely day-to-day and difficult childhood. It’s not the group of friends renting a cabin in the woods we’re invested in. This ambient slasher is Johnny’s story through and through, and there’s no doubt we’re seeing what he sees.
Chris Nash’s movie fumbles its reversal of conventions in the finale, zooming in on Final Girl Kris (Andrea Pavlovic) as she’s rescued by an unnamed woman, played by scream queen Lauren-Marie Taylor. The spotlight is on Kris, who the camera tails much like it did with Johnny for the greatest part of the movie. The shift is abrupt, somewhat watering down the impact of the killer’s first-person chronicle.
Despite the differences in tone and gore (or lack thereof), both Presence and In a Violent Nature are slow-burners that favor long-ish shots, ambient sound, and relatively stripped-down dialogue. Their commitment to a specific POV led to an excited word of mouth out of Sundance 2024 that ultimately worked better than the movies’ limited marketing.
In recent years, the buzz from fans is what may have helped fright flicks put a foot in the door of established film spaces. As Hollywood still struggles to acknowledge horror, this mistreated yet malleable genre has long made its mark by experimenting with themes and forms outside of the mainstream. From seminal movies Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project to REC, Creep, and the AI-bashed but oh-so-entertaining Late Night with the Devil, found footage may be the most effective framing device to withhold information from viewers and amp up the discomfort.
Additionally, the mockumentary of Ghostwatch, Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, and the unsettling, analog nightmare-scape of Skinamarink have also contributed to shaping horror storytelling, blurring the lines between watchers and watched.
One of the few good things in an otherwise universally terrible 2020, Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man interestingly toys with the supposedly objective POV. The Universal Monster classic remake offers a chilling take on abusive relationships. It makes the most of negative space (a pan to nothing, or is it?), with the camera’s POV serving as a kind of presence, and a malevolent one at that. Each time the lens lingers on Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss), the audience is left wondering whether that’s her invisible abuser or a more impartial, but equally visually terrifying, camera narrator.
Presence may be lower on frights but isn’t any less of a guessing game. The continuous POV camera fuels this ethereal whodunit and teases the ghost’s true identity throughout. As an intimate, restrained affair, Soderbergh’s aesthetic horror is akin to the otherworldly A Ghost Story. Both movies let their ghosts roam an infinite timeline of their own, where the future and past melt into a perpetual today.
Unlike the titular presence though, A Ghost Story’s deceased husband holds a vantage point on his bereft wife while remaining visible, albeit underneath a white sheet. On the other hand, Soderbergh turns the ghost into a voiceless narrator, a conduit for the audience to wander through this broken family’s ruins. And this makes Presence’s final reveal, like that of six-year-old Michael Myers, all the more affecting. Without giving too much away, the movie trades jump scares to pack an emotional punch, culminating in a devastating scene carried by Liu’s powerful performance.
The POV shot can foster compassion, as it does by allowing viewers to see through the creature’s eyes in Whannell’s latest, the uneven Wolf Man. But it’s probably Nickel Boys that best matches Presence’s intentions with its first-person narration. Not strictly a horror, RaMell Ross’ ghostly racial violence drama is relayed through two different standpoints. The alternation highlights the blending of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) which is crucial to the plot, protecting the twist until the gut-wrenching end.
The otherness framing depictions of bloodthirsty baddies, stubborn spirits, and other outcasts gets erased through a subjective camera narrator, and becomes a collective space to haunt.
New POV horror thrives in this ‘show, don’t tell’ arena, arguing that darkness can fester within each of us. There isn’t just a call for empathy behind this visual choice, but also the exploitation of a practical tenet of fear—what we can’t see is more disturbing than what we can look in the eye.
Categorized:Editorials
