익명 03:01

First use of super-slow zoom in horror films to create tension

First use of super-slow zoom in horror films to create tension

Here I'm not talking specifically about a "dolly zoom", first introduced by cinematographer Irmin Roberts in Hitchcock's Vertigo, but about the agonizingly slow zoom that you see not infrequently in horror movies, utilized to build tension.

(It's agonizing because you're on the edge of your seat, waiting for some reveal, and the slower the zoom, the greater the tension.)

When did its use arise in the horror genre? The question arose because I recently watched Doctor Sleep and noticed it during the Kubrick-homage shots, then watched Under the Skin (2014), which was also heavily influenced by Kubrick, and noticed the shot. And, I suspect that if I reviewed many of the better horror films, I'd notice even more uses.

I'm asking because I'm not a horror film scholar and wondering if this did derive from Kubrick with The Shining, or some less well known director and film known mainly to scholars of the genre.



Top Answer/Comment:

By the late 1960s and 1970s, zooms were a stylistic device associated with modernist or disorienting cinema, because they felt "artificial" compared to dolly-in movements. So possibly the earliest use would be around that time.

Mario Bava (Italian gothic-horror director) made extensive use of zooms in the 1960s.

Tim Lucas notes Bava’s pioneering stylistic use of the zoom in Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (2007). On page 503, he makes a reference to the episode "La goccia d'acqua" ("The Drop of Water") of I tre volti della paura/Black Sabbath (1963):

"The Drop of Water" (f)eatures a staring corpse that won't close its eyes, and ends with a slow, inexorable zoom into the eyes of another corpse.

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