The Cat and the Canary (1939)

Starting from a thundering thud, a figure was walking towards us from the distance in a cemetery. In the next shot, the camera was pointing at the sky from below, and a lady was crouching down while putting the bouquet down. After that, the protagonist, Joan, came into the frame and inspected the bouquet, therefore looking at the camera. We were firstly introduced to Joan through the view of a bouquet. Throughout the film, the camera constantly takes the angle of an unknown object to watch Joan—Joan was not the only observer even when she was the only living being in the room.

A montage shows a series of close-ups of still life and small gestures in Joan’s routine: the hand pressing the garden pliers, the door bar, the swinging car key, the moving tiled floor, the fork putting food in the mouth, etc. This series is accompanied by marvelous sound design of the fabric rustling, wood crunching, and metals clicking. In some shots, the camera is often set from a corner of the ceiling or through the narrow corridor, watching Joan from above or from the back. The unusual angles blur the distinction between the positions of the observer and the observed. There was a two-way gaze between the objects and the subject. Not only Joan, we feel being watched, too. Seeing the close-up of the dotted petals of lilies, we know that Joan has taken the bouquet from the cemetery home, and they began to sense the abnormal phenomenon at home.