Monstrous Mobilities and Predatory Perspectives: Drone Shots and the Gaze of Monsters

Across screen media, the movement profiles of different camera techniques are key to the construction of perspective, emotion, and identification. Drawing from Thomas Deane Tucker’s (The Peripatetic Frame: Images of Walking in Film. Edinburgh University Press, 2022) work on camera movement and human locomotion, we argue that the movement profiles of drone shots place us in the mobile perspective of non-human entities. Where Steadicam shots mirror the motion of human walking, drone shots rely on gliding, flying, drifting, and darting. If Steadicam creates what Tucker calls a ‘participatory peripatetic point of view’, drone shots allow for participation in a decidedly non-human perspective. The Chinese television series Ultimate Note (iQIYI, 2020) uses drones in place of crane shots, but also uses their speed and agility in scenes where oversized predators threaten the human characters. These drone shots heighten the usual sense of threat from a high camera position by evoking the movement of disembodied military technology, here re-embodied as a non-human predator. Sabeen Ahmed (Theory & Event, 21(2), 382–410, 2018) argues that the phenomenological experience of living under drone warfare is one of a ‘space of death’; following Ahmed, we argue that the mobile perspective of drones is thus the movement of death. Aligning drone shots with the gaze and movement of monsters cements this connection between drones and predation.