Paul White (David Keith) is a father and a husband, but he can't help but succumb to the hunter part of his brain. While installing 1980's home entertainment systems for rich house wives, he kills them and stashes body parts in his wife's (Cathy Moriarity) abnormal home.
Donald Cammel (the director of the iconic Performance) wrote and directed this over the top drama wrapped in a slasher flick. The story of Cammel's life is perhaps more cult cinema than his short body of work; after a career of Hollywood interference, Cammel ritualistically shot himself in the head and visually experienced his slow death (35 minutes) with his reflection in a mirror. This truth alone peeks interest in Cammell's filmography, but the film that brings us into the art of death that Cammell so brilliantly noticed is White of the Eye.
The film opens up with a predatory eagle flying high over the cityscape, and of course we get a literal birds-eye-view that also brings us in to the point of view of a hunting animal. The film then cuts to the first murder seen of the film. The killer leaves a suffocating goldfish in a plate of dead meat being thawed for cooking. With Hitchcock style, the murder scene kicks in lick a loud speaker sliced by a blade. Fluids hyperbolically fly across the room, giving us the feel of a horror film, but none of the fluids belong to the victim. Like a true revisionist, Cammell begins his slasher flick with all the archetypes of the genre, but one is missing: the victim's blood. In opening the film this way, Cammell may be bringing the murder into a state of beauty as wine and red roses spill to the floor in slow motion-he is showing the aesthetic pleasure of murder that has been proven over and over again with the popularity of the horror genre.
 
As the film progresses, we are introduced to the degeneration from society's civilized normalcy. Paul White is not only an infidel; he is also a serial killer. The human monsters of slasher horror were formidable plagues of the city and suburbia especially. Cammell throws his monster even further into the American nightmare--the killer is daddy. The ideas in White of the Eye bring humans back to the animal ancestry about which Charles Darwin theorized. Maybe we're not meant to be tied down to one person; after all, animals don't understand the notion of fidelity, but they understand territory and the hunt (but could sexual freedom cause murder and mayhem and isn't that what the slasher genre always reveals). Cammell also brings up the possibility that the hunter simply may not stop at the animal; the hunter may become the animal, and the hunt may spatially spread up the food chain.
When looking at White of the Eye and Cammell's suicide, we may see that Cammell's self inflicted murder was not a tragedy, but exactly what the artist wanted. In the documentary Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance (1998), Cammell's wife, China Kong, mentions that Cammell "couldn't understand why the western civilization prefer[s] the last moments on earth [to] be random." With this statement and Cammell's history, we can see White of the Eye as an intelligent horror film that tries to break free of horror and civilization by reminding us that savagery is within us, and the animal also resides in the normalcy expected of us throughout our lives.
I can't recommend White of the Eye enough; the film is one that will be watched over and over again, and new appreciation and ideas will come with every viewing, a true cerebral horror picture.
Guest-written review by Brad Guillory
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 1987
DIRECTOR: Donald Cammell
WRITING CREDITS: Donald Cammell, Andrew Klavan
GENRE: Thriller
CAST: David Keith, Cathy Moriarty, Alan Rosenberg
COUNTRY: UK
RUNTIME: 110 min
RATING: 10/10
White of the Eye Website/IMDB Click here
White of the Eye Trailer
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