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Camera Abuse / Film

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Films — Animated

  • Inverted at the end of 9, when blood-on-lens violence is averted in favor of a gentle-raindrops-on-lens upbeat ending. The raindrops are shown to be teeming with microscopic life, reborn on a once-dead world, in the final fade-out.
  • Aladdin: The Peddler in the prologue entreats the audience "Please, please, come closer!" Then the camera zooms right up to his face, and he mutters "Too close, a little too close!"
  • An American Tail: Fievel Goes West: Tiger spatters spit on the lens in one scene.
  • Brave: The ending of this trailer for the movie.
  • The Brave Little Toaster: During the "Worthless" song, when one of the cars gets crushed it sends parts flying. One of those parts hits the camera and causes the lens to crack.
  • A Bug's Life:
    • In one of the Animated Outtakes, Molt accidentally backs into the camera and knocks it over. The film crew are briefly visible before someone turns the camera off.
    • In another, PT Flea gives a frenetic speech and leaps into the air, hitting the (non-existent) camera, and LEAVING A SMEAR on the (non-existent) lens.
    • When the circus bugs arrive at Ant Island, and land, Heimlich is unfortunately descended into the camera.
  • Cars: One of the little VW Bug bugs flies into the camera and smudges it with dirt.
  • Chicken Little: In the second teaser trailer, just after the words the announcer says zoom in, Chicken Little runs towards the screen yelling, "RUN!!" and hits the camera, his face smudging the lens.
  • Despicable Me: Near the end of the credits, A minion shoots himself out of a cannon, only to crash into the projector. Mouth-first.
  • G.I. Joe: The Movie has one in its awesome intro. A Crimson Guard parachutes down and seems to have no other objective than to punch the screen, which visibly shatters when his fist makes contact...only to cut to another angle, showing that he is actually punching a television crew's recording camera so hard that it shatters violently. A twofer of literal Camera Abuse flipped around to become a Fourth Wall Psych.
  • The Incredibles: The "camera" aboard Mrs. Parr's jet quavers very slightly to mimic the small turbulence bumps encountered in flight. When the missile attack begins and Helen engages in various evasive maneuvers the "camera" now bounces and shakes in response to the drastic changes of direction.
  • The Mind's Eye:
    • In Beyond the Mind's Eye, one segment shows a dark world with miniature pterosaurs flying around. Two fly directly into the camera and bounce off the lens. The third isn't so fortunate; it breaks the lens and then gets cooked to the lens by an electrical discharge.
    • In Odyssey Into the Mind's Eye, one segment shows us the camera view of a rover exploring a prehistoric world. The camera dodges thick dinosaur feet, falls off a cliff, is caught by a pterosaur, almost falls into a volcano, and is implied to finally have been destroyed by a second pterosaur attacking it.
  • My Little Pony: A New Generation: During the scene where Sunny and Izzy are fleeing through Maretime Bay, one of the splatapults' projectiles splatters against the camera.
  • Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf Film Series:
  • Surf's Up: On two occasions, the cameraman is attacked by natives.
  • In Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation, Babs tests out her squirt gun on the camera. The cameraman then rubs his hand on the screen to dry it.
  • In Turning Red, Mei accidentally launches herself toward the In-Universe camcorder and knocks it down.
  • Wreck-It Ralph: In-universe, no less. The camera robot that serves as the stand-in for the player character in Hero's Duty is used by Ralph to shield himself against one of the Cy-Bugs when it lunges at him. It collides with the camera and leads to a game over. The "first-person shooter" is understandably pissed off at Ralph for this.

Films — Live-Action

  • IMAX footage of a Russian rocket launch, taken from a remote-controlled camera positioned insanely close to the pad, had debris scattered everywhere when the engines fired, including a fist-size rock which bounced along the ground and smacked into the protective window in front of the camera. The fact that the footage was in 3D had the entire audience ducking for cover.
  • An in-universe example shows up briefly during 44 Minutes, a dramatization of the infamous North Hollywood shootout, when one of the bank robbers starts taking potshots at a news helicopter, which wisely gets out of there before any actual damage happens.
  • In The Adventures Of Shark Boy And Lava Girl, Minus (Linus) is the victim of a brain storm. One of the brains lands in his hands and he throws it at the camera. It spends about three seconds or so slipping down the lens.
  • The girl scout fight in Airplane!.
  • In Alien Abduction (2014), the hand-held camera filming the action is dropped from low-Earth orbit to smash into the ground in the middle of a field. The lens is shattered, but the camera itself is still functional.
  • Apollo 13 has Fred Haise slightly puking on the lens after launching. Yummy.
  • Be Kind Rewind: When the magnetized Jack Black goes into the video rental store, the camera warps and lines periodically to show that he's magnetized.
  • The 1901 short film "The Big Swallow", which depicts the protagonist eating the camera and its operator, may be the Ur-Example.
  • Black Rat: When the Black Rat smashes in Takashi's head with a baseball bat, blood splatters over the camera.
  • Black Hawk Down: Blood splatters onto the camera when Sgt. Pilla is shot dead.
  • Black Wake: In Dr. Moreira's escape scene, one guy wearing a camera is shot. We see blood splatter on the camera lens to indicate that the shot hit.
  • Literal example in Blade: Trinity. Jessica Biel took aim at the camera with a bow and arrow in a Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You-style scene — and bullseyed the lens. The finished scene includes a Frame Break and a redirected camera after the shot, mostly edited in.
  • During the car chase scene in the mall in The Blues Brothers, some of the musical instruments hit the camera causing it to shake, and at the end of the scene, a person runs into the camera.
  • Braveheart makes use of this as well during the Battle of Stirling scene.
  • Mel Brooks is rather fond of this trope, usually Played for Laughs:
    • Happens twice in High Anxiety, when the camera dollies through a window, which breaks. In this film, it's a parody of Hitchcock's famous move of dollying through a window without breaking it using clever editing and effects.
    • In Robin Hood: Men in Tights, while Maid Marian is singing in the bathtub, the camera zooms in on the window to her bathroom, then the scene cuts to a close up of her singing and brushing her hair. Suddenly, there is a crash as the camera smashes through the window, interrupting the song. It then cuts to a shot of the camera, which moves back outside and draws a very confused look from Marian. Later on in Men In Tights, we see the Abbot called to marry Maid Marian to the Sheriff walking down the aisle towards the camera until he ends up loudly hitting the camera with his staff, prompting him to say, "Sorry."
    • Spaceballs has a similar joke when the camera zooms in too close and hits Dark Helmet in the helmet. During Dark Helmet and Lone Starr's Schwartz duel, Helmet accidentally kills a camera operator on the set.
      Helmet: Um... He did it.
      Lone Starr: What?!
  • The camera lens gets wet during the splash fight when the older kids embark on their canoe trip in The Burning.
  • Camel Spiders: During one scene of carnage late in the movie, a bit of blood splatters on the left side of the camera lens.
  • Subverted in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when it appears that Willy Wonka has walked into the camera, but it's actually the doors to the glass elevator (which is virtually see-through).
  • Happens unintentionally in Children of Men during an extended shot of a gun battle, when a drop of blood from a squib happens to spatter onto the lens. Because the continuous shot is actually a number of shots stitched together with CGI, the blood discreetly disappears when the camera goes through fog.
  • The camera in Chronicle, among other things, is kicked around by bullies, has a drink spilled on its lens, and gets exposed to some mysterious phlebotinum that causes all kinds of interference.
  • This happens frequently to the In-Universe Camera in Cloverfield — in some cases, the jostling is so violent that the camera image becomes pixelated or the video skips (revealing the original contents of the camera's memory card). Also, in the subway tunnel escape scene, blood splashes on the lens and Hud has to wipe it off.
  • The tricky/dangerous parts of Crank: High Voltage's action scenes were shot with relatively cheap High Definition camcorders because if they were damaged during the shoot, it wouldn't cost too much to replace them. They went through 15 of them.
  • In Deadpool (2016), within the first five minutes (naturally, considering its protagonist). Deadpool finds some gum on the ceiling of the cab he's riding in, picks it off, and flicks it away in disgust — only for it to hit the camera lens. Averted somewhat as Deadpool notices this and kindly scrapes it off for the audience. It doesn't stop him from pushing the camera out of the way later when he decides he's lonely in the back seat and climbs up to join the driver.
  • Diamonds on Wheels: When Bobby sprays one of Ashley's goons with a fire extinguisher in the fight in the warehouse, there is a shot from the goon's POV and the entire lens gets blanked out by fire extinguisher foam.
  • In the 2016 film Director's Cut, an eccentric filmmaker named Herbert Blount (played by Penn Jillette) contributes to a crowdfunding campaign for the Film Within a Film Knocked Off, earning him the Executive Producer credit and a line as an extra in the movie. The film implied that Herbert was unhappy over his part getting cut out, so he kidnapped Missy Pyle, and stole the film's raw footage to make it his own. The penultimate scene in the film (and the last scene in Herbert's version of Knocked Off) shows Missy whacking Herbert with a tripod filmed in different angles, including a slow-motion one from the camera... which happens to be screwed on the tripod.
  • In District 9, nearly every time one of the alien weapons is fired, we end up with bits of... things better left unidentified on the camera.
  • Drag Me to Hell features a fly that lands on the camera for a moment.
  • In Earthquake, blood spatters the camera lens when the overloaded elevator plunges down the shaft.
  • In Ex Machina, Caleb cuts his arm open to make sure that he's not a robot. He then smears his blood across the camera and punches the mirror. The mirror shatters. It's unclear whether the audience could simply see from behind the mirror, or if Nathan actually placed a camera behind or within the mirror.
  • Fatal Instinct: After Ned Ravine finds his skunk missing the camera follows him. As it does so it runs into a tree and the lens breaks.
  • Fight Club features not so much "camera" as "film" abuse, from the subliminal message insertions of Tyler Durden and artificial 'cigarette burn' marks, to when the film appears to jitter right off the spokes during Durden's "you're not your fuckin' khakis" monologue.
  • Das Finstere Tal has an odd scene at the climax: while blood is on the camera for a couple of shots, there is no shot of blood actually hitting the camera.
  • In Fletch Lives, a camera is knocked askew during a car chase scene.
  • In Girl House, blood splatters the camera when Kylie beats Loverboy to death with it. The blood shows up Alex's computer screen as he is watching the live feed.
  • In Goddess of Love, the main protagonist spits her liquor into the sink, causing spittle to splat over the lens.
  • In Godzilla vs. Gigan, Anguirus charges face-first into Gigan's abdominal buzzsaw, spraying blood onto the camera lens.
  • Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum: At the end of the movie, after Ha-Joon is attacked by a ghost in Room 402, we see the P.O.V. of the flying drone camera as it falls to the ground, cracking the lens on impact.
  • In the 1971 flick Graveyard of Horror, every shovelful of earth the distraught husband tosses aside as he's digging up his late wife's grave flies right at the camera. Oddly, it's an Orbital Shot, so the man must be slowly spinning as he digs to keep dirt-dousing the camera.
  • An in-universe example occurs in Happy Gilmore: the viewer is shown home videos from the protagonist's childhood, and footage is shown of his father being struck by a hockey puck while operating the camera, complete with a broken lens.
  • Happened in Real Life in Harlan County U.S.A., a documentary of a miners' strike. At one point, a strikebreaker stalks up to the cameraman and knocks the camera to the ground.
  • In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the Whomping Willow shakes snow off its branches during the transition from winter to springtime scene, and some splashes onto the screen.
  • Hellboy II: The Golden Army: The first monster battle has monster blood splashing on the camera. It might have 'worked' if the redshirts who had been filming earlier hadn't already been eaten.
  • In the extended version of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, at one point during his song, the Goblin King stabs one of the crowding goblins with his spear, twirls him around and hurls him away. The goblin jostles the camera as it flies past.
  • Holiday on the Buses:
    • The camera gets buffeted by branches during Stan's shortcut through the woods.
    • When Luigi drops Stan in a pot of soup, it splashes onto the camera.
  • This effect is simulated in Killer's Kiss when Vincent flings a glass at the camera in a fit of rage.
  • During one fight in The Lady Hermit, some blood splatters on the camera lens and remains there for the rest of the shot.
  • The Last Jedi:
    • At the end of a low-angle shot of the fathier stampede on the Canto Bight racetrack, the camera is knocked askance by their hooves.
    • Later, during the battle of Crait, a passing speeder kicks some of the planet's characteristic red soil up onto a camera lens.
  • Played surprisingly straight in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
  • In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, when the (first) bridge they cross collapses and falls, the camera shakes subtly to mimic the seismic effects of a giant rock striking another giant rock.
  • The Malay Chronicles: Bloodlines has plenty of blood, dust and grime hitting the screen in the climax, a Big Badass Battle Sequence set on a beach where the La RĂ©sistance battles against the Garuda pirates. Notably, when the hero Merong kills Kamawas the villain — we see things from Kamawas' POV, and the entire camera lens gets drenched in red sauce.
  • In Man of Steel, as Zod's ship takes off for the Phantom Zone, exhaust from its thrusters obscures the audience POV.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • In-universe in Iron Man 2: the cameras that recorded the ill-fated North Korean and Iranian attempts at Iron Man knockoffs get the errant dakka/blood on the lens treatment.
    • Doubling as a Freeze-Frame Bonus during the opening credits of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Young Groot is rocking out to "Mr. Blue Sky" while the other guardians are fighting a transdimensional monster. Things get a bit hectic, and at one point, Groot ends up rolling across the floor and knocking the camera.
    • In Werewolf by Night (2022), the camera is splattered with blood when Jack wolfs out and mauls the Bloodstone guards.
  • In the 2017 film Monolith, the main actress drinks dirty water from the desert, causing her to spit it into the camera lens.
  • In the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a policeman covers the camera with his hand, breaking the camera and drawing an exasperated, "Christ!" from the cameraman. The scene immediately changes to one of a broken film reel, fading to white and then black, and a longer version of the Intermission song is played. It's the last thing ever seen in the movie; there are no end titles or credits. In the DVD commentary, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam remark how in one of the initial screenings they saw of the film, the audience assumed that the film had broken and simply sat and waited (probably waiting for the projectionist to fix it), not realizing that the film was, in fact, over.
  • In The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the camera lens is cracked by an avalanche and a large diamond.
  • In Muppets Most Wanted, Constantine literally smears Vaseline on the camera lens to achieve a romantic effect at one point.
  • In Nazareno's father's death scene in Nazareno Cruz y el Lobo (the highest-grossing Argentine film ever made), the camera is hit by water and mud.
  • In the 2015 film Nightlight, the In-Universe Camera is variously struck, spattered, dropped, rolled, crashed through bushes at full speed, sent plummeting off a cliff facing straight down, and (increasingly) possessed. By the end, it's got hairline cracking all around the edges of its lens.
  • The Nutty Professor (1963) ends with the principal cast members walking up to the camera one by one to take a bow, theater-style. Jerry Lewis walks up last, stumbles wildly, and falls onto the camera.
  • Los Olvidados has Pedro throwing eggs at the camera after being thrown into "Farm School".
  • Several scenes in Once Upon a Time in Mexico have droplets of (bad) CG blood landing on the camera lens.
  • One Cut of the Dead: Blood gets splattered onto the lens midway through the first sequence. After a minute, a hand comes from behind the camera and wipes it off. Later, the camera gets knocked to the ground and eventually picked back up again. Since the camera isn't supposed to be diegetic, this might come across as odd until The Reveal.
  • A spoiler reveals that Paranormal Activity would have ended with the possessed heroine beating her husband to death with his beloved camera Quarantine (2008)-style, but they didn't have the time or money to figure out a way to do this without sacrificing their only camera. However, the real ending does have the husband's body being suddenly thrown at the camera, knocking it off its tripod.
  • A subtle example in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. As Jack is sailing away from the Island of the Pelegostos and is giving his standard farewell speech, the wave that smacks Jack in the face and cuts his sentence also manages to hit the camera as well.
  • Planet Terror uses loads of fake blood in the Helicopter Blender scene, although most of it was removed for the TV ads.
  • Quarantine (2008) takes this to a literal extreme when a character uses the in-story camera to beat a zombie to death.
  • In [REC], the policeman is constantly shoving the camera and telling Pablo to turn it off. At one point, Pablo bashes in an infected's head with the camera. Later, another infected smashes his camera light.
  • In one scene of Robowar, the titular war machine kills a man who, in close-up, spews blood into the lens of the camera from his mouth.
  • In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dr. Frank N. Furter does a Food Slap by tossing a drink right into the camera during "Sweet Transvestite".
  • Saving Private Ryan has a lot of blood splatter get onto the camera.
  • An early scene in Scary Movie has Cindy being attacked by Ghostface. At one point, the camera zooms in on her screaming face... only to conk her in the noggin.
  • In Space Jam, Daffy Duck spatters spit on the lens.
  • In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, during "Johanna," as Sweeney is swinging his razors around, some blood gets on the lens.
  • Sweet Hostage: As Leonard drives Doris Mae to his cabin, he delivers a Roadside Wave to the camera.
  • In There Will Be Blood, the lens gets splattered with oil early on. It happens again at the end; during his No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Eli, Plainview kicks over a bucket of water, some of which gets on the camera.
  • A literal example: for a scene in Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, he wanted a shot of a horse falling off of a cliff onto the camera. Due to budget restrictions, the only way he was able to do it was to literally place the camera at the bottom of the cliff and drop a fake horse onto it. He ended up destroying the camera and ruining some of the film, but hey, he got the shot!
  • In Tomorrow Never Dies, the exhaust from Bond's stolen fighter jet shatter the picture into a million pieces as we fall into the opening credits.
  • During the climax of Transformers, the fight between the Autobots and Decepticons abuses the camera to the point that it is sometimes nearly impossible to tell what is going on.
  • The entirety of The Troll Hunter, given that it is shot entirely using a handheld DV In-Universe Camera carried by one of the main characters. Several shots devolve into meaningless shaking, shots take time to focus, and the lens of the first camera cracks its lens when it falls to the ground when a troll eats the cameraman. Several of the next shots are done with a cracked lens until a new camera (and camerawoman) is brought in.
  • In Twilight: New Moon, CGI werewolves knock over the camera as they charge past it.
  • In The Wrong Man, after the title character has been incarcerated for the murder he did not commit, his disorientation is symbolized by having the camera slowly move in ever-increasing circles.

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