Weaponized Cameras

So there's a fight scene, and someone just happens to have a camera. Not only is the camera useful for snapping photographs, its one more possible weapon out of many already present in the scene. If the camera isn't being used to physically bonk people over the head, the flash can be used to momentary blind them. In some rare cases, the effectiveness of the camera as a weapon has to do with superstition on the part of the person whose picture gets taken ("You stole my soul!")

Examples of Weaponized Cameras include:

Comic Books

• The female character in Zombie Powder turned her tripod into a cannon.

Film

• In the film Dog Soldiers they use a polaroid camera to blind the attacking monsters. The photographs they take show up in the end credits.
• The climatic scene in Rear Window.
• Quarantine includes a scene where a character uses the POV camera to beat up a zombie lens-first.
• Done in Gremlins by one of the characters who knew the Gremlins were sensitive to light.
• In Dr. No, photographer Annabelle Chung cuts Quarrel's face with a broken flashbulb. It doesn't do her much good.
• The Camerahead Cenobite from Hellraiser III Hell On Earth can make things explode by taking a picture of them with his camera eye, which can also extend with enough force to punch a hole through a man's head.
• A camera-mounted tripod is used as a stabbing and bludgeoning weapon in Halloween: Resurrection.
• An alternate ending for Paranormal Activity would have had a possessed Katie beat Micah to death with the camera.
• The Water Street Butcher bashes a child's head in with the camera in The Poughkeepsie Tapes.
• When her home is plunged into darkness, Sarah from Inside uses the flashes emitted by her camera to navigate the house, and find the wounded killer.

Literature

• Sometimes, the camera really does steal souls. See (repeatedly) Goosebumps.
• Discworld
  • In The Colour of Magic, Bel-Shammaroth is stunned and scared off by caged Salamanders flashing lights. Salamanders whose purpose is to provide light for Twoflower's camera.
  • In The Truth, Otto Chriek's experimental camera is used to advantage in a fight scene because it uses Uberwaldean Land Eels—which emit the mysterious "dark light"—instead of Salamanders.
• The only way to defeat the Big Bad in the book Golden And Grey: The Nightmares Ghosts Have, was to capture his image in some way. The hero intended to use a pocket mirror and brought one along, but when it broke, an annoying reporter with a camera ended up saving the day.
• In Michael Crichton's Prey, the killer Grey Goo were originally designed to be nanomolecular cameras.
• In Charles Stross' The Laundry Series, the CCTV cameras ubiquitous across England can be turned into "look-to-kill" weapons, operating on the same principle as basilisks, gorgons, etc. It says something about how bad a full-scale invasion by Eldritch Abominations is expected to be that killing (by petrifying and/or cooking) most of Britain's population is considered the better option.

Live Action TV

• Kolchak the Night Stalker
  • "Bad Medicine". When Kolchak takes pictures of a diablero, it flees to protect its eyes from the bright light from the camera's flashbulb.
  • Subverted in "They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be...". Kolchak thinks the monster is adversely affected by the light from his camera's flash bulb. It actually turns out to be vulnerable to the sound the camera's recharger makes after the flash.
• One of the CSIs had a girl die when a camera was thrown at her.

Tabletop Games

• In the Champions adventure C.L.O.W.N. Snapshot, one of the members of the title villain group, had a high tech camera that could change its target into a photograph.

Video Games

• These can blind foes in Nethack.
• Fatal Frame, in which a camera can be used to exorcise ghosts by taking their picture with a Camera Obscura using special film.
• The small, flying camera robots in Half Life 2 often end up blinding you.
• In Final Fantasy VI one of Edgar's tools is a camera with a damaging flash.
• In Eternal Darkness there's a level where you play as a journalist in a makeshift World War I hospital. You start the level with a camera and some flash powder which you can use to stun enemies (which is useful, considering some of them can easily dodge the puny guns you're given).
• While Jade cannot actually fight using her camera in Beyond Good and Evil, it does serve as a substitute for a Sniper Rifle scope for making precise long-distance shots with the disk launcher.
• Ran Hibiki from the Rival Schools games incorporates her camera into some of her special attacks, being a School Newspaper Newshound and all.
• In the movie studio stage of the Scott Pilgrim game, one of the generic Mooks attacks with a flash camera.
• In Touhou Gaiden Games Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler, taking enough pictures of the bosses makes them explode as though they were defeated. Taking pictures also clears away bullets in the picture.
• There's at least one Tintin videogame adaptation where you can use the camera to scare away birds/bats and stun both men and beasts alike, allowing you to get close enough to knock them out cold.

Web Comics

• In El Goonish Shive, Catalina and Rhoda use their cameras' flashes along with a loud whistle to scare off a boar.

Western Animation

• When The Simpsons went to Itchy & Scratchy Land and the robots went berzerk, flashes from cameras were both their Berserk Button "on" switch and "off" switch.
• It took Buzz and his gang a camera set in the baggage conveyor belt scene to temporarily paralyze Toy Story 2's villain, Stinky Pete. With the flash, of course.
• In one Ed Edd and Eddy episode Eddy keeps doing this to Kevin.
• The protagonist of Speed Grapher can kill with his camera, which blows up whatever he photographs.
• Johnny Test used this to defeat the Molemen in one episode.
• During a James Bond Parody episode of Dexters Laboratory a mook at the photography company's secret lair uses a camera to shoot shuriken-photos at Dexter.

Truth in Television

• More reasonable than you may think. Older film cameras are liable because they tended to be made out of milled metals and other durable materials with a simple internal construction, while modern high-end cameras tend to have heavy-duty magnesium frames and are designed specifically so that you can drop them on rocks in the middle of an African safari and still expect them to work well enough. As for flashes, well, a professional off-camera flash is something you don't want going off in your face rapidly in the first place, and many modern flashes have enough capacitors to build several flashes' worth of charge per cycle. Plus, many photographers are liable to have two or more flashes on them if they have their kit. Basically, don't put a photographer in a corner, it could be painful.