Peeping Tom (1960)
Directed by Michael Powell

Film Review

Possibly the greatest British horror film ever made, certainly one of the most controversial, Peeping Tom marks a surprising departure for its director Michael Powell.  In the 1940s, through his association with Emeric Pressburger, Powell became one of the leading figures in the British film industry, crafting such timeless masterpieces as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948).  Peeping Tom is a much darker and far more psychologically complex film than anything Powell had previously made, although the magical realism and subtle irony of his earlier films does break through in a few places.  The film was not well received on its first release and the torrent of adverse criticism that it aroused would effectively end Powell's filmmaking career.

Interestingly, Peeping Tom was released just a few months before Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), a film that has many similarities to Powell's and with which it is often compared.  Both films feature a dangerous psychopath who is portrayed as a likeable, albeit slightly sinister, young man; both have scenes of a graphic violent nature; and both have voyeurism as a central theme.  Whereas Psycho proved to be a major box office success and would secure the international reputation of its director, Peeping Tom was subjected to a clumsy reedit and proved to be a commercial disaster.  Some critics described Powell's film as repugnant, others said it was perverse.  When the film was restored in the late 1970s, thanks mainly to the efforts of some notable admirers such as Martin Scorsese, it was almost universally hailed as one of the triumphs of British cinema. 

Perhaps the hostile reception that Peeping Tom met with on its first release had less to do with its horror content (which is negligible by today's standards) and more to do with its subtext - that cinema is inherently a voyeuristic artform, one that depends crucially on the voyeuristic instincts of the public.  Right from the opening sequence, Powell is making an identification between the central character, who is soon revealed to be a killer, and the audience.  Cinema entertainment satisfies a craving for vicarious experience to which every one of us is prone.  The fact the Mark Lewis is portrayed not as a villain, but sympathetically, as a tragic victim, strengthens this viewer identification and we are drawn ever more into his dark lonely world.  We become complicit in the crimes he commits, which he does not out of malice, but in response to tortured psychosexual impulses arising from a traumatised childhood.  The real voyeur in this film is not the protagonist, but us, the audience.

Peeping Tom is a much darker, far more unsettling film than Psycho, surpassing it in narrative complexity, acting performances (both Carl Boehm and Anna Massey are excellent) and cinematography.  It may not have Psycho's memorable shock set-pieces, but it is more successful at luring the audience into the mind of a psychopath, whilst giving a deeper sense of what voyeurism means.  Far from being the cheap exploitation shocker that some critics seemed to think it was, Peeping Tom is actually a moral film, one that warns of the dangers of depicting excessive violence in cinema.  What it suggests is that, by pandering to an audience's craving for titillation, film directors run the risk of fashioning a society where individuals are inured to violence and regard all suffering and cruelty, no matter how obscene, as entertainment.  The fact that Peeping Tom no longer has the power to shock as it once did is proof that these messages have gone unheeded.

Film Synopsis

Mark Lewis is a shy young man who works as a focus puller at a film studio but has aspirations of becoming a film director.  He supplements his meagre income by taking pornographic photographs for a newsagent and renting out rooms in the house he inherited from his father.  Although outwardly normal, Mark is the victim of a dark and dangerous obsession: he derives a macabre pleasure from watching others suffer.  One evening, he follows a prostitute back to her home and kills her, filming the whole incident with his portable camera.  Not long after, he arranges for a female extra at the studio where he works to stay behind, ostensibly so that he can make a film with her.  She meets a similar fate.  One of Mark's tenants, Helen Stephens, takes an interest in the strange young man and is horrified to learn that, as a boy, he was subjected to cruel psychological experiments by his father...