#260: Peeping Tom

Release Date: April 7th, 1960

Format: Criterion Collection on Blu-ray Written by: Leo Marks Directed by: Michael Powell 4 Stars

I remember when I first saw Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom a couple of years ago. Immediately afterwards I couldn’t help but wonder, how is this movie not more well-known in the United States? 

Considered by many as the first true slasher film ever made - more than a decade before movies were even given that label - it deserves a similar notoriety as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which was released the same year.

The story involves Mark, a shy photographer who still lives in his large childhood home in London, where he rents out the ground floor bedrooms to tenants, one of whom is a young lady named Helen. Helen is an aspiring author of children’s books and she takes a liking to her quiet, sensitive landlord. As their budding romance develops, Mark becomes more and more concerned about certain proclivities of his that not only endanger his relationship with Helen, but also endanger her life. 

What proclivities, you may wonder? 

Well, you see, Mark murders women. Not only that, he has a particular kink of filming them while he stabs them to death; he attaches his camera to a tripod in which one leg has been sharpened to a point, and stabs them in the throat while filming their face in a closeup. 

The fear in the women’s faces is what excites Mark, and from the opening scene in which he murders a prostitute, we get the sense that this desire of his is insatiable. 

Needless to say it’s a scandalous plot, and almost unbelievable that it was part of a film that was given a wide release in England in 1960.

The disreputable content more or less ruined the career of Michael Powell, despite him being a successful mainstream director in England through the ‘40s and ‘50s. He quickly learned that you’re only as good as your last hit, and the general public was just not ready for a movie in which the protagonist was a weirdo who makes snuff films.

Thankfully Peeping Tom has been reclaimed in the decades since its release. The script, from writer Leo Marks, humanizes Mark to a degree as being the product of psychological abuse as a child. The Freudian aspect is interesting, but the film’s most arresting quality is how Powell and Marks trick viewers into being complicit in Mark’s crimes. Like Mark, we sort of enjoy this dirty work of his. 

Well, maybe not enjoy, but we want to see these things that he does, no matter how awful they are. We become dirty little voyeurs too.