Review of Peeping Tom (1960) by Charlie M — 03 Nov 2014

The first modern slasher film, only because it was released a month before Alfred Hitchock's Psycho. But while Psycho bolstered the sagging career of Hitchcock, Peeping Tom promptly ended Michael Powell's magnificent run as one of England's great filmmakers. Peeping Tom is movie that was panned by critics and banned from theaters and remains unrated and underrated to this day.

Mark Lewis is a young London photographer making a documentary about women's expressions of terror whilst murdering them with a blade on his camera. He's a handsome, but disturbed young man with a hint of German in his accent. (Imagine Peter Lorre mixed with Hitler Youth) He works as a cameraman on the set at a London Film Studio, and a secondary job as a nudie photographer at a local newsstand. The downstairs neighbor girl takes interest in Mark as he shows her his childhood home videos in which his psychologist father throws lizards on his bed in the morning. In-spite of this darkness she only sees the good in him even while her blind mother only hears evil in his footsteps.

This film explores all of the same tropes you find in most horror movies but does so with an almost literary genius. It presents the perversion of voyeurism in film and in turn implies the audience's culpability. It looks at the father's effect on a young boys sexuality and how women are viewed. Mark's victims are a prostitute, nude models & an actress. Women who've made their living on being watched or seen without emotional connection. It even presents the director as an aggressive scientist, provoking fear for the sake of his experiments. As though the emotionally detached have finally found a way to express themselves through filmmaking.

What makes this revolutionary for it's time is that this film not only gives us the dual POV of the killer, but it also gives us the opportunity to sympathize with his psychosis. He's is the brutal result of science & film both of which are viewed "objectively." He knows he'll be caught and isn't trying to avoid it, but takes every opportunity to film his experience, simply because he doesn't know any other way to process his sadness & angst.

This is a fascinating film with all the tension, darkness and violence for the films it would go on to inspire.