A prostitute stands in front of a window display waiting. She is being secretly photographed. The photographer approaches her. She takes him upstairs to her flat and begins taking off her clothes. While he is filming her he kills her. The next day outside her building he films the police taking her out of the building and the crowd outside watching. The young man is Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm). When he’s not filming and killing women he works part time photographing models for soft core pornographic pictures and as a member of a regular film crew.
Mark owns the house he grew up in. He rents part of the downstairs to other tenants. One is a man named Tony (Brian Wallace). Two other tenants are Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) and her blind mother (Maxine Audley). The residents don’t know that Mark owns the building. Helen is attracted to the handsome loner. She invites him to her 21st birthday party but he says he has work to do. Later she brings him a piece of cake. They begin to get acquainted and Mark begins to come out of his shell a little. He begins to see Helen as someone different than all the other women he’s ever run across. Something about her innocence and purity breaks through and he begins to enjoy her company.
Mark shows her a film that his father took of him when he was young. His father was a psychologist that used his son as a guinea pig for studying what fear does to a person. Mark and his reactions were scrutinized constantly and Mark was filmed all the time. The result was to screw up Mark for the rest of his life and turn him into a voyeur serial killer. Helen understands that what his father did to him affected Mark but not to what extent it changed him.
Vivian (Moira Shearer) is a stand in and an extra on a film Mark is also working on at the studio. He makes a date with her to film some footage for her separately at night. He kills her and stuffs her in a trunk. When the body is found the police realize that she died the same way the prostitute in SOHO did previously. Chief Inspector Gregg (Jack Watson) begins looking at anyone connected with the studio. He zeros in on Mark. While Helen begins to break down Mark’s psychosis and the police begin to circle around him Mark kills again. Helen’s mother is perceptive enough to know that something is seriously wrong with Mark and has fears that his compulsiveness with take over and result in something bad happening to her daughter.
“Peeping Tom” was released in 1960 and was directed by Michael Powell. It is a British psychological horror/thriller film. Like many cult films it was trashed by critics. After it was embraced by regular folk and turned into a cult film it was revalued and declared a masterpiece by those same critics. It is considered a precursor to the modern slasher film. It is also an expose in every form of psychological deviancy that has psychologists and psychiatrists as excited as their clients who suffer from these ailments.
The film has been referred to as psychologically complex with themes of child abuse, sadomasochism voyeurism and every other fetish that Freud ever thought of. According to Canadian journalist Paul Wells: The film deals with the anxieties of British culture in regarding sexual repression, patriarchal obsession, voyeuristic pleasure and perverse violence and the quest to film fear itself. According to American film critic Peter Keough: Cinema here is equated to sexual aggression and a death wish, the camera to the phallus, photography to violation, and film to ritualized voyeurism. The emphasis of the film lies on morbidity, not on eroticism.
Wow.
The film has also been compared to several of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. I can understand why. Many of Hitchcock’s films concentrated on the anticipation of fear. The build up to it. To a certain extent “Peeping Tom” does that as well. You don’t see a lot of nudity in the film nor is there a lot of blood and murder. Death is not the point. The anticipation of death or the fear prior to death is what drives Mark and the film. Seeing fear in his victims’ eyes is what compels him. Strangely, all of this information about Mark’s background and his relationship with Helen makes him a sympathetic character. He is what his father made him. There’s actually not a lot of anything in the film. It’s the suggestion of all these perversions that gave the film such a bad rap.
The effect on Powell’s career was also strangely critical. He was likened to the Marquis de Sade. The film itself was called disgusting, nauseating, depressing, and beastly and should be flushed down the sewer. None of this is true.
The film does deal with dark elements but it does not show you these dark elements. It implies them which seems to have been enough in 1960. In retrospect the film is quite tame when compared to the slasher films to come after it in the seventies. What the film is, is compelling. It’s also well done.