1960 Directed by Michael Powell
Loner Mark Lewis works at a film studio during the day and, at night, takes racy photographs of women. Also he's making a documentary on fear, which involves recording the reactions of victims as he murders them. He befriends Helen, the daughter of the family living in the apartment below his, and he tells her vaguely about the movie he is making.
Karlheinz Böhm Moira Shearer Anna Massey Maxine Audley Brenda Bruce Miles Malleson Esmond Knight Michael Goodliffe Jack Watson Shirley Anne Field Pamela Green John Barrard Robert Crewdson Nigel Davenport Michael Powell Susan Travers Martin Miller Keith Baxter John Chappell Roland Curram John Dunbar Maurice Durant Paddi Edwards Cornelia Frances Veronica Hurst M. Le Compte Mme. Le Compte Bartlett Mullins Pete Murray Show All…
Naaktsymfonie, De Loerder, Kadın Katili, A Tortura do Medo, Ο Ηδονοβλεψίας, Face of Fear, Peeping Tom: En Smygtittare, Peeping Tom: En Tyvtitter, Le Voyeur, Fotomodeller Jages, Peeping Tom: Kiggeren
Horror, the undead and monster classics Intense violence and sexual transgression Thrillers and murder mysteries horror, creepy, eerie, blood or gothic horror, scientist, monster, doctor or experiment horror, gory, scary, killing or gruesome horror, creepy, eerie, frighten or chilling violence, shock, disturbing, brutal or graphic Show All…
Moral of the story: Never trust a white dude who says "I hope to be a director very soon."
There is always an automatic aura of respect surrounding Powell's films. The attention to detail, the immaculate use of colours and the stunning set designs and mis en scene should garner nothing other than admiration and awe.
Peeping Tom is no exception. It is an amazing visual feast, oozing with luscious primary colours and lighting that makes just about every scene hold a treasure of some sort. Powell's ability to capture and hold your gaze with deftly constructed scenes ensures that, despite the film's somewhat straightforward plot, it is still a riveting film to watch.
Peeping Tom perhaps betrays its age somewhat in the pacing, but it is still an unusually macabre and dark film for that time. It has…
The killer’s backstory is that his scientist father performed experiments on him as a child that can basically be summed up with “what if I made my son the weirdest guy of all time”
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The gaze having colonized and replaced, rendering the whole of the body an optic nerve and the eyes no longer the eyes but where the new eye intersects with the transmission of data and of pleasure, the body an extension of the new eye, a system which can record, edit and play back events which use lived duration as another field to extend into and parasitically feed from, remaking it in the process, subsumed within and consumed there at leisure. The new eye is atop the pyramid, severed and floating above, everything which is only its base, what it needs to form a whole which it can then replicate and feed back onto, forming a totality from which to gaze out from, to forever mark that outwards as its domain of operation, a newly ravished corpse caught eternally in the act of so becoming.
"Mark are you crazy?" -Co-Worker
"Yes... do you think they'll notice?" -Mark
A tripod blade is a pretty sweet weapon for a serial killer.
I'm a big slasher fan but I've never watched Peeping Tom and I don't really know why. It's one of the first films to feature a serial killer and do the story from the killer's point of view. It's arguably the first slasher even though I would call it more a pre-cursor to slashers. In addition to all these things about Peeping Tom it also happens to be an interesting and really good film about a man's obsession with fear. It's creepy, it looks good, and the script is fantastic.
Everything about this film looks cool…
”I don’t want to spoil anybody’s fun,
but we do have a maniac on our hands.”
Dear Michael Powell,
This is to inform you that it has come to our attention that you are obviously way too far ahead of your time, and therefore you must be punished.
Regretfully,
1960
Cinematic Time Capsule - 1960 Ranked
I had only seen this film about voyeurism and obsession once before so it definitely needed a revisit and it definitely holds up. While tame by today’s standards, it’s still a disturbing glimpse into the life of a seriously unbalanced individual. This is another one of those films in which I wish I could have seen the reaction of audiences firsthand because apparently people were quite appalled and disturbed by the subject matter. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal now because pretty much everyone’s lives are no longer private. We are online and on display more often than not and while I personally don’t understand the desire to document every aspect of one’s life, it’s kinda creepy how…
At the very beginning of the film we are presented with the first hand vicarious experience of murdering a prostitute. We have the privileged position of seeing what the killer sees through the view finder of his camera as he stabs her to death with the sharpened point of his tripod leg. Given this first-person perspective we are rudely shoved into a position of identification with the killer and by extension made complicit in his crimes by the implicit acceptance of the atrocity that he (we) commit.
Having been immediately introduced to our killer we can dismiss the mystery of the whodunnit and we can focus on the greater mystery of trying to understand and learn…
"The result must be so perfect that the risks don't count."
While he would go on to make five more films over the course of a dozen years, it's still fair to say that the critical reception of Peeping Tom in 1960 effectively ruined director Michael Powell's career in English filmmaking. Like Hitchcock's Psycho a couple of months later, the film was savaged by censors as well as the English press. Unlike Psycho however, audiences also stayed away. The fiasco turned Powell into an international journeyman.
By day an unremarkable focus puller for a London film crew, at night Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm) takes surreptitious pictures of credulous women (e.g., prostitutes, aspirant models, colleagues) before luring them to vulnerable locales…
Criterion Collection Spine #58
A voyeuristic killer that just can't look away from the terror he imposes.
"Imagine... someone coming towards you... who wants to kill you... regardless of the consequences ... A madman? ... Yes. But he knows it - and you don't."
The current Letterboxd poster for Peeping Tom definitely does not do a good job of selling how great of a psychological horror film this is. The movie is about a strange man with a german accent that is obsessed with filming the terror on his victim's faces before murdering them. And I would say this happens to be one of the great films that's able to be tense and frightening by using implied horror, rather than…
