Directed by Michael Powell
Starring Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, Moira Shearer
Release date 26 March 2007

Mild-mannered Mark Lewis is a focus-puller at a British studio. He is also a disturbed serial killer who has an uncontrollable urge to murder women with the aid of his camera tripod…

Peeping Tom isn’t so much a horror movie as a psychological study of a damaged mind. However, like the same year’s Pyscho, it can be seen as an early prototype of what would eventually become the ‘slasher’ film, with a serial killer replacing the array of ghouls and monsters that had been the traditional staple of horror movies up to this point.

There might be more psychological depth in Peeping Tom than in the masked killers that would come later, but Mark is attempting to create something very close to a horror movie in his desire to capture an expression of pure fear on film.

The controversy behind Peeping Tom is almost as famous as the film itself. Through his work with Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell was one of Britain’s most respected directors, but the hysterical reaction to the film left his career in tatters. So, was it a film worth destroying a career for? Resoundingly, yes.

Peeping Tom explores how a person’s ‘art’ can drive them to madness, and it is obviously an issue close to Powell’s heart. In a blackly comic twist, it is Powell and his son who play Mark and his father in the disturbing home video footage!

The film also explores what a psychologist in the film sums up as “the morbid urge to gaze”. Mark is only able to achieve sexual gratification by watching women die through his lens, and the murders are filmed through his viewfinder, making the audience complicit in the crime.

Throughout the movie, Powell draws clear parallels between studio movie-making, under-the-counter pornography and Mark’s snuff films, suggesting that Mark’s sickness isn’t so far-removed from the urges of everyone else. Post-Big Brother, voyeurism has become something of a hot topic, but feeble efforts like Snuff Movie or 3 Blind Mice haven’t come close to Peeping Tom’s power.

Despite being a serial killer, Mark (German actor Carl Boehm) is an incredibly sympathetic character, while Helen (the excellent Anne Massey) does her best to understand him. In his desire to save Helen from his own impulses, Mark even shows almost heroic tendencies (“Don’t let me see that you’re frightened!”). It was these attempts to humanise and understand a killer that left audiences at the time so shocked and confused, and they still make the film an uneasy watch today.

Backed up by a soundtrack of crazed pianos and dripping taps that reiterate Mark’s fluctuating states of mind, and with masterful visuals that combine lurid colours with nods to docu-realism, Peeping Tom is a unique and groundbreaking piece of British cinema.

In a film with so much going on, the tireless commentary by Ian Christie is a useful resource. There's also an intro by Martin Scorsese (who was crucial in getting the film re-released and re-assessed in 1979) and a couple of features that analyse the film and the effect it had on Powell’s career.

Watch out, too, for the priceless jazz-scored trailer, which features a frenzied voiceover warning us to “take care. You are now alone with a killer!” Matt McAllister

VERDICT: 10/10
One of the most important British films ever made.