Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)
Cinema is death twenty-four times per second
By today’s standards, Peeping Tom is about an innocent a slasher movie as you could possibly imagine. But upon its release, decent moviegoers were aghast. The film was derided as being sadistic, perverted, disgusting, morally obscene, sewage…
How did a film from the director of such lauded classics as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I’m Going!, and Black Narcissus cause such outrage?
The same way most things upset the self-appointed morality police: it was different and it made people uncomfortable. Suffice to say that respectable film fans of the early 60s were not at all ready for it.
Peeping Tom was a slasher film before there were slasher films. A horror film that did not fit neatly into the contemporaneous horror boxes of the time — which is to say it was neither gothic creepfest nor monster movie, but something wholly different.
Sure, Peeping Tom could be seen as affiliated with the psychological thrillers or crime dramas of the era which often involved suspense, danger, and killings, but such films were never oriented with the murderer at their core.
In Peeping Tom, the serial killer is the protagonist. Mark is a camera assistant who works in the film industry and has a side gig photographing soft porn pin-ups. Over the course of the film, the audience is invited to feel sympathy for him, see the world through his eyes, and even root for him to varying degrees.
Close to two decades before Halloween and Maniac, Peeping Tom’s opening shot literally put the audience into the killer’s perspective via his camera’s viewfinder as he picks up a sex worker, follows her to her boudoir, then attacks her.
Mark’s camera is both his recording device and weapon (well, technically, it’s a spike on the camera’s tripod, but it’s close enough). In its choice of murder weapon, Peeping Tom strongly insinuates that cinema is intrinsically linked with violence.
The film forced the audience to see the world through the eyes of the killer and provided them the opportunity to not only be repulsed with the images they saw on screen, but with themselves for enjoying it.
But Peeping Tom goes beyond POV shots in channeling Mark’s perspective throughout the film. He isn’t simply the film’s main character, he is its emotional center. We feel for him because he was traumatized as a child; never mind that these traumas caused him to grow up to be a murderer. We pity him. And yes, we root for him despite not wanting him to succeed (perhaps most notably: the scene where he’s hiding above the police investigation of a studio soundstage, we desperately hope he isn’t discovered).
This simultaneous empathy and revulsion was radical in 1960. Today? Not so much.
Widely regarded as a proto-slasher, Peeping Tom employs many of the subgenre’s traits long before they were codified (the extensive use of POV shots, the psychological trauma that made Mark a killer, the symbolic selection of his victims, the ritualistic nature of his murders) while being much more psychologically complex than is typical. There’s no mask in Peeping Tom, for example — instead it internalizes evil as opposed to turning it into mechanizable iconography such as a hockey mask, striped jumper, or clown makeup.
Condemned on its original release, Peeping Tom has been subsequent reappraised in the intervening years and is now widely regarded as an important if atypical horror film worthy of study and praise.
It’s true horror lies not in the (gore-free) violence it depicts, but in the forced identification it imposes on the viewer.