Year: 1960
Director: Michael Powell
Screenplay: Leo Marks
Starring: Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley
Running Time: 101 minutes
Genre: Horror, thriller
London: Mark Lewis (Boehm) is a quiet, polite, soft-spoken young man who works in a film studio, and supplements his income by taking nude photographs of models which are sold in a seedy newsagents. However Mark also has an obsession with filming fear, to which end he films himself murdering women with a spike concealed in the leg of his camera's tripod, he also uses a mirror so that his victims can see themselves as they die, which Mark believes heightens their terror.
"The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it down the nearest sewer, and even then the stench would remain" howled the thoroughly outraged review in London's Tribune magazine at the time of the film's release. This was pretty much the standard reaction in the British press to the film at the time, with the Monthly Film Bulletin comparing Michael Powell to the Marquis de Sade. The hysterical response to the film now seems almost comically quaint, but it did pretty much destroy Michael Powell's career. Alongside producer Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell was one of the most successful and acclaimed British filmmakers of the 1940s and 50s with such classics as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), and possibly part off the reason for the film's overwhelmingly negative response is that it seemed so off-brand for Powell. More recently, the film has been recognised as the classic that it is, praised by critics and directors such as Martin Scorsese. The fact is that the film is one of the greatest horror films ever made. The film is visually striking, creating an authentically cluttered and seedy looking London, it also uses a fluid, mobile camera reflecting the killer's point of view, and what he sees through the end of his own small camera, which he constantly has with him. The film allows us to spend time with the victims. They are not just disposable but people with hopes and dreams, and their deaths have some real weight. Austrian-German actor Karlheinz Böhm (billed as Carl Boehm) plays the killer, Mark Lewis, who has been warped by his scientist father's attempts to film his son's terror. Incidentally Michael Powell played Mark's father in the grainy home movies that Mark watches, and Powell's own son Columba played the young Mark. Böhm gives a powerful, and genuinely moving performance as the killer, who tries but is unable to control his murderous impulses. Anna Massey gives a very good performance as Helen, an aspiring author who lives with her blind mother in the flat below Mark and strikes up a friendship with him. Modern horror fans may be disappointed by the lack of blood 'n' guts, but it was certainly strong stuff for the time, particularly in regards to the sexual content, which is also mild by modern standards. This is a beautiful, powerful film, which is still disturbing today. One of the best horror films ever made, it is also one of the darkest films made about the nature of film and filmmaking. Who exactly is the Peeping Tom? Is it Mark himself? Mark's camera? Or us, the audience? As Helen's mother (played by Maxine Audley) tells Mark: "All this filming isn't... healthy."
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