Peeping Tom is a 1960 British psychological horror-thriller film directed by Michael Powell, written by Leo Marks, and starring Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey and Maxine Audley. The film revolves around a serial killer who murders women while using a portable film camera to record their dying expressions of terror, putting his footage together into a snuff film used for his own self-pleasure. Its title derives from the expression "Peeping Tom", which describes a voyeur.
The film's controversial subject matter and its extremely harsh reception by critics had a severely negative impact on Powell's career as a director in the United Kingdom. However, it attracted a cult following, and in later years, it has been re-evaluated and is now widely considered a masterpiece, a progenitor of the contemporary slasher film, and the grandfather of found footage films. The British Film Institute named it the 78th-greatest British film of all time, and in 2017 a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers and critics for Time Out magazine saw it ranked the 27th-best British film ever.
The music score was written by Brian Easdale and performed by Australian pianist Gordon Watson.
Plot
In London, Mark Lewis picks up Dora, a prostitute, covertly filming her with a camera hidden under his coat. Shown from the point of view of the camera viewfinder, he follows her into her flat, murders her with a blade concealed in one leg of his tripod, and later watches the film in his darkroom. The following morning, posing as a reporter, he films the police removing Dora's corpse from her home.
Lewis is a member of a film crew (a focus puller) who aspires to become a filmmaker himself. He also works part-time photographing soft-porn pin-up pictures of women, sold under the counter. He is a shy, reclusive young man who hardly socialises outside of his workplace. He lives in the house of his late father, renting most of it via an agent while posing as a tenant himself. Helen Stephens, a sweet-natured young woman who lives with her blind mother in the flat below his, befriends him out of curiosity after he is discovered spying on her 21st birthday party.
Mark reveals to Helen through home films taken by his father that, as a child, he was used as a guinea pig for his father's studies on fear in children. Mark's father would study his son's reaction to various stimuli, such as large lizards he put on his bed, and would film the boy in all sorts of situations, even recording Mark's reactions at his mother's deathbed. (He married another woman suspiciously soon afterwards.) His studies enhanced his reputation as a renowned psychologist.
Mark arranges with Vivian, a stand-in at the studio, to make a film after the set is closed; he then kills her and stuffs her into a prop trunk. The body is discovered later during shooting by Pauline, a cast member who has already antagonised the fussy director by acting a faint badly, and then actually fainting from exhaustion at the many retakes. The police link the two murders and notice that each victim died with a look of utter terror on her face. They interview everyone on the set, including Mark, who always keeps his camera running, claiming that he is making a documentary.
Helen goes out to dinner with Mark, persuading him to leave his camera behind for once, and briefly kisses him once they return. Her mother finds his behaviour peculiar, being aware, despite her blindness, that Mark often looks through Helen's window. She is waiting inside Mark's flat after his evening out with her daughter. Unable to wait until she leaves due to his compulsion, he begins screening his latest snuff film with her still in the room. She senses how emotionally disturbed he is and threatens to move, but Mark reassures her that he will never photograph or film Helen.
A psychiatrist is called to the set to counsel Pauline. He chats with Mark and is familiar with his father's work. The psychiatrist relates the details of the conversation to the police, noting that Mark has "his father's eyes". Mark is tailed by the police to the newsagents, where he takes photographs of pin-up model Milly. Shortly afterwards, it emerges that Mark has killed Milly.
Helen, who is curious about Mark's films, finally runs one of them. She becomes upset and then frightened when he catches her. Mark reveals that his father not only filmed his experiments on him, but recorded them and has wired the house, and he plays a recording of her with her boyfriend. Mark makes his films so that he can capture the fear of his victims. He has mounted a mirror on his camera so that he can film his victims' reactions as they see their own impending deaths. He points the tripod's blade towards Helen's throat and we see her reaction distorted in the mirror, but he cannot bring himself to kill her.
The police approach and Mark hears their sirens. As he planned from the very beginning, he impales himself on the knife with the camera running, providing the finale for his documentary. Helen cries over Mark's dead body as the police enter the room. As the scene fades, we hear a recording of his father calling him a good boy.
Cast
Production
Writing Peeping Tom was an original screenplay by Leo Marks who based portions of the film on his experiences growing up as the son of Benjamin Marks, who owned the Marks & Co bookshop in London; elements of Peeping Tom are based on his observations of inner-city residents who frequented his father's store. Dora, the prostitute who is murdered in the film's opening scene, was based on a real-life prostitute who was a regular patron of the Marks & Co book store. Additionally, Marks stated he was inspired to write a horror story and to become a codebreaker after reading "The Gold-Bug" by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. While writing the script, Marks believed the motivations behind Lewis's murders to be entirely sexual, though he would state in retrospect that he felt the psychological compulsion of the character was less sexual than it was unconscious. Prior to writing the screenplay for Peeping Tom, Marks, a polymath, had worked as cryptographer during World War II.
Finance The film was partly financed by Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy at Anglo-Amalgamated, a company that typically funded "B" crime pictures and the Carry On films. The balance of the budget came from the National Film Finance Corporation. According to Variety, Anglo invested $560,000, the most it had ever spent on any one film. Filmink argued "Cohen would have hoped the association with Powell would turn out to be as happy as the one with Joseph Losey", a prestige director who had made a number of films for Cohen.
Casting Cohen originally wanted a star to play the lead role and suggested Dirk Bogarde, but the Rank Organisation, who had him under contract, refused to loan him out. Laurence Harvey was attached for a while, but pulled out during pre-production and Powell ended up casting German-Austrian actor Karlheinz Böhm (billed as Carl Boehm).
Böhm, who was a friend of Powell's, noted that their prior acquaintance helped him psychoanalyse and "go into very, very special details" of the character. Böhm saw Lewis as a sympathetic character, for whom he felt "great pity". In a 2008 interview, Böhm stated that he could identify with the character because he also stood for a long time in the shadow of his famous father, conductor Karl Böhm, and had a difficult relationship with him. Böhm also stated that he interpreted his character as being traumatised by growing up under the Nazi Regime.
Pamela Green, then a well-known glamour model in London, was cast in the role of Milly, one of Lewis's victims, who appears nude onscreen in the moments leading up to her murder scene. Her appearance marked the first scene in British cinema to feature frontal nudity.
Shooting Filming took six weeks, beginning in October 1959.
Themes Peeping Tom has been praised for its psychological complexity, which incorporates the "self-reflexive camera" as a plot device, as well as the themes of child abuse, sadomasochism, and scopophilic fetishism. On the surface, the film is about the Freudian relationships between the protagonist and, respectively, his father, and his victims. However, several critics argue that the film is as much about the voyeurism of the audience as they watch the protagonist's actions. Roger Ebert, in his 1999 review of the film for his "Great Films" series, states that "the movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it".
According to Paul Wells, the film deals with the anxieties of British culture in regarding sexual repression, patriarchal obsession, voyeuristic pleasure and perverse violence. The impossible task in the film is the quest to photograph fear itself.
In the opinion of Peter Keough, the death scenes of the film would provide a field day to Freudian psychoanalysis and deconstructionists. Cinema here is equated to sexual aggression and a death wish, the camera to the phallus, photography to violation, and film to ritualised voyeurism. The emphasis of the film lies on morbidity, not on eroticism. In a memorable sequence, an attractive, semi-nude female character turns to the camera and reveals a disfiguring facial scar. This Peeping Tom is aroused not by naked bodies, but naked fear. As Mark laments, whatever he photographs is lost to him. Mark is a loner whose only companion is his film camera. He is also the victim of his father's studies in the phenomenon of fear in children, a human guinea pig subjected to sadistic experiments. His love interest Helen has her own fascination with a morbid gaze. She is a children's writer whose book concerns a magic camera and what it photographs.
Relationship with Hitchcock's films The themes of voyeurism in Peeping Tom are also explored in several films by Alfred Hitchcock. In his book on Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, film historian Charles Barr points out that the film's title sequence and several shots seem to have inspired moments in Peeping Tom.
Chris Rodley's documentary A Very British Psycho (1997) draws comparisons between Peeping Tom and Hitchcock's Psycho (1960); the latter film was given its New York premiere in June 1960, two months after Peeping Toms premiere in London. Both films feature as protagonists atypically mild-mannered serial killers who are obsessed with their parents. However, despite containing material similar to Peeping Tom, Psycho became a box-office success and only increased the popularity and fame of its director (although the film was widely criticised in the English press). One reason suggested in the documentary is that Hitchcock, seeing the negative press reaction to Peeping Tom, decided to release Psycho without a press screening.
In his early career, Powell worked as a stills photographer and in other positions on Hitchcock's films, and the two were friends throughout their careers. A variant of Peeping Toms main conceit, The Blind Man, was one of Hitchcock's unproduced films around this time. Here, a blind pianist receives the eyes of a murder victim, but their retinas retain the image of the murder.
According to Isabelle McNeill, the film fits well within the slasher film subgenre, with Peeping Tom being considered the first slasher film in history. She lists a number of elements which it shares with both Psycho and the genre in general: a recognisably human killer, who stands as the psychotic product of a sick family; the victim being a beautiful and sexually active woman; the location of the murder being not within a home, but within some other "terrible place"; the weapon must be sharp and pointed; and the attack registered from the victim's point of view and coming with shocking suddenness.