Peeping Tom 1960 Review

This is one my favorite movies, but it is very obscure and has an infamous legacy thanks to film critics at the time. Director Martin Scorsese's presentation of it at a New York film festival in the late 70s is what brought it out of obscurity, which is appropriate because this film was decades ahead of its time. I only found out about it from a brief mention by James Rolfe in his Monster Madness review of Black Christmas. It's rather expensive to buy the criterion edition, and most copies I've seen online are pal. This is why I was so happy to see it for only 5$ on iTunes!

This movie basically ended Michael Powell's career (he directed The Red Shoes) and made Hitchcock very cautious about the release of his Psycho the same year. Apparently this is one of the first English films to have nudity in it, though it's hardly there. In comparison Psycho though controversial is almost silly compared to Peeping Tom. The subject matter is serious and portrays the boyish killer as functioning within society as opposed to Norman Bates.

The film is beautifully shot in full color and set in a modern urban environment which made it too realistic for audiences to write off as just a movie. This is the first film to really use POV filming, a later staple of the slasher genre, further breaking the separation between the audience. We the audience are complicit in everything we see. Mark's motivation and method of killing are very mechanical, a repetition of the destruction of his childhood by the film camera. The most shocking part is that he sits and watches the movies he makes of his victims, which are pure snuff. No production, not even much violence, just fear and death. Mark's relationship to the world is completely artificial, and he can only enjoy the oldest and most powerful of emotions while in dark seclusion.

This is the first depiction I know of snuff films. Super 8 film cameras didn't come out until around 1966, so the only people who would have film equipment would be camera people, like Mark. The movie plot would only be believable if he was a cameraman who was filmed for "scientific" purposes as this was a time before everybody and everything could be filmed.

The plot itself is similar to the short story The Lodger, also an early Hitchcock silent film, in which a single man lives upstairs with a family and has strange habits, coming and going during the night, though in Peeping Tom Mark is actually the landlord rather than the lodger. He starts an awkward relationship with the caring young woman Helen who enters his world oblivious to his personal project. Helen's blind mother on the other hand intuitively knows Mark is up to no good, though she can't see what he does in his room. She is like Tiresias, also blind, from Oedipus Rex who knew who the killer of King Laius is.

There is so much to read from this movie, which was ignored for decades and remains in relative obscurity. Do yourself a favor and watch!