Peeping Tom
Peeping Tom was slammed by critics in 1960. The film marked the end of Michael Powell’s career, but is today seen as a classic film about cruelty and voyeurism in film.
As a child, Mark Lewis was abused for scientific experiments by his father, a biologist who studied human anxiety. He tortured Mark and recorded the child’s panic on celluloid.
As an adult, the traumatised Mark works as a camera assistant in a film studio; in his spare time, he takes pornographic photographs. He brings prostitutes to his studio and films them at the moment he kills them with a weapon hidden in the camera. No one knows about Mark’s psychopathic killings, not even subtenant Helen, who sometimes goes out with Mark in London.
Michael Powell’s first feature-length film after years of collaboration with Emeric Pressburger was slammed by film critics upon its release as ‘sick’ and ‘immoral’ and almost immediately fell out of circulation. The reputation of lead actor Karlheinz Böhm took a serious blow; Powell’s career was over. In the early 1980s, mainly through the efforts of Martin Scorsese, the film was rediscovered. Scorsese called PEEPING TOM ‘the best film about filmmaking ever made’ and ‘a shock, a deeply disturbing experience’. The film has been digitally restored at the initiative of Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation.
See also: Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger