“Do you know what the most frightening thing in the world is? It’s fear.”

The third entry into my 1960s Horror Retrospective is the simply majestic Peeping Tom, a film by a master of his craft, Michael Powell (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus) but its controversial style would be torn apart by critics, leading to the downfall of Powell and his producer Nat Cohen. 

Peeping Tom began life in the mind of Leo Marks, a cryptographer during the Second World War and described by people in the film industry as a deep thinker. His collaborative efforts with Powell for a script centred around Sigmund Freud fell through on the belief that Hollywood were also considering making a film about one of science’s greatest thinkers. It was then that Marks proposed a film on socophilia, where one’s sexual desires are aroused when observing or watching people. The single grain of thought would generate the genesis of Peeping Tom, the story of a man, Mark (Karl-Heinze Bohm) a sensitive, scarred individual who find satisfaction in filming women just at the point of death when he kills them with a bayonet that has been fitted to one of the legs to his cine-camera. What makes this act all the more disturbing is that Mark has also attached a mirror to the camera, forcing his victims to witness their last breath and thus capturing the true essence of fear.

There is more than meets the eye when initially watching this feature. Peeping Tom is a disturbing mix of sexuality at the hands of a repressed man, who has been reduced to the background of society, unable to mix with anyone due to his own inhibitions. We later learn that this was due to an overbearing, manipulative father, who would play psychologically and mentally disturbing mind games with Mark. This is the heart of Freudian theories, where the patriarch is the result of our own weaknesses, fuelling rage and anger and the want to destroy. This is demonstrated further by Powell casting himself as the father figure in the home movie, and casting his own son as the young Mark, a harrowing thought if you delve deeply into the psychosis of this. Powell though was no stranger to remonstrating his opinions and anger to stir up the film set, normally at the behest of the camera crew, but the cast equally felt the oppressive way that the director would conduct himself on set, providing an edge to the filmmaking. On one occasion, this was pushed to the extreme when Powell insisted on Otto Heller, the cameraman remove a protective lens from an arc light, the cameraman refused before Powell carried out the deed himself. The actions would cause blistering on actress Pamela Green’s skin and her eyes were swollen shut as a result. Allegedly if she had looked directly into the naked light, it could have caused blindness.

It is also a sweeping statement on society and how when individuals’ repress their own thoughts and feelings, they will manifest in dark and disturbing ways. 

Furthermore, Powell would intensify the audience’s own portrayal in the murderous acts by placing them in the camera’s eye. We are voyeurs in these sadistic acts and willing participants throughout.These sexual subjugation would stem from the first killing of a prostitute, all from the viewer’s perspective, before working towards secretive, pornographic shoots from above a newsagency. The character of Milly (Pamela Green) would be the most voracious, and the scene in question would be Green claiming to be the first nude in a mainstream British feature film. There’s also the harrowing way in which Mark murders Vivian (Moira Shearer) on the set of a movie under the guise of shooting his own feature. It’s little wonder then that audiences and critics were shocked and appalled at the time, compelling cinemagoers away from the cinema and nearly burying the movie in the process.

One of its strongest advocates was Martin Scorsese who helped bring the movie to a modern audience and funded the restoration process. He would remark from his own observations and love of the film that ‘Peeping Tom shows the aggression of filmmaking), how the camera violates…’ It was clearly a feature that was progressive and hard hitting, which upon release proved too hard to handle for some viewers, but it still remains one of the most striking horror features to have been made, and perhaps misunderstood and judged on face value. Powell may have had his faults in his strides for perfectionism in the celluloid art, but his own words on the film sums up his interpretation, ‘I tried… to show why one human being should behave in this extraordinary way. It’s a story of a human being, first and foremost.’

This exercise in gazing into the soul of humanity and through the eyes of a tortured man, came at the cost of his career, but not thankfully at the sake of cinema, as Peeping Tom is a movie that captures the essence of depravity It has styled and inspired many other filmmakers since 

and must not be suppressed again. For lovers of the genre must embrace this important part of horror film history.

– Saul Muerte

1960s Horror Retrospective

The Flesh and the Fiend

Eyes Without A Face