Peeping Tom (film)
| Peeping Tom | |
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Original film poster
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| Directed by | Michael Powell |
| Produced by | Michael Powell |
| Written by | Leo Marks |
| Starring |
Carl Boehm Moira Shearer Anna Massey Maxine Audley Pamela Green |
| Music by | Brian Easdale |
| Cinematography | Otto Heller |
| Edited by | Noreen Ackland |
| Distributed by | Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors |
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Release date
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Running time
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101 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | £125,000 |
Peeping Tom is a 1960 British horror thriller film directed by Michael Powell and written by the World War II cryptographer and polymath Leo Marks. The title derives from the slang expression 'Peeping Tom' describing a voyeur. The film revolves around a serial killer who murders women while using a portable movie camera to record their dying expressions of terror.
The film's controversial subject and the extremely harsh reception by critics effectively destroyed 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.
The music score, written by Brian Easdale, contains a challenging part for solo piano, which was played by the Australian virtuoso Gordon Watson.
Mark Lewis meets Dora, a prostitute, covertly filming her with a camera hidden under his coat. Shown from the point of view of the camera viewfinder, tension builds as he follows the woman into her home, murders her and later watches the film in his den as the credits roll on the screen.
Lewis is a member of a film crew 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 ever 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, a sweet-natured young woman who lives with her blind mother in the flat below his, befriends him out of curiosity after he has been discovered spying on her on her 21st birthday party.
Mark reveals to Helen through home movies taken by his father that, as a child, he was used as a guinea pig for his father's psychological experiments on fear and the nervous system. Mark's father would study his son's reaction to various stimuli, such as lizards he put on his bed and would film the boy in all sorts of situations, even going as far as recording his son's reactions as he sat with his mother on her deathbed. He kept his son under constant watch and even wired all the rooms so that he could spy on him. Mark's father's studies enhanced his reputation as a renowned psychologist.
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Wikipedia