Horror movies elicit extreme opinions and emotions in people. I have heard it said that only a truly depraved mind would want and succeed in making a story about murder mutilation and torture, which are some of the hallmark elements of many horror films. Great directors have ventured into this genre with great success. Of course, there is Hitchcock, but also Polanski and Kubrick. They were great filmmakers who kept themselves very distant from their art (even Hitchcock, regardless of his short cameos). Michael Powell, who was also a magnificent director, refrained from taking this safe route and when he dipped his hand in horror, he decided to personalize it, as if he was somehow comparing the psychopathic killer of his 1960 masterpiece, “Peeping Tom”, to himself. I have also found myself identifying with directors of many films that I watch. This resulted in my feeling extremely uneasy while watching this film. It’s killer is at the same time a director and a spectator of his home made films, the result of which placed me directly into the mind of a madman. Chilling stuff and the film opens with a birds eye view, through a camera lens of a cold blooded killing. My eye became the director’s eye and the director’s eye became the killer’s eye, which made me squirm in my seat. Then the film goes about making said killer into an almost sympathetic character. No wonder this movie was hated by critics when it first came out. It took them out of their comfort zone and made then feel deep dark thoughts. Powell was a master at making movies and he knew how to lead his viewers into the inner depths of his story. He loved using color having used it extensively even in the 1940’s and knew how bright colors could emphasize and startle when used to depict blood, terror and death. The film deals with a disturbed young man who is also a camera man working on a film set who in his spare time works as a pornographer, filming naked models that are sold at a sleazy smalltime book shop. Another hobby of his is using a knife attached to his camera’s tripod to kill women while he films them as they watch themselves die in the reflection of his camera. He then slithers up to his private film room hell to watch the murders in the dark, over and over again. At many points in the movie I found myself watching these films with him. His name is Mark Lewis and as portrayed by the handsome Austrian actor Carl Boehm, comes across as sweet, shy and seemingly harmless. His tenant neighbor living below starts to fall for him, while her alcoholic and blind Mother becomes suspicious. It is telling that only a blind character who can’t participate in the murderous fetish that is at the films core, can see through what he really is. This is a sort of indictment on filmmaking that Powell does here. Almost as if he is trying to tell us that we watch what we want to feel and are afraid to actually do. A really chilling and horrifying thought. Each of the murders depicted are done in a similar fashion but filmed quite differently. In the first one the viewpoint makes us feel like the killer. The 2nd lets us feel like the victim and later in the final killing we are left to our imagination. It should be noted that Mark became who he is due to terrible abuse that he was privy to as a child. He was the guinea pig on his Fathers experiments on fear and now that his father is dead and he is alive, he has continued the experiment by expanding it to its limit. In the archived films of his Fathers experiments, Powell actually portrays the Father and Powell’s actual son portrays the young Mark, which adds to the complex format of this movie. As I have said before, a great horror films serves as a warning about something. This movie warns us about ourselves, which is the greatest warning of them all. It is this stunning realization that makes “Peeping Tom” the greatest horror movie that I have ever seen.
1001 Movies before you die 