Spend The Night With: Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom (1959. Dir: Michael Powell)

A brilliant and truly chilling British thriller consider so shocking on it’s release that it practically ended director Michael Powell’s stellar career. A psychotic photographer is obsessed by the subject of fear. He puts theory into practice by enticing prostitutes to his studio and murdering them, photographing their faces, frozen in their final moments of agony and terror. Carl Boehm is spectacular in the role as Mark, the cameraman whose perverse hobby, we discover, was ignited by childhood experiences. You’ll probably think twice about getting a family portrait taken after viewing this.Written by Leo Marks, Peeping Tom is terrifying and creepy but the audacious twist is to see the events through the eyes and lens of the killer, not the people pursuing him. We get an insight into Mark’s adult behaviour through a series of flashbacks to his youth. His father, an behavioural psychiatrist, uses Mark for experiments deliberately terrifying the child with mind games and nasty shocks, filming the results to use as data. Mark detaches himself from human contact by becoming a photographer, in effect he can direct his life from behind the lens. What the critics of Peeping Tom found so shocking was not the horrific and systematic murder of young women but the fact that the script found sympathy, even, in places, empathy, for the protagonist, Mark, the photographic psycho. The film is about the simultaneous detachment and involvement that is the nature of voyeurism. Mark isn’t the only voyeur in the film. We, the audience, are voyeurs too. By seeing the events through Mark’s eyes we somehow become implicit. It was food for thought that many choked on. When the film was released in the UK in 1960 critics and moral guardians (eg The Daily Mail) fell over themselves to have the film banned. Protests at cinemas caused one distributor to pull the movie from release a number of screens. Worse still, director Powell was stonewalled by invited guests at the film’s premiere "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain." wrote an outraged critic from the Tribune, this from a left leaning paper with pretensions of supporting the arts. Powell’s once glittering career was left in tatters. It mattered little that he was responsible for a number of pioneering and globally acclaimed films such as The Thief of Baghdad (1940), Black Narcissus (1946), and The Red Shoes (1948). Powell would be from heron forever associated with ‘that’ movie. Between 1959 and his death in 1990 the once prolific Powell would direct just three films.Soon after its original release Peeping Tom was shelved and practically forgotten. Branded tasteless and exploitative it may well have rotted were it not for a small band of film buffs and directors who maintained that in fact Peeping Tom was Powell’s masterpiece and a classic of modern cinema and a turning point for modern British film. In 1979 Martin Scorsese managed to track down a print for the New York Film Festival and the film was re appraised, this time given its proper due.

The Food: Take out pizza - you can use the lid of the box to hide behind when things get too scary.

The Drink: Neat gin has a similar flavour to photographic solution. Replace the lights with red light-bulbs and drink out of a shallow tray.