Peeping Tom (1960)

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Michael Powell (The Red Shoes) directs this British giallo flick about a photographer whose ghastly hobby is stalking young women and filming their expressions as he murders them. You could say that Peeping Tom is an early slasher film, the genre that would beget Michael Myers, Fred Krueger, and Jason Voorhees. But it’s actually a much more psychological endeavor — and more impactful for being so.

The lead character, Mark, played by Carl Boehm, is depicted as a broken man whose father helped warp his perception of love and sex at an early age. Mark is portrayed as a sympathetic character who knows there is something wrong with him. He even seeks psychiatric help for it. But he simply can’t overcome his fetish for voyeurism or compulsion to kill. A budding romance with his downstairs neighbor, Helen (Anna Massey), brings Mark added pressure to ‘normalize’ himself. One of the more interesting aspects of the movie is seeing how Mark treats Helen differently from his victims. Once he catches a glimpse of fear in a woman’s face, his killer instinct is triggered. At the film’s climax, as Helen confronts Mark about his dark nature, he struggles not to terrify her or to see her face show the slightest fright — an attempt to keep from killing her.

Boehm does a fine job riding a line between threatening and pitiful. The rest of the cast are adequate, with Maxine Audley standing out as Helen’s blind mother. The screenplay may surprise you with where it takes Audley’s character — another highlight of the film for me. Superlative British craftsmanship in art decoration and vibrant cinematography are further reasons Peeping Tom distinguishes itself from its genre siblings.