Peeping Tom movie storyline. Sometimes, it’s the artist who has been celebrated by society that breaks apart from the blueprints of the medium the most. As one half of the iconic Archers duo, Michael Powell had virtually nothing to prove when he opened up the decade in a way that seemingly no one was prepared for.
Peeping Tom ruined his career, because it sprinted when Psycho ran. The world wasn’t ready to see Powell’s unflattering depiction of artistic desperation, or his preliminary entry into the then-non-existent slasher genre. Wasn’t it obvious what someone like Powell was always ahead of the game, particularly with his bold ‘40s works? We can appreciate Peeping Tom now, but audiences back then that were already familiar with Powell’s history should have known better.
Peeping Tom is a 1960 British psychological horror-thriller film directed by Michael Powell, written by Leo Marks, and starring Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, and Moira Shearer. The film revolves around a serial killer who murders women while using a portable film camera to record their dying expressions of terror, putting his footage together into a snuff film used for his own self pleasure. Its title derives from the expression “peeping Tom”, which describes a voyeur.
The film’s controversial subject matter and its extremely harsh reception by critics had a severely negative impact on 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, and a progenitor of the contemporary slasher film. The British Film Institute named it the 78th greatest British film of all time, and in 2017 a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers and critics for Time Out magazine saw it ranked the 27th best British film ever. The music score was written by Brian Easdale and performed by Australian pianist Gordon Watson.
Mark Lewis, works as a focus puller in a British film studio. On his off hours, he supplies a local porno shop with cheesecake photos and also dabbles in filmmaking. A lonely, unfriendly, sexually repressed fellow, Mark is obsessed with the effects of fear and how they are registered on the face and behavior of the frightened.
This obsession dates from the time when, as a child, he served as the subject of some cold-blooded experiments in terror conducted by his own scientist father. As a grown man, Mark becomes a compulsive murderer who kills women and records their contorted features and dying gasps on film. His ongoing project is a documentary on fear. With 16mm camera in hand, he accompanies a prostitute to her room and stabs her with a blade concealed in his tripod, all the while photographing her contorted face in the throes of terror and death.
Alone in his room, he surrounds himself with the sights and sounds of terror: taped screams, black-and-white “home movies” of convulsed faces. At his house, he meets Helen Stephens, a young woman who lives with her blind mother in a downstairs flat. She visits his flat, where he shows her black-and-white films that were taken of him when he was a child. She is horrified to see that his father used him as a guinea pig in various experiments, taking movies of his reactions of fear.
Peeping Tom (1960)
Directed by: Michael Powell
Starring: Karlheinz Boehm, Columba Powell, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer, Maxine Audley, Brenda Bruce, Miles Malleson, Esmond Knight, Martin Miller, Michael Goodliffe, Jack Watson
Screenplay by: Leo Marks
Production Design by: Alfred W. Marcus
Cinematography by: Otto Heller
Film Editing by: Noreen Ackland
Art Direction by: Arthur Lawson
Makeup Department: Pearl Orton, W.T. Partleton
Music by: Brian Easdale
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors
Release Date: April 7, 1960
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