Movies - Peeping Tom

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Peeping Tom (film)

	Movies - Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom is a 1960 psychological horror film by the British film director Michael Powell. The film takes its title from the character 'peeping Tom' (the voyeur in the tale of Lady Godiva), and is an horrific tale of voyeurism, serial murder and child abuse.

The film was written by the World War II cryptographer and polymath Leo Marks. The story revolves around a young man who murders women while using a portable movie camera to record their dying expressions of terror.

Synopsis

The film begins with an eerie scene where the protagonist Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) stalks a prostitute all the while filming her with a camera hidden in his pocket. This scene, shown from the point-of-view of the camera viewfinder, generates high tension as the character follows the girl into her house, murders her and later watches the film in a den at his house as the credits roll over the screen.

Mark Lewis, it transpires is a member of a film crew who aspires to become a film-maker himself and who works part-time by photographing lurid pictures of women. Lewis is a shy reclusive young man who hardly ever socializes outside of his workplace. He lives in his father's house, who leased his house to other tenants and now Lewis serves as their landlord. Lewis is fascinated by the boisterous family living downstairs and especially by Helen (Anna Massey), a vivacious sweet-natured girl who pities Mark and starts a budding friendship and later relationship with Mark.

Mark reveals to Anna through home-movies taken by his father (played by director Powell in a cameo) that as a child he was used as a guinea pig for his father's psychological experiments. In arguably the film's most gruesome scene, we see how Mark's father would experiment on his son by studying his reaction to stimuli such as lizards which he would put on his bed and would stalk the boy with a camera and went as far as recording his son's reactions as he sat with his mother on her deathbed. His father, whose studies made him a respected psychologist, was interested in studying the behaviour and habits of a voyeur and its subesequent effects and so kept his son under constant watch and even wired all his rooms so that he could hear him and spy on him.

Lewis who works on a film-set arranges with Vivian (a stand-in) to make a film after the set is closed. He kills her and in a famous scene stuffs her in a prop trunk which is discovered later on by the film crew much to their horror. The police recognize patterns between the two earlier murders and notice that both victims died with a look of utter terror on their faces. They interview everyone on the set and become suspicious of Mark who constantly travels with his camera always running, always recording and who claims that he's making a documentary.

A psychiatrist called to the set to console the upset star of the movie-in-production converses with Mark and tells him that he was familiar with his father's work. The psychiatrist relays the conversation to the police noting that Mark had 'his father's eyes.'

Lewis is then tailed by the police who follow him to the building where Mark takes photographs. Mark kills his subject and heads home.

Helen who is suspicious of Mark's films finally comes across one of his films and is visibly upset and frightened when Mark enters the room and catches her. During their confrontation, Mark reveals that he tapes and makes movies so that he can capture the fear of his victims and states that he uses a round mirror above his camera during their deaths so that the last thing they see were their own deaths.

The police finally arrive at his house and Mark, realizing that he's finished, attaches his camera along with a hidden knife in its tripod and impales himself finally becoming part of his own movies.

Themes

Peeping Tom is an immensely disturbing film about voyeurism and is known and exalted for it's psychological complexity. On the surface, the film is about the decidedly Freudian relationship between the protagonist and his father and the protagonist and his victims. However several critics have considered Peeping Tom an overt tale of voyeurism in which the film is as much about the voyeurism of the protagonist as the audience is a voyeur of the protagonist's actions. Martin Scorsese who has long been an admirer of Powell's works stated that this film alongwith Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 contain all that can be said about directing.

In this way, Lewis is allegorical for a director of a horror film. In horror movies, the directors kill victims often innocents to provoke responses from the audiences and to manipulate their responses. Lewis records the deaths of his victims with his camera and by using the mirror and showing each of his victims their last moments provokes their own fear even as he kills them.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Peeping Tom (film) ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Peeping Tom (film); it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay