Hey Hey, here are some highlights from Peeping Tom by Michael Powell and Leo Marks. It’s an extremely competent horror/drama following the life of a sympathetic serial killer with ‘Scopophilia’ which is basically a fetish for looking at erotic things you shouldn’t be. For Mark Lewis, our star stalker, this kink is bound up with childhood traumas given to him and encouraged by his dad.
As the main character in this film is the killer, there isn’t much of the mystery of a horror film, I wasn’t really taken with how they delivered on the hidden contents of Mark’s dark room, nor how the film resolves itself at the end.
(though that’s always the tough part for any horror)
Karlheinz Böhm adopts the same nervous & erratic mannerisms as Peter Lorre in M.
But I can’t take many points away for the ensemble’s performance, the script is actually pretty witty, the staging and movement is ambitious and the technicolour is pushed with some really great effect, as you’d expect from Michael Powell, through use of darkness (see below). It’s a film for people interested in film itself, what it means look through the crosshair. To be both character, audience and voyeur, to put film within a film, and to also generally draw meta humour from horror character tropes and film sets.
I should also quote my favourite exchange from Maxine Audley as the blind, wise Mrs Stephens and her daughter played by Anna Massey:
“I don’t trust a man who’s footsteps are quiet.”
“Well he’s shy”
“His footsteps aren’t, they’re stealthy”
…and my least favourite line from the same character:
“The back of my neck told me, the part that I talk out of” — what???
Strong 7/10
ideaskip 