Peeping Tom

FILM SKOOL

An influential cinematic masterpiece written by Leo Marks (Twisted Nerve) and starring Carl Boehm (Sissi), Anna Massey (Frenzy), Moira Shearer (The Red Shoes) and Maxine Audley (A King in New York), Peeping Tom will also play as part of the BFI’s Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger season at BFI Southbank and across the UK (16 Oct – 31 Dec) and at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon (14-22 Oct).

Mark (Carl Boehm), a focus puller at the local film studio, supplements his wages by taking glamour photographs in a seedy studio above a newsagent. By night he is a sadistic killer, stalking his victims with his camera forever in his hand trying to capture the look of genuine, unadulterated fear – an obsession that stems from his disturbing and terrifying childhood at the hands of his scientist father. Mark slowly becomes enamoured with Helen (Anna Massey), who lives with her blind mother (Maxine Audley) in the flat downstairs, but how long before he turns the deadly gaze of his camera towards her?

Now regarded as a ground-breaking masterpiece of the British horror movement, on its initial release in 1960, Peeping Tom received a savage reception from critics who were dismayed by its controversial subject matter and the sympathy it seems to engender for its murderous protagonist. The second film from visionary director Michael Powell, following his run of 1940s and 50s classics collaborating with screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, Peeping Tom left Powell’s career in tatters and the film was made unavailable for many years. Peeping Tom has since become recognised as a watershed in genre cinema, its themes of voyeurism and psychopathy proving hugely influential on the evolution of the slasher movie.

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