peeping tom

Films tied to Peeping Tom, Michael Powell's 1960 film about a cameraman who films the women he kills, by something a filmmaker or a critic said. Mark Lewis is a focus puller at a British film studio who films women with a 16mm camera and kills them with a blade hidden in his tripod. A psychiatrist in the film tells Mark the word for what makes people peeping Toms: scoptophilia, "the morbid urge to gaze."

Freud's word for it was Schaulust, the pleasure in looking, and the spelling is now scopophilia. Laura Mulvey applied the idea to cinema in her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," and in 1999 she called Peeping Tom "overtly about voyeuristic sadism" in an essay for the Criterion Collection. The film also gives Mark's urge a cause. His father, a scientist, filmed him as a boy to study how he reacted to fear, and Mark now films the fear on his victims' faces. Powell played the father himself, and his own son Columba played the boy. Caroline Lejeune of The Observer wrote that it was a long time since a film had disgusted her so much, and the backlash is a major reason Powell stopped directing in Britain.

Each later film is here because someone said it comes from Peeping Tom, and the page says who. Sisters (1973) opens on a hidden-camera TV show called Peeping Toms, a name Bruce Kawin says in a Criterion essay alludes to Powell's film, and its journalist Grace Collier goes on to witness a murder in the apartment across the way. Andy Spletzer of The Stranger called Peeping Tom the predecessor of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), in which Henry and his roommate Otis steal a camcorder and later watch the tape of a family they killed in a home invasion. Slashfilm lists Man Bites Dog (1992) among the films that followed Peeping Tom, and Rotten Tomatoes pairs the two. In it a documentary crew follows a serial killer around.

In Scream 4 (2011), Ghostface quizzes a victim on the phone about which movie started the slasher craze, and names Peeping Tom, directed by Michael Powell in 1960, as the first movie to put the audience in the killer's point of view. Franck Khalfoun, who directed Maniac (2012), has said point of view had been in movies since Peeping Tom but no horror film had been shot entirely that way. Nearly all of Maniac is seen through a mannequin-store owner with a fetish for scalps. Edgar Wright named Peeping Tom a big influence on Last Night in Soho (2021), where an aspiring fashion designer is mysteriously able to enter the 1960s, and put it among the ten films he picked for the BFI's London After Dark. Watch Peeping Tom first.