Director: Michael Powell
Starring: Carl Boehm, Moria Shearer, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley
There will always be debate among horror fans over just which film can be defined as the original slasher movie. Some will point to when the genre first exploded, after the release of Halloween in 1978 and Friday the 13th in 1980. Others will say that it really begins in 1974, with Black Christmas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. However, the film most often credited as the first “knife movie” is 1960’s Psycho. One you don’t hear mentioned nearly as often is Peeping Tom. This is strange to me, and not just because Peeping Tom was released two months before Psycho. Pay enough attention, and you’ll find that it’s actually Peeping Tom which displays more of the tropes most commonly associated with slasher films.
Peeping Tom tells the oddly sympathetic story of Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), an aspiring filmmaker who works in both the movie and pin-up photography industries. Around most people, Mark is withdrawn and shy. He also has a darker side which has been shaped from years of abuse by his psychologist father. Those who meet Mark’s dark side don’t live very long. The particular psychosis which dictates Mark’s every waking thought is scopophilia (aka “voyeurism”), or the pleasure of looking at something or someone. This is not automatically a dangerous compulsion to have, but in Mark’s case it most definitely is.
Due to having every moment of his childhood documented and filmed, Mark as an adult is on a mission to create a documentary of his own. Because his father’s greatest interest was in the emotion of fear, this becomes the subject of Mark’s own filming. Using young women as his guinea pigs, Mark elicits fear using various methods, ultimately killing the women by stabbing them with a blade concealed in his camera’s tripod. The POV shots used during the murder scenes are one of the best things about Peeping Tom. Not only are we watching through Mark’s eyes as he gazes through the lens of his camera. We are also being introduced to what would become one of the most widely used techniques of the slasher genre.
Mark eventually meets a girl named Helen (Anna Massey), our “final girl” for this picture. They form a tragically sweet relationship, prompting Mark to declare that he will never film Helen, not wanting to chance that his compulsion might overwhelm him in this case. At the same time, he understandably doesn’t want Helen to see the films of the women he’s killed. Instead, he opts to show the films his father made of him as a child. These films don’t disturb Helen any less, though they aren’t enough for her to do the smart thing and run far, far away.
It’s at this point that I ought to at least briefly mention the fact that Mark lives in his childhood home, an inheritance from his father, and that he rents out some of the rooms to pay the bills. Helen and her blind mother (Maxine Audley) are two of the tenants. I mention all of this not just because it’s how Mark meets Helen, but also provides an excuse for Mark to get caught. Despite all the secrets he has, Mark never locks his door. This has something to do with his childhood, though I honestly forgot what. The important thing is that this allows for both Helen and her mother to enter into Mark’s apartment when he’s not there. Pretty sure that’s called trespassing… Whatever! It sets up a terrific finale, wherein Mark completes his documentary in the exact manner he’d always intended.
Though the POV shots are the biggest visual treat of Peeping Tom, they are far from its only slasher trope. Among them:
– The killer is the product of psychological trauma
– A knife or stabbing weapon of some kind is the primary weapon
– The victims typically being sexually active, such as the prostitute in the opening scene
– The fact that there are multiple female victims
Another way in which Peeping Tom is recognizable as a (or perhaps the) proto-slasher is in how those who view it are made to share in the killer’s voyeurism. Slasher movies would not be near as popular without their depictions of violence, or the scenes in which their female characters are at their most vulnerable. It was the film’s tone, as well as its now quaint scenes of violence and sexuality which landed the film in hot water. This also essentially tanked the career of its director. Yet, try as the censors might have to bury this movie, Peeping Tom survived and remains an essential film to anyone considering themselves a true fan of horror.
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