Horror and terror come in different forms, especially in film. Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) is unlike any other horror films. It takes terror and fear to aesthetic heights that someone like Hitchcock (“a master of suspense”) couldn’t fully achieve, even in his famous Psycho (1960). This is primarily due to Powell’s inherent understanding of human nature and sheer radicalism of his films (including those he made with Emeric Pressburger).
In the case of Peeping Tom, Powell collaborated with Leo Marks who wrote the screenplay. The film tells a complex story about a young man, Mark Lewis (played brilliantly by Karlheinz Böhm, credited as Carl Boehm), who works as an assistant camera operator (a focus puller) for a film studio in England. On the side, Mark takes photos of pin-up girls. This side job and foray into pornography would perhaps make us judge Mark harshly but there’s something kind, calm, and sweet about him, which immediately creates a viewer’s conflict.
The opening scene takes us into Mark’s interior life. We’re confronted with his eye, and this sets the stage for one of the perspectives in the film. Mark’s holding a camera, secretly filming a dark and unsettling street. A young woman, obviously a prostitute, says nonchalantly, “It’ll be two quid.” She’s used to the routine. Mark accepts and follows the woman into her apartment. As he follows, so does his camera.
The woman is detached from the act itself. She undresses in a perfunctory way, expressionless, even bored. The expectation of a dull but necessary sex act is annihilated when Mark (or rather Mark’s camera) begins to move toward the woman. She screams in horror, and this is both the end and the beginning of the film. Mark watches the final result, checking for aesthetic inconsistencies of the “dailies,” like any film director would. Except his films always end in murder.
Is there anything good about Mark Lewis? It seems like a strange question. How can a sociopathic killer be good in any way? But something happens that jolts him out of the murderously repetitive existence, namely meeting Helen Stephens (Anna Massey). Helen’s the antithesis of all the pin-up girls Mark photographs, or the beautiful women in the film studio he works at. She’s not beautiful in that sense, yet her forthright and direct attitude reveals a sense of stability, and hence attractiveness. (This directness would become a hallmark of Anna Massey’s acting.)
Mark and Helen live in the same building (Mark is the landlord), and out of curiosity, Helen invites him to her 21st birthday party. Mark’s shy and refuses but this doesn’t stop Helen. She seeks him out by offering something for the “sweet tooth.” Mark’s unsure how to handle the encounter. After all, Helen is a different kind of woman than what he is used to.
Something inside of him makes room for vulnerability and he offers her a gift: a series of film reels that capture scenes from his childhood. Sounds harmless enough, except that these aren’t ordinary family videos. It turns out that Mark’s father was a scientist who researched the impact of fear on children. In order to have a full picture, as it were, he filmed every waking and sleeping moment of his son. Mark hasn’t known life in any other way. His father’s eyes never gazed upon him. Mark was merely an object and a subject to be studied, like a frog that’s about to be dissected.
Helen’s distressed. She quickly realizes that there’s something more at play. She’s particularly angry and uneasy about young Mark being startled by a lizard his father places in his bed. “Switch off?” says Mark. “No,” says Helen resolutely but is unsure why she wants to keep watching. She wants to know why all of this is happening. “I’d like to understand what I’m shown,” she pleads with Mark. Just like the audience, she’s demanding to know what the moving images that are before her eyes mean. But, like most film directors, Mark refuses to explain.
Mark’s not a simplistic version of a psychopath, and Peeping Tom can’t be explained by Freudian psychoanalysis (a theory that often gets applied into Hitchcock’s films). One of the reasons for this impossibility is our view of the cinema itself. Powell, along with Emeric Pressburger, has always made radical films. Black Narcissus (1947) pushes the limits of faith and desire, while The Red Shoes (1948) takes us into the beautiful madness and collision between art and real life. Peeping Tom is no exception, and its discordant film score, and perfectly paced dialogue illuminate both an exterior and interior terror.
On one hand, we’re faced with Mark’s double and contradictory life. His kindness and struggle between good and evil is brought out by Helen. He’s aware of his sickness and the trauma his father created that will have an inevitable end. He wants to leave the patriarchal prison, yet the compulsion to kill and film is too strong. The line between killing and filming is blurred.
Powell’s trying to tell us something about the filmmaking as well. In some way, the director is a master of terror. He points the camera and essentially captures and annihilates the actor. The actor can’t escape the camera. This “magic lantern” puts the actor under the spell, and he has no choice but to give in if indeed, he wishes to continue. He’s at the mercy of the director, the ultimate controller and tyrant, only interested in getting a desired result. The actor’s interiority is shaped and changed.
There’s a hallucinatory quality to Peeping Tom, similar to that found in Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. We’re mesmerized by the presence of madness, and just like Helen, we don’t want the film switched off. We want to see the end. What creates the final terror in all the murdered women’s faces? Why do they appear twisted? As the film reaches its finale, Helen’s about to become another victim. Mark’s camera has a built-in blade as well as the mirror that causes undulating contortions and induces fear. But Helen’s unafraid. She conquers terror repeatedly throughout the film, as well as in the final moments. She’s not afraid of the blade or of the distorted mirror because she knows that there’s a small shard of goodness in Mark’s broken soul.
In the final moments, Mark turns the camera on himself in every sense of the word. The end has arrived. Is Powell doing the same? It’s unfortunate that Peeping Tom wrecked his film career. The reviews were extremely negative, and it was only later that the film was recognized for its brilliance and complexity. Powell took voyeurism to much bigger heights. In fact, to reduce the film to such an explanation and description is to destroy the nuance and contradiction Powell has created. Mark’s compulsion and psychopathic desires are secondary. What matters is the camera itself, the viewfinder of terror, the actor whose mere presence awakens the sleeping monstrous lens, and the director who’s willing to sacrifice the stability of the actor for art.