Peeping Tom: 50th Anniversary

Fifty years after its notorious debut, Peeping Tom returns to cinemas in all its creepy and lucid Technicolor glory for audiences' voyeuristic pleasure. It’s the kind of release that this tragic film, that destroyed director Michael Powell’s career, was unjustifiably denied in its own time. Vilified by contemporary critics who branded it as merely a perverse snuff film, Peeping Tom is a complex ‘film about film’, wrapped up in a portrait of a damaged mind.

The viewer is immediately, sympathetically aligned with Mark, an abused and juvenille man, whose occupations include film studio cameraman, seedy erotic photographer and obsessive serial killer. Mark’s method of killing is highly disturbing, his camera has a spike for impaling and a mirror so that his victims can witness their own grizzly deaths. A fearless interrogation of the murderous voyeurism of cinema, Peeping Tom is more relevant today in our image-obsessed, screen-saturated society than ever before. [Rachel Bowles]