‘I like to understand what I’m shown.…’
Ahh yes, that famous horror masterpiece released in 1960 and featuring an odd murderous voyeur who hides his dark impulses behind a veneer of social awkwardness and introversion. We’re talking about Psycho, right? Actually no. It’s just a coincidence that both Hitchcock’s masterpiece and Peeping Tom dropped in the same year, but both share a strand or two of insidious DNA…
Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm) is an odd guy. A camera man and photographer by trade, he spends his evening murdering woman in order to record their dying breath. This stands in stark contrast to his charming courtship of Helen (Anna Massey), a sweet girl who lives in the same building and spends her days caring for her blind mother.
So. The other great horror masterpiece of 1960 that has been hanging around my watchlist for years now. I must admit I was expecting a little more. Peeping Tom is a devilishly malevolent idea, but by today’s standards, the actual moments of visual terror are pretty tame – to the point where it is sometimes unclear what has actually happened. Sure, the acting is offbeat and weird in a way that lends itself to the films other-worldly aesthetic, and there are some beautiful shots here, not least the POV shots that make up the murder scenes (and the score is excellent), but Peeping Tom just hasn’t aged quite as well as some of the other classics of the genre.
Whilst there is no doubting its influence, I won’t be reaching for Peeping Tom again anytime soon.