When Psycho was released in 1960, it was met with a mixed reaction from critics, but audiences were fascinated. The depravity of the subject matter and the shocking violence were amazingly controversial at the time; however, I imagine it was accepted because 1) People expected strange, twisted movies from Alfred Hitchcock and 2) The movie had a brilliant marketing campaign that played off its genre and the feeling Hitchcock wanted from the audience.
Peeping Tom is a movie released a few months before Psycho with similar subject matter, and just about as well made, that did not receive the same fate. Critics loathed it, and audiences were repelled by it. It destroyed the career of its director, Michael Powell, until the 1970s, when Martin Scorsese led the charge to get people to recognize Peeping Tom as the brilliant psychological horror movie it is.
The movie follows Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), a focus puller for a local film studio who aspires to be a filmmaker himself. However, the types of movies he films are not normal. Lewis takes women to places where they can be alone and puts all the focus on the women. He then takes out his camera and films them; while they sit in confusion, he slips a cover off one of the legs of his tripod, which hides a knife.
Mark films the reactions of his victims as they die. They twist and turn, and their faces contort in terror, and he films every second of it. After he finishes, he retreats to a viewing room in his home, where he watches the movies in the darkness and compiles them into a "documentary" he refers to every so often.
Perhaps what really struck at the core of audiences who viewed this movie at the time was how it explicitly turns the audience into a voyeur for Mark's murders. As moviewatchers, we are voyeurs, peeking into the lives of characters onscreen, but there is always the sense that we are off to the side -- that we have no real effect on what happens onscreen. Not so with Peeping Tom.
Similar to Hitchcock's Rear Window, it makes certain the audience sees what the protagonist sees, that the audience feels what the protagonist feels as Lewis manipulates the emotions of his victims so that he can get exactly the reaction he desires on camera. The audience is one with Mark as he kills these young women. It can hear the soft whir of the gears in Mark's camera, see the violence of Mark's knife plunging into his victim's throats and feel the rush and fear he does when the dead are in the last throes of life, all through the claustrophobic view of Mark's camera.
One of the most fascinating things about Peeping Tom is that it never lets the audience forget that it is watching. When people die in most horror movies, we see it, but we don't really see it -- there is that filter between the audience and what happens onscreen, the fourth wall. That wall exists in Peeping Tom, but it becomes frighteningly close to being broken. That is where much of its horror comes from. Never before, or since, has a movie so brutally presented the audience with the consequences of watching something unfold.
Mark's buried sexuality is another Hitchcock theme Peeping Tom makes full use of. The tripod leg that hides the knife is unmistakably phallic; before he pulls off the cover, Lewis strokes the leg up and down gently, caressing it softly with his fingertips. The camera itself is like a part of him he cannot live without -- when someone borrows his camera for a few moments simply to look at it, one can see the yearning in Lewis' eyes as he desires to have that part of him returned. And when he sits in his viewing room to watch movies, there is a kinky manner to the way Mark rests in the darkness and watches what he filmed.
In fact, the one time in the movie Lewis does not have his camera with him is when he is on a date with someone who can possibly cure his, er, misguided urges -- Helen Stephens (Anna Massey), an innocent, kind author of children's short stories who lives on the bottom floor of the building Lewis owns and lives in, which he inherited from his father.
Helen can tell there is something deeply wrong with Mark. Soon after they meet, she becomes curious about Mark's hobbies, and he shows her movies from his childhood -- movies his father, a biologist, filmed showing a young Mark being awakened by flashing lights in his eyes, whereupon his father drops a large lizard onto Mark's bed. There is another movie of Mark seeing his mother for the first time after she dies, and another of Mark during his mother's funeral. Mark's father was interested in fear and the nervous system, and Mark was his greatest subject.
Instead of being repulsed by Mark, although she does not know what exactly he films, Helen reaches out to him tenderly and tries to show him the love that has been missing from his life from day one. But the damage to Mark is nearly irrepairable. He knows nothing but watching and being watched. A psychologist and colleague of Mark's father who casually chats up Mark on the set of a movie notes that Mark has, "his father's eyes."
What brings it all together is the way Boehm characterizes Mark. In a way, he is similar to Norman Bates -- capable of being somewhat charming, but he is also quite shy and guarded (and there is an uncomfortably voyeuristic moment in Psycho where Bates watches Marion Crane undress). What separates them, however, is the way Boehm forms Mark into someone who is always aware of his crimes. He knows his urges, and he knows he cannot avoid giving in to them. From the beginning of the movie, he is fully prepared to be caught by the police.
This gives Mark an even more frightening quality -- especially as the audience is right there with him -- but strangely enough, it also makes him a bit more sympathetic. He recognizes that he is damaged, and he also recognizes that he is doomed to never repair that damage. It never excuses his actions and the brutality of his murders, but it is difficult to not feel pity for Mark on some level when he ventures out with Helen sans camera for the first time in his life and appears to have formed a genuine connection with a person.
Now for a scene from the movie! This shows the very first murder Mark commits, which happens at the very beginning of the movie. I apologize for the crappy audio quality of the video, but every other scene I saw on YouTube is of the very end of the movie, and I am obviously not going to show that.
