Peeping Tom‘s killer admires his handiwork from the comfort of his darkroom
Chris Forrester considers the act of looking and how it’s intertwined with filmmaking in the proto-slasher Peeping Tom. Spoilers ahead!
Nighttime in London. An eye opens. A man prowls the streets. Concealed beneath the folds of his coat is a camera, and as he stalks, the camera’s eye remains carefully trained on his prey — a blonde sex worker — diverging only briefly to follow his hand as he tosses an empty box of film into a trashcan. He follows her to an apartment, where she begins to undress on the bed. He adjusts something, his movements only partially visible at the edges of the frame, and a strange glow appears on the wall behind her. The camera closes in. She screams.
This sequence of events — the first killing of many — unfolds twice: first in lush, sepia-hued Technicolor as the camera captures these terrors in the moment, and a second time in black-and-white as the camera operator views his work, projected large in a dark room. This time the events unfold in silence; her mouth only gestures the words “that’ll be two quid,” her scream is but a silent visage of terror.
When we talk about the lineage of the contemporary horror film, Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) is often touted as the forefather of the modern slasher; I said as much when I wrote about Black Christmas (Clark, 1974), the film that refines Psycho’s loose (and mind you entirely unintentional) configuration of the disparate parts of what would come to be known as the slasher film into a recognizable (and for the industry, repeatable) format. But equally significant is the initially-maligned and lesser-known Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960), which not only also prefigures the modern horror film to a certain degree, but does so with a fascinating self-reflexivity.
The man, the camera operator, is Mark Lewis, a killer of women with a unique MO. By day, he works on a film crew and photographs racy pin-up photos of women, but by night he hunts and kills women with a portable movie camera, affixed with a knife and a mirror. Not only must his victims die, they must behold the fear of their final moments as the knife approaches and the camera watches. Lewis, tormented as a child by his father’s unconventional psychological experiments, is less concerned with the killings than the expressions of fear they yield, and though his first shown victim is a prostitute, his killings are less moralistic than convenient. He kills these women because they won’t be missed.
The killer’s camera beholds its first victim
Like its killer, as ominous a potential avatar for the filmmaker as there ever was, Peeping Tom is a film concerned with the camera and its capacity to abstract, behold, and immortalize that which unfolds before it. The film’s opening sequence, outlined above, introduces the viewer to its killer, but also to its central thematic conceit of the camera as seer. Emblazoned on those opening images are the crosshairs of the camera’s viewfinder, and so as they’re witnessed the images remind the viewer of both their context and their artifice.
The viewer must then contend morally with Mark’s actions, but also with what it means to behold them. If it’s possible, as the film attests, for the camera to play accomplice to such atrocity, then who are we to find entertainment in its spectacle?
Beyond the broad conceit of the killer whose camera is his weapon, the film also asserts this linkage between image-making and violence in a couple of ways, often in the construction of its setpieces. Mark’s father, something of a mad scientist, studied unconventionally the effects of fear on the human nervous system, often conducting torturous experiments on Mark himself. For research purposes, he recorded them with a camera — and Mark at one point shows clips of himself reacting to various stimuli, including a lizard placed on his bed and his mother on her deathbed, to a frightened onlooker — and so asserted to the young boy the culpability of the camera as more than just a passive observer to torment, but a compounder of its shame. Not only do Mark’s traumas linger in his mind, they sit in his darkroom as a physical record of his scarring.
Elsewhere, the erstwhile guinea pig recruits a stand-in for the film on which he’s employed to help him shoot a movie after hours. Theirs is something of an illicit affair, and it requires the would-be star to hide from studio security as her peers leave for the night. Again he kills, the camera and its attachments (this time we see that the knife is concealed in a leg of its tripod) his weapons, but the preceding exchange is of note. She dances, unaware of the true nature of Mark’s “project;” he films. Briefly, he has her pantomime operating the studio camera — I’m “filming you, filming me,” he remarks — before leading her to her mark in front of an open trunk on the floor. He reveals his weapon and makes the kill.
Mark’s second victim enters the deserted movie studio
Just as the first killing is linked with Mark’s work as a pin-up photographer, here the venue of the killing and the context of its execution attain significance equally important to the film’s meta-critique. The merging of studio-shot musical number (or at least the invocation of one) and cold-blooded murder offers lucidity to the film’s observations of violence as horror-film spectacle (analogous, here, to the jubilant splendor of song and dance) and its location of such within the context of moviemaking. Even the film itself seems to bleed with the victim, her place taken as she falls out of frame by a bright red studio light that cuts through the darkness as a knife through flesh.
By modern standards, Peeping Tom is relatively bloodless. Whereas in a recent Halloween film the carnage claimed 31, and seven in the original, and in the aforementioned Black Christmas another seven, here it totals only three: Mark’s two shown victims and later himself — but at release the film was decried as seedy trash. It functionally ended the career of its filmmaker, one of the great runs in British film history which alongside Powell’s former collaborator Emeric Pressburger yielded such wonders as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Red Shoes (1948).
Perhaps reductively, one might liken the act of releasing Peeping Tom to the demise of its protagonist, who — when cornered by the police — impales himself with his camera-weapon, a death by the camera, of the camera, and for the camera; a life immortalized just as it’s ended. The film theorist Laura Mulvey, who saw in the film what critics of its day refused to, wrote that it “creates a magic space for its fiction somewhere between the camera’s lens and the projector’s beam of light on the screen.” It’s fitting then that Mark meets his end in much the same locale: between the camera and the screen.
A new 4K restoration of Peeping Tom screens at IU Cinema on February 6 as part of the series I Like to Watch: Voyeurism in Cinema. The series previously featured a 25th-anniversary screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and a 50th-anniversary screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.