DIRECTOR: Michael Powell

CAST: Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, Moira Shearer

REVIEW:

Coming out only months before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom narrowly beat it out for staking a claim to fame as the original founder of the slasher movie genre (although by modern standards, or even the standards of the likes of Halloween or Friday the 13th in the next decade, there’s precious little “slashing”). One has to remember the year of its release; for a movie that feels exceedingly tame in its usually implied violence today, it was shocking and controversial at the time. It’s also strange to consider that Psycho, which premiered only months later and had even more depraved subject matter, was a huge hit and acclaimed, while Peeping Tom was a notorious flop that was pulled from theaters, virtually ended its director’s career, and was savaged by the British press. Critics seemed to be in a competition for the most hyperbolic and pearl-clutching condemnations. Derek Hill, reviewer of Tribune magazine, stated colorfully that “the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Len Mosley, writing for the Daily Express, stated even more hyperbolically that the film was “more nauseating and depressing than the leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay, and the gutters of Calcutta”. Such was the scorn leveled at the film that star Carl Boehm later recalled that no one at the premiere wanted to shake his or his director Powell’s hand. However, in following decades the film eventually earned a more favorable critical reappraisal as an ahead-of-its-time psychological horror thriller and gained prominent admirers like Martin Scorsese, who praised the film in writings and even chipped in $5,000 to help the relatively obscure and forgotten film find a wider audience with a 1978 re-release.