Peeping Tom: The Film That Ended Michael Powell

Two films arrived in 1960 about a shy, damaged man who kills women and can barely meet your eye. One made its director the most famous horror showman alive. The other finished its director’s career inside a fortnight. Alfred Hitchcock got Psycho. Michael Powell got Peeping Tom, and the British press treated it as something to be disposed of rather than reviewed.

The line everyone quotes belongs to Derek Hill in the Tribune: the only fit way to dispose of the film, he wrote, would be to shovel it up and flush it down the nearest sewer. He was not an outlier. The reviews read less like criticism than like an exorcism. And the man they were casting out had, ten years earlier, been half of the most gifted partnership in British cinema.

The career that was standing there to be ended

To feel the size of the wound you have to know what Powell had already made. With Emeric Pressburger, under the banner of The Archers, he had directed The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes — pictures drunk on Technicolor, unembarrassed by feeling, formally daring in ways British cinema rarely permitted itself. The Red Shoes alone would have secured a reputation. Powell was not a jobbing director slumming in horror. He was an established master reaching, deliberately, for a subject the industry considered beneath discussion.

The screenplay came from Leo Marks, a cryptographer who had run codes for agents in occupied Europe during the war, and the film carries a codebreaker’s fascination with hidden systems and the damage done in the name of observation. Marks reportedly considered a script about Freud before settling on a man whose whole psychology could be read through a lens. The result is a horror film about the act of filming, made by two people who understood, from opposite disciplines, what it means to watch someone without their knowing.

Karlheinz Böhm — billed as Carl Boehm, and best known to European audiences as the young emperor in the Sissi films — plays Mark Lewis, a focus puller at a film studio who moonlights taking photographs and murdering women. He is soft-spoken, courteous, terrified of his own gentleness. Böhm plays him not as a monster wearing a mask of shyness; the shyness is the whole man, and the killing leaks out of it.

The camera that kills

Mark’s method is the reason the film still detonates. He has modified his camera so that one leg of the tripod conceals a blade. He films his victims as he kills them, and — this is the detail that curdled the critics — he has fixed a mirror to the camera so that the dying woman sees her own face contorted with fear. He is not collecting bodies. He is collecting the perfect image of terror, the expression he can never quite capture to his satisfaction.

Powell shoots the first murder from behind the camera lens, so that we are looking through Mark’s viewfinder as he advances. This is the move that got the film condemned and the move that makes it great. The apparatus of cinema — the thing we have paid to sit in the dark and stare through — is handed to the killer, and by extension to us. Every horror film invites you to watch a woman be frightened. Peeping Tom makes you notice that you have accepted the invitation, and asks what that says about the paying customer.

Otto Heller’s cinematography does the film no favours with the squeamish. The colour is lush, almost pretty, the reds and blues of a Soho that trades openly in looking. Mark rents rooms above a newsagent that sells “views” — nude photographs — and the film draws a straight line between that grubby commerce and the respectable business of the camera crew Mark works on by day. Everyone in Peeping Tom is selling images of women. Mark simply takes the transaction to its logical end.

Why it still works

The mechanism that keeps the film alive is its refusal to let the audience off the hook while never once sneering at Mark. Powell casts himself as Mark’s father — a scientist who filmed his small son’s terror as a research project into the nervous system, waking him with lizards, recording his fear — and casts his own son, Columba, as the boy. That is not a stunt. It is Powell confessing that the director who studies fear for a living and the father who tortured his child for data are the same kind of creature, and that he knows it about himself.

Anna Massey, as Helen, the downstairs neighbour who takes a shy interest in Mark, supplies the film’s only clean tenderness, and her blind mother — Maxine Audley — supplies its sharpest irony: the one person who cannot see Mark is the only one who reads him correctly, because she listens to the room instead of watching it. Moira Shearer, Powell’s own Red Shoes ballerina, turns up as a studio stand-in who dances for Mark’s camera, and the casting is its own quiet joke about what directors ask of women who trust them.

The film’s real ancestor is not another horror picture at all; it is the whole tradition of the artist who consumes the people he loves in order to make his work, and its descendants are everywhere the camera itself becomes suspect. Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio — horror about a sound engineer dissolving into the film he is mixing — is unthinkable without it. Polanski’s studies of watched, unravelling minds in Repulsion and The Tenant share its claustrophobia and its suspicion of the eye. And every found-footage horror that hands the camera to the killer is drinking, knowingly or not, from Leo Marks’s poisoned well.

Powell never recovered. He directed only intermittently afterwards, largely abroad, and Peeping Tom did the quiet, thorough work of erasing him from the story British cinema told about itself. The rehabilitation came slowly, and it came from filmmakers rather than critics — Martin Scorsese chief among them, championing the picture in the 1970s and helping shepherd its restoration. Scorsese’s line, that Peeping Tom and Fellini’s 8½ between them say everything that can be said about the act of filmmaking, is the one that stuck.

Where to watch, and what it asks of you

The film is widely available in restored editions and turns up regularly on the boutique labels that treat 1960 horror as the art object it is. Watch it in a proper transfer; the colour is half the argument. And watch it aware that it was made to make you uncomfortable about the exact activity you are engaged in.

For a companion piece from the same year and the same anxious island, The Innocents — released a year later — turns the same distrust of a controlling adult gaze on a governess and two children, and lets you decide whether the horror is in the house or in the watcher. Together they are the two English-language high points of a very particular kind of horror: the kind that suspects the person doing the looking.

Spoilers below

The father footage is the key that unlocks the whole film. When Helen finds Mark’s home movies, we learn the full shape of the experiment: Professor Lewis observed his son’s fear responses relentlessly, filming him startled, filming him grieving at his mother’s deathbed, presenting him with a lizard on his bedclothes to record the reaction. Mark grew into a man who can only relate to fear through a lens, because a lens is the only way his father ever related to him. His murders are not lust. They are him trying, over and over, to complete his father’s study by capturing the one expression the professor never got on film: the face of someone at the instant of understanding they are about to die.

The ending closes the circuit with terrible neatness. Cornered, with the police arriving, Mark completes his masterpiece by making himself the final subject. He has rigged his equipment so that he runs onto the blade in front of his own camera, tripping the flashbulbs and the tape as he dies, capturing his own terror at last. The recorded voice we hear is his father’s, and the small boy crying out is Mark himself — Powell’s confession folded into the machine one final time, the director filming his own child’s fear right up to the end. He dies having finally photographed the one face he could never get, because it was always his own.

That is why the sewer-flushing critics were, in a sense, responding correctly. The film had shown them something true about the pleasure they had built careers on describing, and they could not forgive it. It took filmmakers, who knew the guilt from the inside, to recognise that Peeping Tom was one of the most honest films ever made about why anyone points a camera at another human being at all — a truth its first reviewers were in no state to hear.