Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Loner Mark Lewis works at a film studio during the day and, at night, takes racy photographs of women. Also he's making a documentary on fear, which involves recording the reactions of victims as he murders them. He befriends Helen, the daughter of the family living in the apartment below his, and he tells her vaguely about the movie he is making.
Peeping Tom is a landmark proto-slasher and meta-cinematic horror film that scandalized Britain on release and destroyed Michael Powell's career — only to be rehabilitated as a masterpiece. Its cinematography is genuinely exceptional: Powell and Otto Heller use point-of-view camera work with brilliant self-awareness, implicating the viewer as voyeur in ways that feel radical even today. Novelty is very high — the film's central conceit (a killer filming his victims' fear, and a film about filmmaking and spectatorship) is singular and ahead of its time, anticipating both slasher cinema and postmodern horror by decades. Plot and acting are solid but not transcendent; Carl Boehm's performance is memorably unsettling but the supporting cast and narrative mechanics are functional rather than extraordinary. The ending is effective and thematically coherent but not the most surprising or resonant of conclusions.