Often associated with Hitchcock's PSYCHO due to originally being released within months of each other in 1960, Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM effectively destroyed his career while Mr. Hitchcock's reached new heights. And yet over the years Powell's voyeur themed thriller has maintained and grown a cult status truly deserved by this layered and multi-themed classic.
Set in late 50s London Mark Lewis explores the seedy underbelly of smut, pornography and prostitution using his ever running camera to record his voyeuristic experiences as he indulges in murder keeping footage of the last terrified moments of his victims deaths as home movies. A result of his fathers experiments during his childhood Mark Lewis is the first psychological film study of what would later be tagged as the serial killer.
PEEPING TOM shocked and appalled the critical elite on its release and was spurned as a sleazy exploitative effort, and Hitchcock learned a lesson from this by not showing PSYCHO to the press in advance of its release, by those not ready to allow sympathy for the films villainous lead or acknowledgement of the voyeuristic aspects of cinema into their 1960 mindset. The slasher film genre owes more to PEEPING TOMs Point of View death sequences than it does to the often honoured PSYCHO and now a new generation can be introduced to this classic film through an astoundingly beautiful re-mastered Blu Ray release before it is reaped for the poignant plot by Remakewood.
A happy horror hard-on for PEEPING TOM.
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