Peeping Tom
By Kit Macdonald
Fans of that very special genre, films that have had their titles ridiculously mangled for the Spanish market, will get a kick out of Peeping Tom, or El fotógrafo del pánico, as someone once deemed it should be called here – before it even begins. After it begins, they'll find a work that has retained the dark magnetism that led it to be regarded as highly controversial on its original release in 1960.
It follows Mark Lewis, a shy, socially awkward cameraman with a terrible obsession: he films women while murdering them, capturing their expressions of terror as he does so. Childhood trauma, where his father, a psychologist, used him as a subject for cruel experiments on fear. A world that was still emerging from the staid 1950s unsurprisingly proved hostile territory for a such a transgressive tale, and the backlash did damage to Powell's career from which it never fully recovered, despite latterday recognition from Bafta and directors of the stature of Francis Ford Coppola, George Romero, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, and the reassessment of Peeping Tom as a classic and precursor of the slasher genre.