by A.J.
This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. So, for the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some horror movie recommendations to help you celebrate Shocktober.
Night 9: Psychological Horror
“Taking my picture?”
Whether you are interested in horror movies, classic movies,
or film history in general, eventually you find Peeping Tom. It is a
peculiar film: made in a classic style, shot in bold technicolor, and made at a
time when horror, like other genres, was beginning to touch on darker subjects
and themes. Too dark for many in 1960. Peeping Tom was so reviled by
critics and audiences that it was pulled from theaters and essentially ended
the career of Michael Powell, the renowned British director of many revered
classics such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes,
Black Narcissus, and The Thief of Bagdad. Powell and Peeping
Tom were ahead of their time; a cliché but true. Only eight years later Rosemary’s
Baby, a much much darker film, would achieve mainstream success with
critics and audiences. In the decades since it’s disastrous release, Peeping
Tom has been recognized as a classic, and you’ll find it on
many underrated, overlooked, or “best movies you’ve never seen” lists. Of
course the standards of what is shocking and vile change so much that the visuals
and set pieces in Peeping Tom would be considered tame by the next
decade. The real horror in Peeping Tom is in what you don’t see,
in what it implies, and in its themes which retain their disturbing and
dreadful shock value.
In a way, Peeping Tom is about making movies. It is
certainly about watching movies. Our main character is Mark (Carl Boehm) , a
young, handsome Austrian man, who works as a focus puller at a British movie
studio. He also moonlights as a smut photographer for pornographic magazines.
Also, he is a serial killer who films his victims at the moment of their death.
As memorable as Freddy Kruger’s glove with knives or Leatherface’s chainsaw is
Mark’s weapon of choice: a knife hidden in the leg of his camera’s tripod. As
he moves in for a close up, so does the blade.
Mark owns the building where he lives, inherited from his
father, but he cannot afford the upkeep so he rents the other rooms. His
apartment is unassuming, but there is, as you might imagine, a back room where
he develops and screens the films of his murders. In the apartment below him
live Helen (Anne Massey) and her mother (Maxine Audley). In the
excitement of her 21st birthday, Helen invites Mark to her apartment. When he hesitates,
she goes to his apartment where she, and we, learn his backstory. We learn that
Mark’s father, a famous psychologist, conducted and filmed experiments on Mark
as a child to learn about children’s reactions to fear. We see “home movies” of
him harshly waking up Mark in the middle of the night by shining a light in his face or dropping lizards on him. Mark’s killings are part
of of own his own documentary on fear and death. It is not until the climax
that we realize the full scope of Mark’s documentary of death.
Helen is shy, like Mark, but also full of life. She is a
strong enough force on him that she convinces him to go on their date without bringing along his beloved camera. However, after Helen kisses Mark, he
responds by kissing the lens of his camera as though he is compelled to
do this. Perhaps this is because Mark was not able to film their kiss, or
perhaps because experiences are only real for him if is his camera “sees” them,
or perhaps because Mark sees himself as a camera. That Peeping Tom
allows for multiple pathways to explore its themes and subtexts is what makes it a great film and explains why it has endured through the decades despite its
initial unwelcome reception.
Perhaps the film’s signature sequence involves Mark and Viv
(Moira Shearer), an extra in the film currently shooting at the studio,
sneaking on set at night. Viv believes they are
there so Mark can film her dance. Mark, and we, know the real reason she is
there. Shearer, who starred in Powell’s The Red Shoes, dances as Mark
rearranges the set and adjusts the lights, making sure everything is just right
for the camera. Shearer is so full of life that we feel the full weight of the
impending tragedy yet we accept it as a fulfillment.
It is worth noting that Peeping Tom was released in
not only in the same year, but mere months before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
The reaction to the two films could not have been more different. Roger Ebert
speculated in his Great Movies essay on Peeping Tom that this was “because audiences expected the macabre from Hitchcock” while Powell was known
for “elegant and stylized films.” It’s hard not to compare and contrast the
films once they are linked. Both films feature psychologically damaged young
men but while Psycho only flirts with voyeurism, Peeping Tom is
expressly about voyeurism. Powell employs the POV (point of view) shot that not
only shows us exactly what Mark sees when he commits the murders, but
implicates the audience in the crime. Countless slasher films from the 1980’s onward would use the POV shot to either not reveal the identity of the killer or for pure
sensation. Powell uses the POV shot not only for sensation but as part of an attempt to
explore the life and mind of a person who would commit such crimes. However,
unlike Psycho, shot in black and white, Peeping Tom is shot in bold and vivid
technicolor. I believe that this is major reason why audiences had such an
intense negative reaction.
The saturated
technicolor look which Powell had mastered through the 1940’s and 50’s implied
a warm, uplifting picture. It was generally used by musicals and comedies while
noir films and prestige dramas where shot in black and white. Even dramas shot
in technicolor tended to be broad melodramas, well done soap operas on the big
screen, like the films of Douglas Sirk (Imitation of Life, Magnificent
Obsession, Written on the Wind). Peeping Tom showed people in full technicolor
something they would rather leave in the shadows.
Peeping Tom airs on TCM on Sunday, October 30th at 7PM CT and is streaming free on Tubi and the Roku Channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment