Peeping Tom (1960)

Peeping Tom (1960) follows Mark Lewis, a solitary young man who works in a London film studio by day and secretly films and murders women by night, obsessively recording their faces as they die. Haunted by childhood experiments in which his scientist father measured his fear, Mark becomes consumed with documenting terror as if making a documentary about the moment of death. When he meets his neighbor Helen, a sympathetic young woman who may offer a chance at human connection, Mark is torn between his yearning for intimacy and the compulsion that drives his crimes — and a detective begins to close in. Watching the film is a tense, unnerving experience: it’s a slow-burn psychological study rather than a conventional slasher. You’ll see clinical, often intimate camera work that deliberately implicates the viewer in voyeurism, crisp black-and-white cinematography, and a formal style that probes themes of trauma, guilt, and the ethics of spectatorship. The movie unsettles by forcing you to confront both the killer’s warped subjectivity and your own impulse to look. Expect disturbing imagery and morally ambiguous characters; the film is as much an analysis of fear and filmmaking as it is a thriller. It’s provocative, chilling, and thought-provoking—an influential but controversial work that lingers after the credits.

Actors: Karlheinz Böhm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer

Director: Michael Powell

Runtime: 101 min

Genres: Drama, Horror, Thriller

7.2 /10 7.6 /10 7.4 /10