Peeping Tom

Voyeurism, mental illness and acts of transgressive violence - Mark Kermode celebrates a film that makes the viewer feel guilty for watching

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There is a moment toward the end of Peeping Tom when a policeman, discovering a spiky looking piece of machinery remarks, "It's only a camera", to which his partner ominously adds "Only... ?" Earlier, despairing of an acquaintance's unstoppable tendency to reduce the world around him to frames of leering celluloid, another character plaintively announces "All this filming isn't healthy - get some help Mark... " Ever get the feeling that a film was talking to you?

It's perhaps easy to understand why I've always been a huge fan of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, the controversial British serial-killer thriller which allegedly destroyed the career of its creator, and which was memorably dismissed by critic CA Lejeune as "Beastly!"

Focusing on the grisly antics of a social misfit with a movie camera who 'likes to watch', Peeping Tom is a film which appeals to a certain breed of movie-geek, reminding us that no matter how all-pervasive our own obsession with cinema may seem, we are nowhere near as deranged as the anti-hero of this chillingly voyeuristic classic.

Yet while we may laugh at the sly asides about 'film lovers' who frequent the Everyman cinema in Hampstead and read 'Sight & Sound' magazine while furtively nurturing collections of pornographic photos, the real genius of Powell's dark masterpiece is that (like Henry Portrait Of A Serial Killer several years later) it somehow manages to make villains of all of us. Perhaps this is why some people hate the film so much. And why others, like myself, love it.

Next page • "All cinemas are palaces of sin. I see that as a good thing"