Peeping Tom

Michael Powell's shocking, serial killer drama was so reviled by critics upon its release that it effectively ended the filmmaker's career. Years later, the film has been rediscovered by a new generation of cinephiles who delight in its garish color design, bone-chilling narrative pacing, and perverse exploration of seeing and violence.

Peeping Tom stars Karlheinz Böhm as a shy, disturbed photographer, who works a a film studio by day, but by night has a more sinister project: he moonlights as a private photographer of scantily-clad women, while obsessively working on his own "documentary" of the women's dying expressions. When he befriends the cheerful Helen (Anna Massey), the daughter of the family living in the apartment below his, he tells her vaguely about the movie he is making, peaking her curiosity. When she sneaks into Mark's apartment to watch it, she is horrified by what she sees — especially when Mark catches her in the act...

As much psychological horror film as self-reflexive meditation on the motives behind violence and filmmaking, Powell’s seminal, controversial masterpiece has returned to the spotlight thanks to a new 4K restoration by The Film Foundation and BFI National Archive.

Peeping Tom screens in a 4K restoration by The Film Foundation and BFI National Archive in association with Studiocanal. Funding provided by The Film Foundation and Studiocanal. Special thanks to Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker for their consultation. 4K scanning by Silver Salt Restoration Limited, London; Picture restoration by Cineric, Inc., New York; Audio restoration by BFI National Archive.

Part of our "Powell and Pressburger: Titans of Technicolor" series. Courtesy of Rialto Pictures.

 

“Peeping Tom exerts an awful fascination....It puts the sin in cinephilia.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice

"The quintessential Michael Powell film, at once mischievous and compassionate, ironic and evangelistic, comic and tragic. A film of visceral terror." – Film Comment

“[A] film of many layers and masks… creates a magic space for its fiction somewhere between the camera’s lens and the projector’s beam of light.” – Laura Mulvey