‘Under-The-Skin Horrors'

The challenge issued to audiences of Peeping Tom on its original release in 1960 proved so threatening that the response of an outraged British press remains a ‘landmark in British cinema’. ¹ At the time, critics simply could not stomach Michael Powell's disturbing horror film, with its story of a troubled young man whose childhood subjection to his father's cruel psychological experiments leads him to murder the women he films. Today, with Peeping Tom firmly established as one of the towering achievements of British film-making, many scholars delight in reproducing their favourite quotations from among the critics’ original declarations of seething hatred. But as Ian Christie warns, simply to dismiss these reviews as hysterical or dimwitted is to ‘run the risk of incorporating [the film] into a cultish nostalgia’. ² Unfortunately, much of the scholarship on Peeping Tom that has avoided revelling in such ‘cultish nostalgia’ has also tended to remove the film from its social and historical context. Such scholarship refers to Peeping Tom as the ultimate ‘film-about-film’, what Peter Wollen calls a cold, intellectualised ‘aestheticization of death’ and a film so neatly prescient of 1970s psychoanalytic film theory that ‘psychoanalytic criticism is not simply imposed externally, but justified internally’. ³ Laura Mulvey goes so far as to say, ‘Peeping Tom offers realistic images that relate to the cinema and nothing more. It creates a magic space for its fiction somewhere between the camera's lens and the projector's beam of light on the screen.’ ⁴