Peeping Tom (1960)

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2019) Some movie genres are older than we realize, and if you’re looking for early examples of slasher-horror movies, you’re going to have to go past 1970s Halloween or Black Christmas and land somewhere near the 1960 double-feature of Psycho and Peeping Tom. Daringly for its time and directed by respectable filmmaker Michael Powell, it’s about a serial murderer who (high-tech twist!) records his actions with a video camera. This is also an opportunity to play with some metatextual material about the nature of film and, as the title suggests, the audience as voyeurs as much as the killer protagonist. The atmosphere of the early-1960s London is also worth a look, anticipating the later British movies of the decade. Still, as much as the film does have a bit of material to chew upon, its very specific time also means that it has lost its lustre, and not very gracefully at that. It may have been transgressive and upsetting at the time—but it’s now, sixty years later, a bit too dumb and blunt to be taken seriously. Peeping Tom is interesting to horror enthusiasts, obviously, but otherwise not that gripping as a story.