Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42393 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-03-05
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Formats: PAL, Special Edition, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 96 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Michael Powell lays bare the cinema's dark voyeuristic underside in this disturbing 1960 psychodrama thriller. Handsome young Carl Boehm is Mark Lewis, a shy, socially clumsy young man shaped by the psychic scars of an emotionally abusive parent, in this case a psychologist father (the director in a perverse cameo) who subjected his son to nightmarish experiments in fear and recorded every interaction with a movie camera. Now Mark continues his father's work, sadistically killing young women with a phallic-like blade attached to his movie camera and filming their final, terrified moments for his definitive documentary on fear. Set in contemporary London, which Powell evokes in a lush, colourful seediness, this film presents Mark as much victim as villain and implicates the audience in his scopophilic activities as we become the spectators to his snuff film screenings. Comparisons to Hitchcock's Psycho, released the same year, are inevitable. Powell's film was reviled upon release, and it practically destroyed his career, ironic in light of the acclaim and success that greeted Psycho, but Powell's picture hit a little too close to home with its urban setting, full colour photography, documentary techniques and especially its uneasy connections between sex, violence and the cinema. We can thank Martin Scorsese for sponsoring its 1979 re-release, which presented the complete, uncut version to appreciative audiences for the first time. This powerfully perverse film was years ahead of its time and remains one of the most disturbing and psychologically complex horror films ever made. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com

Special Features
1.75 Wide Screen
DVD 5
English
Region 2
Mono English
Mono
Photo Albums
Filmographies
Chapter Search
French

Synopsis
An acclaimed and abhorred film about a man raised by a scientist who devoted his life to the study of the psychology of fear, using his own son as his guinea pig. As an adult the boy is obsessed with filming the deaths of beautiful young women, after causing them personally with his knife-wielding tripod. Powell aficionado Martin Scorsese brought the film out of obscurity in 1979.

Customer Reviews

The film that was scarier that Psycho!
Also released in 1960, Peeping Tom disgusted the censors and outraged the British Press to such a degree that Director Michael Powell found he had to move to Australia if he wished to continue his filmmaking career! The theme of scopophilia (pleasure from watching) is at the centre of this daringly ground-breaking movie as an affected cameraman (Mark) films the fear of the girls he murders to watch again and again! As he becomes emotionally entangled with his live-in tennant, his love for her becomes confused with his sociopathic desire to film her when she becomes frightened. A dark and interesting film, Peeping Tom addresses the very nature of cinema and the viewers' apparent complicity in the subject matter.

"I'm from the Observer.."
This DVD is a vast, VAST improvement on the VHS edition of this wonderful film.
Presented in anamorphic widescreen, Peeping Tom shows the seedy-looking cinematography in all of its glory, and the soundtrack is pin-sharp, making the most of Brian Easdale's haunting piano music.
Buy this for the film, not for the extras.

Fear - Shock - Terror!

This is a strange movie about a man who was filmed constantly as a child and as he grew up by his father. Consequently, he now uses the camera himself - but for more sinister purposes! Though there are murders in this movie, it deals more with fear, shock and terror.

Anna Massey stars as a young woman celebrating her 21st Birthday and gets to know whom she believes is just a fellow lodger to actually be her Landlord.

Interesting piece of art from 1960.

Stars Moira Shearer, Esmond Knight, Nigel Davenport, and Miles Malleson in an unusual role as 'dirty old man'!