If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice a lag of fifteen or so years between the 1945 film “The Spiral Staircase” and the release of Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” in 1960. There are two serial killer films released in this 15-year period and I can’t find them. One is “Follow Me Quietly” made in 1949 and the other is “The Sniper” released in 1952. While I am neither a film historian nor a crime scholar, there seems to be one reason for the dearth of serial killer movies from just after World War II and that is the lack of serial killers.
While there were plenty of homicides, murders for hire, revenge killings, spouse snuffings, and the occasional spree killing (for information on Charlie Starkweather, a famous spree killer of the time, go here and here), there wasn’t a major serial killer that became a newspaper star with the exception of “The Honeymoon Killers” who killed some 20 women from 1947 to 1949 and were executed in New York in 1951. While I have included films about that case in this series, they weren’t serial killers in the way that Henry Lee Lucas or Joel Rifkin or Dennis Rader are serial killers.
So Mark Lewis – the killer in “Peeping Tom – was dripping blood on virgin snow in the eyes of the audience. Period pieces about Jack the Ripper and Sweeny Todd were one thing, an in your face and absolutely creepy film where the killer wasn’t an offstage myth – he was the star – was a lot more than anyone was expecting. If Hammer Studios or some American horrormeister such as Roger Corman had made the film, people would have been sufficiently warned. It wasn’t. The film was made by Michael Powell whose career – usually as a team with Emeric Pressman – spanned decades and included such classic as “Thief of Bagdad,” “Black Narcissus.” “The Red Shoes” and “The Edge of the World” including numerous others.
“Peeping Tom” was so creepy that it literally ended Powell’s career overnight. Far from the overwrought and exploitive, it was an exploration of a depraved character that – as will show up again and again – seemed like the boy next door. Some 40 years later, the film still creeps out viewers. Not with graphic violence but with a process of killing and recording his victims that speaks to why serial killers kill. There are no rambling psychiatrists babbling about Freud in this film. There’s no need for it.
This is a powerful and sophisticated film made by a master who deserved better from the critics and the audience. “Peeping Tom” is a classic in the true sense of the word and still a remarkable movie.