Sure, the slasher genre is something of an old hat, and one that hasn’t always worked for critics, but it has its roots in older, scarier movies. Halloween is often cited as one of the first, coming behind just Black Christmas in terms of a faceless killer murdering people for no reason. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out the same year as Black Christmas. But there are some that are older, perhaps most notably Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, first appearing on movie screens in 1960.
That said, the British psychological horror movie Peeping Tom might be the first slasher film, and it beat Psycho to theaters by a few months. I found it on Tubi recently.
To cut to the chase a bit: this movie is probably about exactly what you think it is about. In the opening minutes, an unseen man, following a prostitute around while watching her through the lens of a movie camera, goes off with her presumably to do what clients always do with prostitutes, only he then murders her while recording the whole thing. However, this is not some unnamed murderer. He’s Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), a rather shy, bland man who works part time in a small shop whose owner sells soft core photos under the counter. Mark just so happens to be his photographer in a secret room upstairs. He’s also assisting on a film crew with asperations to be a director himself some day. It’s just, every so often, he makes himself a film of himself murdering a terrified woman.
He’s also a man who has somewhat fallen on hard times. The large house he grew up in is too much for him to keep up on, and he’s been forced to rent out most of the rooms. He seems to strike up some kind of a relationship with a friendly tenant living on the first floor with her blind mother. The woman, Helen (Anna Massey), is very interested in his filmmaking, and she finds Mark fascinating. Will she be Mark’s next victim, or will the seeming romantic feelings that Mark has for her, possibly reciprocated, be enough? After all, Mark has never known that sort of affection, but it may not matter as the police are closing in anyway.
A movie like this, despite the lurid premise, is still a product of 1960. That means that censorship is still a thing, and for all Mark is supposedly taking racy photos, the women in them are basically covered up where they need to be when they are on camera. Likewise, Mark’s kills are few in number and all happen off-camera. Instead, this movie is far more interested in Mark’s psychology than his violent habits. Mark’s father subjected his son to a lot of psychological experiments when he was growing up, and all of these experiments, especially involving a fear response, took place on camera. Why this would lead to homicide is anyone’s guess, but it does lead to a good explanation as to why Mark is the way he is.
So really, this movie is more about a tortured soul who can’t help himself sometimes as he needs to catch self-performed violent crimes on camera. If anything, this obsession leads to his eventual downfall as the movie outlines the exact conditions by which Mark finds himself unable to resist the act of murder. As a psychological characters study, the movie works far better than it does as a slasher, prototype version or not. This movie isn’t so much about the violence as it is about the man who can’t stop himself from going to his two passions: murder and photography. Which, come to think of it, could just as easily describe the movie’s audience.
Grade: B
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