Peeping Tom is a British thriller film made in 1960, which chronicles a serial killer who films his victims as he murders them to record their faces and expressions as they die. Mark Lewis, the protagonist and serial killer, murders women to explore his obsessions with fear and voyeurism. Peeping Tom was considered a horror film at the time, but many critics have debated whether it should actually be categorized as a psychological thriller. This film’s graphic content and themes can make the viewing experience a bit uncomfortable, but once I really started to think about Mark Lewis and dive into his psyche, I became fascinated by his character and the film.

Mark Powell, the director, wants the audience to feel a connection with Mark in order to sympathize with his situation. From the start of Peeping Tom, the director Michael Powell aims to immediately bring the audience into the mind of Mark Lewis. Powell accomplishes this by bringing the camera to the point of view of Mark so the audience sees exactly what he sees. The opening scene shows an unidentified man walking towards a woman on an empty city street at night. The man approaches the woman and brings a film camera up to his eye, which transports the audience’s view into the viewfinder of the camera. This technique initially made me quite uncomfortable because it made the film seem too real and created a sense of intimacy with the characters. The point of view camera is an important function of Peeping Tom because it is a movie that has an extremely complex protagonist, and the technique gives the audience a unique way of relating to him. One of the most interesting themes of Peeping Tom is voyeurism, which I believe is still a major part of our vastly connected digital society.

Our generation is constantly sharing intimate experiences with the world through a vast network of social platforms. Platforms like Facebook or Twitter allow people to share their daily life with thousands of strangers. Anyone has the ability to gather information about someone’s life, which has fueled a society that has become obsessed with the lives of other people. We can essentially follow someone’s daily life without actually physically being with him or her, which is much like how Mark Lewis uses his camera to obsess over the women he aims to murder. Although Peeping Tom shows an extreme type of voyeurism, I believe it touches on the voyeuristic obsessions of today’s social networks and platforms.

I enjoyed Peeping Tom mostly because of its focus on voyeurism and how Powell gave the audience the ability to get inside of the Mark Lewis’ mind. Powell’s film techniques, like the point of view angle, are extremely important to the character development of the film. We see aspects of Mark’s personality that other characters do not see, such as his homicidal tendencies. Furthermore, this film made me really think about how our society does not focus on privacy anymore and, more importantly, the consequences that can follow. These women allow Mark to film them with his camera unaware of the fact that he intends to use those intimate times to murder them. Mark is able to get into intimate situations with these women where they are extremely vulnerable because he knows a lot about them. Overall, I think Peeping Tom is a phenomenal film because it directly involves the audience, and forces them to dive inside the mind of a sociopath.