“Peeping Tom,” released in 1960 and directed by Michael Powell, is a disturbing thriller about a serial killer obsessed with catching the images on camera of those he kills right before he kills them. The very title of the movie elicits the idea that this film is voyeuristic since peeping tom’s are those who observe people without their knowledge. However, what truly makes this the sadism of the main character, the serial killer, Mark. He takes pleasure in the sadistic voyeurism of producing his films about igniting fear and capturing that on camera and then killing his victims. So he is not only watching and filming these women (voyeurism) but his obsession is in capturing the fear on film (sadism).

However, another factor that adds to the sadistic voyeurism in this film is the male gaze, which stems from feminist theory in regards to the patriarchal way women are portrayed in films. In “Peeping Tom” Mark not only singles out women as his victims for no explicit reason, but when he is filming them, and the way we see them through his camera, is often in a sexually objectified manner. To illustrate my point a little more clearly, I will focus on the opening scene, in which we don’t know Mark’s identity yet, but we get a stage-setting view of his first victim.

The first shot is an extreme closeup of someone’s eye (Mark, but we don’t know that yet). This imagery suggests gaze, as the eye is looking straight ahead. The next shot is an establishing shot of a dark, abandoned street with a lone woman looking into a store window. The unidentified man walks out of the bottom corner of the shot and begins to approach the woman. He then stops, and we get a closeup of a camera in his bag, with the lens’ peaking out of the top of the bag. He takes his coat and tries to cover up the camera so it is not so obvious. We then hear a click followed by a mechanical rotating sound, which makes us understand that the camera is indeed filming. The perspective then shifts to inside the lens of the camera, and this is when we get a true sense of the voyeuristic nature of this man as he films a strange woman, unknown to her.

Through the lens we see him approach the woman, and as he gets closer, the camera shifts down onto her butt before moving back up to her face again. This is the first distinct example of the male gaze. The woman is dressed in a tight skirt wearing tights and high heels, and when the camera focuses on her body, we get a sense of sexual objectification. As the woman notices him, she turns around and says, “It’s be two quid,” implying that she is a prostitute. When she turns around to lead him to her place, he agrees to the deal by following, and films her as she crosses the street, and leads him into an alley. When she stops to unlock the door, the camera again shifts down to film her entire body, before the man’s arm is shown throwing something away. When they walk up the stairs he focuses on her butt and her legs, again sexually objectifying her body. As they enter the room, she begins to undress and he stands still to watch (and film) as she does so. He then proceeds to kill her, but all we see as the viewer is a look of extreme fear on her face and hear her screaming before the shot cuts to the man watching the film he just made in his own personal theater. The fact that Mark watches his films and obsesses over the quality of them reasserts the sadistic voyeurism.