I WAS AFRAID to watch this movie. All of the press materials I read on Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom focused on its gore: The protagonist is a serial killer who films his female victims as he stabs them with a knife hidden inside his camera’s tripod. When the movie was released in 1960, critics overwhelmingly declared it as “sick,” “filthy,” and “wallow[ing] in the diseased urges of a homicidal pervert.”

And indeed, the opening scenes of Peeping Tom are creepy, forcing the audience into the killer’s perspective—surveying his victim, approaching her, and then watching the horror in her face as she’s murdered.

Peeping Tom

directed by Michael Powell

plays 3/26-28 at Egyptian

Contrary to all the buildup, however, Peeping Tom is actually rather tame. I even chuckled during some scenes. It’s not that the current media has desensitized me to images of murder, it’s that the movie isn’t really about a psycho killer. It’s about a painfully shy filmmaker named Mark, who seems to spend much of his time behind a camera or looking through other people’s windows. The symbolism in this is as obvious as Gatsby’s green light: Mark is an observer, a lurker, not a participant. It is only behind a camera that he is comfortable interacting with others. So comfortable, in fact, that there’s even a scene in which Mark caresses a camera as if it were a woman’s face.

Mark’s social handicap, we learn, is the result of his being used as a lab animal by his father, a behavioral psychologist who threw lizards at the boy and documented his fearful reactions on film. In this way, Peeping Tom is a remarkable prototype of such current movies as Edtv or The Truman Show (where real life is the camera’s greatest subject). Still, Peeping Tom can’t escape its datedness, especially in its portrayal of women characters. Most of Mark’s victims are prostitutes or pinup models, but however tragic they are meant to be, they look like figures on pulp-fiction covers, in showy costumes and heavy, bloody makeup. Any buildup of suspense is diminished by such caricatures uttering campy lines like, “Be quick about it, Sonny, I’m melting!”

Peeping Tom is said to have effectively ended Michael Powell’s career. What is rarely mentioned, however, is that Powell already had a substantial career (he directed and co-directed 25 films, including The Edge of the World, Thief of Baghdad, and The Red Shoes) and may have been looking toward retirement. Or perhaps the seasoned director felt he could afford to take bigger risks. In any case, what seems to have been revolting and controversial in 1960 now plays like a quaint addition to a time capsule.