Peeping Tom

Armed with a camera, the psychopathic photographer and filmmaker Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm) indulges his sadistic voyeurism by murdering women and filming their deaths—until he falls in love with his neighbor and finds himself battling his dark impulses. Received with repulsion upon its release, only to be reevaluated later as a masterpiece, this endlessly analyzed and still-shocking film challenges viewers to confront their own relationship to violence on screen. “The cinema spectator's own voyeurism is made shockingly obvious and even more shockingly, the spectator identifies with the perverted protagonist. It is this relentless exposure of cinematic conventions and assumptions that has attracted the interest of feminist film critics, and the recent application of psychoanalytic theory to film theory clearly reveals the film’s psychoanalytic frame of reference.” (Laura Mulvey)