Unfairly relegated to the realm of the horror-sexploitation film until the early Seventies, Peeping Tom was rescued in France, where it is considered an authentic sadiste film, and in this country by admirers such as Martin Scorcese and Susan Sontag. Compared to what we are offered today in the genre, its horror is almost entirely intellectual, created in a subtle, thoughtful manner by Michael Powell, who views his subject with no little irony, although the film was apparently a very personal one for him. Set in London's film world and its seedy underbelly, the pornography business, Peeping Tom is the story of a filmmaker, of sorts, the son of a scientist whose work was in the study of fear, and who used his son as a guinea pig, recording his reactions on film. The grown son continues to link fear with film, murdering his models with a knife that flashes from the tripod of his camera and recording their terror on seeing not only the knife but their own reflections in a mirror fixed to the camera. The study of a modern kind of monster, Peeping Tom is above all a meditation on the cinema.
In a 1968 interview Powell says of the film: “It is the most sincere of my films... because Peeping Tom is a very tender film, a very nice one. Almost a romantic film... I felt very close to the hero who is an ‘absolute' director, someone who approaches life like a director, who is conscious of and suffers from it. He is a technician of emotion. And I myself who am thrilled by technique, always mentally cutting the scene unfolding in front of me in the street or in life, I was able to share his anguish... I think that the camera is something very frightening. If you think that Peeping Tom's camera acquires such a personality that it becomes a source of terror like the lens, I'm extremely pleased because that is exactly what I feel myself.”