A genuine cult classic, with admirers like Susan Sontag and Martin Scorsese keeping its reputation alive in this country, Peeping Tom is considered in France an authentic sadiste film; in a 1973 issue of Ecran, it was reevaluated with these words:
“A flop at the time of its first release in 1960, and for a long time banished into the ghetto of sexploitation movie theatres, this film is unique and directed in a completely exemplary manner by Michael Powell: it illuminates an area of the Fantastic rarely dealt with in the cinema, the problem of the casual/psychological monster. The hero of Peeping Tom, played by Karl-Heinz Boehm, is the son of a scientist whose work centered in the study of fear. During his childhood, Mark Lewis was used as a guinea pig by his father who repeatedly registered the fears of his son on film. Grown-up, Mark has linked fear and camera in a similar manic obsession. He lures models into being filmed and then stabs them with a knife which flashes out of the tripod of his camera. He films the agony of his victims who in a supreme refinement can see their faces distorted by fear, reflected in a parabolic mirror fixed to the camera. Beyond the horror theme, Peeping Tom becomes a meditation on cinema, in which the spectator finds himself entrapped. To view Peeping Tom is to look at a character who in turn is looking at another character looking at himself or herself. In short, we're all peeping toms!” Michael Powell himself performs in the film, playing the sadistic father, and his son plays the role of Mark as a child.
In an interview published in Midi-Minuit Fantastique, October 1968, 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. Since H.G. Wells, Arthur Clarke and Ray Bradbury, they have all tried to think up frightening machines but it's very difficult to achieve. I don't think there is anything more frightening than a camera, a camera which is filming and which is watching you.”