"Peeping Tom" and First-Person Horror

The Criterion Collection recently announced that they are discontinuing a slate of StudioCanal owned titles. They’ve lost the DVD rights to films like “Grand Illusion,” “Pierrot Le Fou” and Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy.

(They are having an Out of Print Sale, linked here)

I was dismayed to see “Peeping Tom” on the list. I can think of few films so essential to our understanding of contemporary horror.

The film follows the murderous exploits of Mark Lewis, a solitary photographer who preys on women. Sometimes posing as a documentarian, Mark gets his victims in front of his 16mm film camera, he kills them with his tripod immortalizing their death throes on film.

The viewer is thrust into the point of view of the camera’s viewfinder, forcing us into identification with both the deadly mechanism and the deeply disturbed Mark. We become both the murderer and the means. Even more disconcerting is the allegorical significance of this approach. The viewer is confronted with their own voyeurism.

“Peeing Tom’s” first person aesthetic takes on a new significance when we consider the current horror film fixation with POV. Camera phones, video messaging, and other portable media have provided a new awareness of the first person field of vision that the modern horror film exploits. Movies like “Quarantine” and “Cloverfield” mimic familiar digital platforms as a foray into traditional zombie/infection and monster films respectively.

These are standard genre movies but they are always seem to be reaching to a higher level of verisimilitude. Their approach assumes that the familiarity of the first person digital viewpoint is what incites fear in the viewer. The limited range of vision offered by this approach can be genuinely terrifying (see "[REC]") but a film like “Peeping Tom” exposes an oversight these recent horror films make. They do not realize that identification with the monster is far more horrifying than relation to the victim. When we are forced to identify with the monster, we are faced with out own unrepresentable dark side.

John Carpenter’s "Halloween” aligns us with the central monster to great effect. The opening tracking shot gives us the POV of Michael Myers as a child.

The power of this opener is that it gives us a greater understanding of his monstrous pervasiveness. When we find ourselves yelling at the screen at some nubile slasher victim-“Don’t go into that house, whatever you do, don’t go in that damn house!”- it’s because we have this special access to the monster that Carpenter provides.

(please refer to this great explication of the opening of “Halloween” on Jim Emerson’s Scanners website: Opening Shots: Halloween)

This does not mean that victim identification and pro-sumer video are useless as horror strategies. Perhaps more successful than the strict video mimicry of a film like “Quarantine” is the hybrid method of “28 Days Later" which replicated the lo-fi look of broadcast style video without tethering the film to a visual conceit. The flip side of this aesthetic discussion is the practical use of video. "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity" -despite all their flaws and even- made their limitations a narrative virtue, far outstripping production costs upon release.