A classic of our times, Peeping Tom from filmmaker Michael Powell is getting a 4K re-release later this year theatrically before landing on the home formats in the new year.
The new restoration is actually premiering at the BFI London Film Festival on 7 October, followed by its release in UK cinemas from 27 October and as a Special Edition UHD, Blu-ray and DVD release from 29 January 2024.
Mark (Carl Boehm), a focus puller at the local film studio, supplements his wages by taking glamour photographs in a seedy studio above a newsagent. By night he is a killer, stalking his victims with his camera forever in his hand trying to capture the look of genuine, unadulterated fear – an obsession that stems from his disturbing and terrifying childhood at the hands of his scientist father. Mark slowly becomes enamoured with Helen (Anna Massey), who lives with her blind mother (Maxine Audley) in the flat downstairs, but how long before he turns the deadly gaze of his camera towards her?
Martin Scorsese, longtime admirer of Michael Powell, who spearheaded the film’s rediscovery in the US by releasing the film in 1979 comments:
“Art and obsession—they go together. To create anything, whether it’s writing or painting or music or dance or cinema, you have to be obsessed. But one can cross the line into danger, easily. Michael Powell didn’t just understand that danger—he lived it. And he actually expressed it in cinematic terms. Unlike The Red Shoes, set in the grand world of high culture, Peeping Tom is set at the rock bottom level of low culture, with a protagonist who has already crossed the line. On a plot level, it’s about a serial killer who murders women as he films them. On a deeper level, it’s a portrait of self-destruction by means of cinema—the lenses are scalpels, the splices real cuts that bleed, the celluloid razor wire, and the light of the projector blinding. There’s no other picture quite like Peeping Tom in the history of the cinema. It is ravishingly beautiful, like all of Michael’s greatest films, and I’m thrilled that we’ve finally been able to give it the restoration that it deserved. It is also a shock to the system, a deeply unsettling, and, I find, absolutely lucid picture about the danger of making art.”
Watch the restoration trailer below.
