Critics reviews

The formal potency of Peeping Tom represents one of Powell's most daring rebukes, even if it took his career down with it. The movie will ask dangerous questions about its own system but refuse to answer them. It will elevate sleazy, sometimes preposterous pulp material to art by dragging respectability towards the gutter. It will recognize that some things are too sacred, too private, or too dangerous to have a camera record them. And then it will record them anyway.

[Peeping Tom] might be considered the grandfather to the omnipresent found footage horror genre and it inspired Jim McBride's classic, scathingly self-reflexive David Holzman's Diary—and virtually every self-critical documentary since. The film remains relevant today not simply because of its vast influence, but because of the fundamental truth Powell expresses about the dark heart of cinema.

Quite unlike anything else in British cinema before or since, Powell’s garish, deliciously perverse proto-slasher movie stands up at least as well as its better-known trans-Atlantic cousin Psycho, released around the same time.

Reviled and fetishized, Michael Powell’s undeniable—if unsavory—classic, which opens in an excellent new print for a run at Film Forum, was the original first-person horror film. Released in Britain barely a month before Psycho had its American premiere, Powell’s serial-killer saga is no less perverse and perhaps even more disturbing.