Cine 350 - Comparing Peeping Tom and Psycho

Nick Bova

CINE 350

R 1:40-4:20

10/29/2015        

Mid-Semester Paper

        Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is both a horror film and a melodrama, which are two of the main genres we’ve been studying this semester so far.  For the most part, in horror movies up until this film was made, monsters were usually portrayed as scary-looking creatures such as Dracula, Frankenstein, etc.  But, Mark’s upbringing by his strange experimental father, as well as his subsequent transformation into an extremely psychologically disturbed man, portrays him as a monster in his own right.  Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho also has elements of both female desire and family dysfunction.  Hitchcock sometimes would add things into his films that the audience wouldn’t notice at first glance, and in a lot of instances it was strange relationships between sons and mothers.  But both of these films shed light on the role of family dysfunction and it’s (major) effect on later on in life in adulthood.

         Throughout Peeping Tom, I noticed Mark really has three primary jobs: He is a camera operator at a movie studio, he takes provocative pictures of women, and he also owns a house that rents out to tenants.  In his spare time, he films just about everything he can in hopes of creating the perfect film.  However, his view of perfect is a little too obsessive.  He wants everything to be perfect and if it isn’t, he needs to film again.  So when he murders women, he isn’t just doing it because he is a serial killer, he just wants to get the perfect reaction to death that he can so his film with be finalized.  His obsession with killing women isn’t necessarily his desire for them, but the desire for his film.

        Helen comes into the story when Mark returns home to hear her birthday party going on downstairs.  He’s a very solitary man and isn’t very social with his neighbors at all.  His father had owned the house, and used Mark as an experiment during his childhood, scaring him all sorts of ways and filming his reactions.  Mark was literally more of his father’s experiment than his actual son.  Helen enjoys being around Mark and waits for him to come home everyday.  She has caught him staring into her window on a couple of occasions, and she finds him interesting.  We know that he has fallen in love with her when she asks to be photographed by him and he swears he will never do it, because he knows if he does he would not be able to resist the temptation of killing her for another shot for his film.

        As a horror film, Peeping Tom revolves around Mark’s life, the monster of the movie.  He murders women and makes inappropriate remarks throughout the film and is really the only odd character in the cast.  His upbringing with his experiment obsessed father turned him into a strange character.  His entire life revolves around taking pictures and making films, but he wanted to make something different from all other films.  He wanted to make films of real life like people growing up, walking on the streets, kissing their lovers, and eventually dying.  

        As a melodrama, Peeping Tom is very different from other melodramas.  We first realize the film has melodramatic themes in the film after Mark shows Helen the films his father made of him as a child.  The short film contains scenes from when Mark was scared by his father and Helen exaggerates her surprise at what she is seeing.  She is almost pressuring Mark into answering questions he doesn’t have the answers to.  Another instance is the over exaggeration of death in the film.  In real life, if someone were to walk up to you with a knife, you would probably run away.  In the film, every woman that Mark kills just stands or sits waiting for their untimely death.  They beg him to stop but do not try to save themselves; they just let it happen.

        In Hitchcock’s Psycho, Norman Bates grew up in the house behind the motel his mother owned.  But after she mysteriously died, he would tell people that she would order him around and that she refused to leave the house.  So when Marion came to stay at the motel, she could hear two voices arguing from the house; little did she know it was Norman speaking for his mother.

        The audiences that viewed the film had no idea what the ending was going to be like.  It turns out that Norman had actually killed his mother and has been keeping her dead, rotting body in the basement of his house.  He dresses up as her when he murders Marion, possibly to keep his identity hidden, or maybe just because he’s that crazy.