Michael Powell

Peeping Tom: The 1960 British flop that invented the slasher movie

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Michael Powell’s daring 1960 British horror Peeping Tom disgusted critics and ended his career for nearly 20 years. It’s often credited with inspiring the all-American “slasher” movie.

The setting is unremarkable, most often an unassuming American suburbia. The villain is a blade-wielding, unapologetic killer, warped by past trauma into luring strangers to their (preferably bloody) deaths. The protagonists, typically young and horny, are all at risk, except perhaps for one: a “final girl” who may be resilient and morally pure enough to survive.

Even only casual viewers of horror will recognise this as the common outline of a slasher movie. Cemented in hit “Golden Age” slashers like Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) (not to mention the many sequels to and imitators of each), the tropes of the slasher subgenre have been laid bare and then parodied and deconstructed in horror movies ever since Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) kicked off its own self-aware slasher genre.

Alamy Peeping Tom was met with revulsion by critics at the time: its British distribution was cancelled and the film and its director were forgotten for nearly 20 years (Credit: Alamy)

Those tropes that are now so familiar, however, have their origins in a film made almost two decades before the so-called Golden Age of the slasher began – and by a Brit, no less. But though hailed today as one of cinema’s best and most groundbreaking horrors, Peeping Tom found no such adulation when it was released back in 1960.

The film’s director, Michael Powell, had recently parted ways with his creative partner of nearly two decades, screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, with whom he had made some of Britain’s most spellbinding pictures, among them The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Black Narcissus (1947) – humanistic, romantic, fantastical works that tested cinema’s then-limits in photography and optical effects. For Peeping Tom, Powell had a new partner-in-crime, World War Two codebreaker-turned-screenwriter Leo Marks, and together they had in mind a different kind of innovation.

Noir in the 50s suddenly becomes a lot more brutal and more willing to follow protagonists who are pretty loathsome – Dr Matthew Asprey Gear

By the late 1950s, the relaxation of film censorship, society’s evolving relationship with the taboo and cinema’s competition with the increasingly popular medium of television were changing films, in Hollywood and the UK. Dr Matthew Asprey Gear, tutor at the Edinburgh College of Art, tells BBC Culture that films at this time would become “more lurid and titillating and dwell in the murk a little bit, to pull the audience in”. This meant more sex and violence, says Gear; it also meant less moral certainty when it came to depictions of crime. “Noir in the 50s suddenly becomes a lot more brutal and more willing to follow protagonists who are pretty loathsome… Even if they do get their comeuppance, the focus on their immorality feels like something new,” he says.

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The enduring allure of erotic masterpiece Black Narcissus

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What began as a 1930s novel about troubled nuns in the Himalayas led, a few years on, to a film classic. Now as a new TV version begins, Neil Armstrong explores the story’s dark power.

There is nothing in the innocent opening sentences of Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel Black Narcissus to suggest that the subsequent film version would be butchered by censors, banned, and eventually hailed as “one of the first truly erotic films” by one of the world’s great directors – Martin Scorsese.

 
Black Narcissus tells the story of a group of nuns who find themselves overcome by repressed desire when they move to a Himalayan retreat (Credit: Alamy)

Black Narcissus tells the story of a group of nuns who find themselves overcome by repressed desire when they move to a Himalayan retreat (Credit: Alamy)

That movie was made by an English director and a Hungarian-born writer-producer: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the celebrated cinema partnership revered for a series of groundbreaking and influential British films, of which Black Narcissus has become one of the best-loved. Now, there is a new adaptation, this time a joint BBC-FX production made for the small screen and starring Gemma Arterton and Aisling Franciosi.

The book, Godden’s third, and first bestseller, was praised by critics for its “rare beauty” and its “subtlety and freshness”, yet the story is not commonly described in such terms now. Rather Amanda Coe, the writer of the new three-part television version, says she thinks of it as “The Shining with nuns”.

Godden, who died aged 90 in 1998, was born in England but spent much of her childhood in India where her father managed a steamship company. She was a bestselling author who wrote more than 60 books, several of which were filmed. However her popularity has waned to the point where the most familiar Rumer to some will be the actress daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, apparently named after the writer.

Black Narcissus is Godden’s best-known work, partly because of the success and enduring popularity of the 1947 film. It tells the story of a small cadre of nuns from an Anglo-Catholic order sent to a remote mountaintop palace 8,000ft (2,400m) up in the Himalayas to establish a school and dispensary for the ‘natives’ – whether the ‘natives’ want one or not. The young, relatively inexperienced and rather self-important Sister Clodagh is placed in charge of this mission. Among the nuns is the highly-strung, difficult Sister Ruth.

The sexual themes are understated in the novel but when Michael Powell read it, he felt ‘the story, so coolly told in excellent prose, would be wildly exotic and erotic on the screen’

The palace is an unsettling place, perched vertiginously on the edge of a gorge and constantly buffeted by the wind. “I think you can see too far,” one of the nuns says. The locals know the building as the House of Women because, in the past, the region’s ruler kept his harem there. It is still filled with the ghosts of bygone days. The air may be thin, but the atmosphere is thick.

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