Reception
Peeping Tom was an immensely controversial film on initial release and the critical backlash heaped on the film was a major factor in finishing Powell's career as a director in the UK. However, the film earned a cult following, and since the 1970s has received a critical reappraisal that not only salvaged Powell's reputation but also earned the film a re-evaluation. He noted ruefully in his autobiography, "I make a film that nobody wants to see and then, thirty years later, everybody has either seen it or wants to see it."
An account of the film's steady reappraisal can be found in Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by Ian Christie and David Thompson. Martin Scorsese mentions that he first heard of the film as a film student in the early 1960s, when Peeping Tom opened in only one theatre in Alphabet City, which, Scorsese notes, was a seedy district of New York. The film was released in a cut black-and-white print but immediately became a cult fascination among Scorsese's generation. Scorsese states that the film, in its black-and-white cut form, influenced Jim McBride's David Holzman's Diary. Scorsese himself first saw the film in 1970 through a friend who owned a 35mm colour, uncut print. In 1978, Scorsese was approached by a New York distributor, Corinth Films, which asked for $5000 for a wider re-release. Scorsese gladly complied with their request, which allowed the film to reach a wider audience than its initial cult following.
Today, the film is considered a masterpiece and one of the best British horror films. In 2004, the magazine Total Film named Peeping Tom the 24th greatest British movie of all time, and in 2005, the same magazine listed it as the 18th greatest horror film of all time. It was included in a BFI poll for the best British films of all time. The film contains the 38th of Bravo Channel's 100 Scariest Movie Moments. Roger Ebert has included it in his 'Great Movies' column.
Film aggregate Rotten Tomatoes has awarded the film a 94% rating, based on 36 reviews and an average score of 8.4/10. The sites consensus is: "Peeping Tom is a chilling, methodical look at the psychology of a killer, and a classic work of voyeuristic cinema."
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