Studiocanal today announced the release of a spectacular 4K restoration of Michael Powell’s iconic serial-killer classic Peeping Tom, produced by The Film Foundation and BFI National Archive in association with Studiocanal. Written by Leo Marks (Twisted Nerve) and starring Carl Boehm (Sissi), Anna Massey (Frenzy), Moira Shearer (The Red Shoes) and Maxine Audley (A King in New York), this influential cinematic masterpiece will be available on Special Edition 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD with a 32-page booklet and 90 mins of brand new extra content from 29 January 2024.
Martin Scorsese, a longtime admirer of Michael Powell, who spearheaded the film’s rediscovery in the US by releasing it in 1979, commented,
“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 easily cross the line into danger. 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.”
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?
Now regarded as a groundbreaking masterpiece of the British horror movement, Peeping Tom received a savage reception on its initial release in 1960, as critics were dismayed by its controversial subject matter and the sympathy it seemed to engender for its murderous protagonist. The second film from visionary director Michael Powell, following his run of 1940s and ’50s classics with screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, Peeping Tom left Powell’s career in tatters and was made unavailable for many years. Peeping Tom has since become recognised as a watershed in genre cinema, its themes of voyeurism and psychopathy proving hugely influential on the evolution of the slasher movie.
Peeping Tom was restored by The Film Foundation and BFI National Archive in association with Studiocanal, with special thanks to Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker for their consultation.
Studiocanal will unveil a new 75th Anniversary 4K restoration of The Small Back Room in 2024, followed by UHD and Blu-ray releases for the first time, featuring new bonus content, including interviews with filmmaker Kevin Macdonald and Powell & Pressburger expert Ian Christie. Together with a new release of Oh… Rosalinda!!, these two titles will be joining Peeping Tom and The Tales of Hoffmann in STUDIOCANAL’S Vintage Classics range in 2024.
Peeping Tom will be released as a Special Edition 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD, with a 32-page booklet and 90 minutes of brand-new bonus content, on 29 January 2024.
Special Features:
- New Visions of Voyeurism: Peeping Tom by Sir Christopher Frayling
- New Take Me To Your Cinema: The Legacy of Peeping Tom, featuring a conversation between film critic/author Anna Bogutskaya and film critic Rhianna Dhillon
- New Restoring Peeping Tom
- The Eye of the Beholder
- Intro by Martin Scorsese (2007)
- Interview with Thelma Schoonmaker (2007)
- Audio Commentary by Professor Ian Christie
- Original Theatrical Trailer
- Behind the Scenes Stills Gallery
- 2023 trailer
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