These movies about creepy Peeping Toms have some thoughtful insights on the voyeuristic nature of cinema.
Peeping Tom (1960)
Directed by Michael Powell, this British horror thriller — part of the Criterion Collection — follows the very creepy Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm, pictured) as a seemingly shy man who secretly records and murders women.
“The movies make us into voyeurs,” critic Roger Ebert wrote in an evaluation of the film. “We sit in the dark, watching other people’s lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it.”
Martin Scorsese has said the film, paired with Federico Fellini’s 8½, says “everything that can be said about film-making, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two.”
“8½ captures the glamour and enjoyment of film-making, while Peeping Tom shows the aggression of it, how the camera violates,” Scorsese has said. “From studying them you can discover everything about people who make films, or at least people who express themselves through films.”
Rear Window (1954)
Still the best film about peeping toms — and one that is heavily referenced by other films on this list — this Alfred Hitchcock thriller stars Jimmy Stewart as L.B. Jeffries, an adventuring news photographer who finds himself sidelined by a cast and forced to stay home. He passes the hours watching his neighbors through their apartment windows.
Hitchcock brilliantly enlists us as accessories in his peeping by getting us invested in the lives of his neighbors, and what they represent: the sexy but complicated single life of Miss Torso, the sadness of Miss Lonelyhearts, the creative freedom of the songwriter, the mix of joy and resignation for the newlyweds.
All his worries are amplified by threat of marriage to his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly, pictured with Stewart), who everyone recognizes as a great catch — except for the self-pitying Jeffries.
Then, one night, Jeffries starts to notice very strange behavior on the part of another of his neighbors, The Salesman. And Rear Window becomes fascinatingly unpredictable.
It’s also on our list of 1950s Films That Are Still a Pleasure to Watch
Body Double (1984)
Brian De Palma pays a very ’80s homage to Hitchcock in Body Double, a film rife with references not just to Rear Window, but Vertigo.
When struggling actor Jake Scully (Craig Wasson, pictured) gets the chance to housesit at a fancy home in the Hollywood Hills, he learns that the job comes with a creepy side benefit: through a telescope, he can watch a neighbor get undressed each night.
But soon, an act of violence leads Scully to start to question everything, and take a journey into L.A.’s adult underworld that brings him into contact with actress Holly Body, played by a magnetic and charismatic Melanie Griffith.
Sex Lies and Videotape (1989)
The film that was perhaps most responsible for the indie film boom of the 1990s, Steven Soderbergh’s stunning debut finds James Spader (one of the best of all cocky blond guys in ’80s movies) playing the seemingly awkward drifter Graham Dalton.
Dalton has a knack for convincing women to confess their sexual desires and backgrounds in front of his video camera, which makes him both repellant and fascinating to the repressed Ann Bishop Mullany (Andie McDowell, pictured), the wife of Dalton’s old college friend, John (Peter Gallagher) — who is himself a secret philanderer.
Things get messier and messier, in thanks part to the involvement of Ann’s less-inhibited sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). Sex, Lies and Videotape is a wonderfully complicated and coolly judgment-free examination of people and the secrets they share. Made for about a million dollars, it earned that back thirty times over, opening Hollywood to the notion that small, smart DIY movies for grownups could be the future.
Bad Influence (1990)
Directed by the great Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential), this is James Spader’s other late ’80s-early ’90s movie about sex, lies and videotape. In this one, he plays unconfident executive Michael Boll, who falls under the thrall of the larger-than-life Alex (Rob Lowe).
The peeping Tom aspect comes into play when Michael learns that Alex has videotaped him having sex with a woman other than his fiancee in order to break up his impending nuptials. Soon, another video is made, even more incendiary than the first.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Stanley Kubrick’s final film is about many things — dreams, fidelity, dreaming of fidelity — but voyeurism becomes an important theme when Tom Cruise’s Dr. Bill Harford attempts to infiltrate a strange party with the password “fidelio.”
He thinks he can watch the passionate going-ons undetected, but this proves to be naive when he’s quickly identified — could it be the yellow cab he’s left idling outside? — and ordered to unmask and disrobe.
At this point, Eyes Wide Shut is just getting started.
The Lives of Others (2006)
The winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, this unfussy masterpiece from director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck revisits the dark days of the Stasi in East Germany, and examines the consequences of living in a society where everyone is incentivized to peeping Tom and tattle on each other.
It follows Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe, pictured) as a Stasi officer ordered to spy on a playwright and his girlfriend. But he soon learns that the personal and political are difficult to separate.
Voyeur (2017)
This documentary tells the fascinating story of Gerald Foos, a man who bought a Colorado hotel in the 1960s, then spied on his guests’ intimate moments from an observation platform that allowed him to be a peeping Tom through their vents. He kept detailed journals of his unwitting subjects’ behavior, with the justification that it was valuable research into human behavior.
The film also chronicles his unlikely friendship with the brilliant New Yorker writer Gay Talese, author of the groundbreaking book Thy Neighbor’s Wife, about American sexual mores, as well as classic magazine features like “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
Through the course of the documentary, by directors Myles Kane and Josh Koury, Talese explains that as a journalist, “I’m a voyeur myself.” He wrote a lengthy feature about Foos that you can read here.
The Rental (2020)
A slow-boil horror about homesharing, the directorial debut of Dave Franco follows two couples who rent a hauntingly beautiful cliffside retreat and soon realize that things are not what they seem.
You guessed it: they’re being watched by a high-tech peeping Tom. The top-notch cast includes Alison Brie (pictured), Dan Stevens, Sheila Vand and Jeremy Allen White and Toby Huss.
The film creeped out Barry Jenkins so much that the Oscar winner went back through his own history of home rentals to try to suss out any shady ones, he told Franco in this discussion about The Rental.
We think the film would have been much more popular if not for its release near the peak of the Covid lockdowns, when most theaters were closed.
The Voyeurs (2020)
This modern take on voyeurism makes some dramatic tweaks to the familiar formula of men watching women through windows. Pippa (Sydney Sweeney) becomes fascinated by the couple whose apartment she and her boyfriend (Justice Smith) can see clearly from their own: The man (Ben Hardy) is a photographer, and the woman is his girlfriend and sometime model (Natasha Liu Bordizzo.)
Pippa becomes obsessed, especially when she sees the man having affairs. Then things get very, very strange. The film, an Amazon Prime original written and directed by Michael Mohan, is well aware of peeping Tom movie tropes and has a lot of fun subverting them.
By the Way
It’s interesting to note that many movies — especially older movies — sometimes seem to treat voyeurism as natural, boys-being-boys behavior — or at least lull the viewer into a sense of complicity, by refusing to condemn the peeping Toms of the film.
Post #MeToo movies, like The Rental, tend to recognize non-consensual spying as not just creepy, but potentially criminal.
For a fascinating study of peeping Toms in cinema, and their portrayal, we recommend this provocative video essay by Pop Culture Detective.
Liked This List of Movies About Creepy Peeping Toms?
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Main image: Body Double. Columbia Pictures.
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