The are the 13 most voyeuristic movies we’ve ever seen. They like to watch — and be watched.
But First: What Is Voyeurism?
The word can be defined as gaining pleasure from watching others, or gaining enjoyment from seeing the pain or distress of others.
Some of the characters in this gallery have the first type, and some have the second.
Why are so many filmmakers fascinated by it? Perhaps because watching a film is so much like looking into a window of someone else’s life.
Rear Window (1954)
Still the best of all voyeuristic movies, Rear Window is frequently referenced by other films because of its smart take on whether film itself is voyeurism.
The 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 while taking for granted his amazing girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly, pictured above).
Rear Window is about crime, sure, but also about a bachelor’s fears of settling down. The different people L.B. watches represent different possibilities: Miss Torso is the attractive but beleaguered single, Miss Lonelyhearts never found the right partner, and The Salesman… well. He’s the most intriguing of all.
Peeping Tom (1960)
When people talk about voyeuristic movies, or movies about voyeurism, this is the one they usually mention right after Rear Window.
Directed by Michael Powell, this British horror thriller — just added to 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.”
Body Double (1984)
This very ’80s take on voyeuristic movies, this Brian De Palma cult classic pays tribute not just to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but also to the master’s 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.
Fright Night (1985)
This ’80s horror classic from Tom Holland (not the one who plays Spider-Man, he wasn’t born yet), Fright Night stars William Ragsdale as Charley Brewster, a teenager obsessed with a TV horror show features who becomes convinced that his suave new neighbor (Chris Sarandon)… is a vampire.
He enlists the help of his favorite show’s host, a former vampire hunter named Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall). It turns out Charley has pretty good instincts.
This is a very fun watch not just for the terrific supernatural twist on Rear Window, but also for the very ’80s — and very effective — practical effects, led by Richard Edlund, who was just coming off the success of his work on Ghostbusters.
The Burbs (1989)
The setup for The Burbs is similar to that of Fright Night, but The Burbs leans more into dark comedy.
The film, by Gremlins director Joe Dante, stars Tom Hanks (above) as Ray Peterson, a suburbanite who begins to suspect his new neighbors, the Klopeks, are involved in ritualistic killings. His wife Carol (Carrie Fischer) isn’t convinced.
Of course things escalate as Ray becomes more convinced that he’s on to something — and most of the people around him think he’s losing it.
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, when friends and neighbors were encouraged and incentivized to report disloyalty.
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.
The Girl Next Door (2004)
The rare voyeuristic movie where spying on a neighbor leads to fun and romance. When high school senior Matthew Kidman (Emile Hirsch) spots his new neighbor Danielle (Elisha Cuthbert, above) undressing, she storms over.
But they end up hitting it off, and he discovers that she’s a young veteran of the adult entertainment industry. Hijinks ensue, but through an unlikely series of wild events, everything ends up just fine.
The cast of The Girl Next Door is notably good: Supporting characters are played by Timothy Olyphant and Paul Dano.
Disturbia (2007)
A millennial-fronted homage to Rear Window, Disturbia stars Shia LaBeouf as a young man who — grieving the death of his father — punches out a teacher. He’s sentenced to three months of house arrest, and spends that time, you guessed it, spying on his neighbors.
He hits it off with one of them, Ashley (Sarah Roemer), but begins to suspect that another, Turner (David Morse) just might be a serial killer.
Keeping Up With the Joneses (2016)
Keeping Up With the Joneses follows a suburban couple played by Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher as a suburban couple, the Gaffneys, who start to suspect their glamorous new neighbors the Joneses, played by Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot… are spies.
You thought we were going to say serial killers, didn’t you? Nope. This one has a fun mutual-spying twist on the voyeuristic movies genre.
To wit: The Gaffneys begin to spy on the Joneses, who also seem to be spying on them, and things get complicated and messy.
Voyeur (2017)
Speaking of complicated and messy: This documentary tells the fascinating story of Gerald Foos, a man who bought a Colorado hotel in the 1960s, then spied on his guests’ intimiate moments from an observation platform that allowed him to peep through their vents.
Foos 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.”
During the documentary, by directors Myles Kane and Josh Koury, Talese thoughtfully explains that as a journalist, “I’m a voyeur myself.”
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. The top-notch cast includes Alison Brie (pictured), Dan Stevens, Sheila Vand and Jeremy Allen White and Toby Huss.
The film creeped out Franco’s friend 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.
The Voyeurs (2020)
This modern take on movies about spying on neighbors is well aware of all the tropes of the genre, and has a lot of fun tweaking them.
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. Michael Mohan, writer and director of the Amazon Prime original, says he was inspired by “steamy moral dilemmas” in films like Unfaithful and Indecent Proposal.
The Woman in the Window (2021)
Based on the bestselling novel by A.J. Finn, The Woman in the Window stars Amy Adams (above) as an agoraphobic child psychologist named Anna Fox who begins to spy on her new neighbors from the vantage point of her Manhattan brownstone.
This being a movie about spying on neighbors, she witnesses a crime in their apartment — a woman being stabbed. But the police don’t believe her, and she gets reassurances that everything is fine.
Directed by Joe Wright, this one is notable for a top-tier cast that includes Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Anthony Mackie and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Liked This List of Voyeuristic Movies?
You might also like this list of 1950s films that are still a delight, including Rear Window (pictured), which is, as we mentioned, the gold standard of voyeuristic movies.
Also, About That Spying on Neighbors Trope
It’s interesting to note that many movies — especially older movies — often treat spying on neighbors as natural, boys-being-boys behavior, ignoring the fact that it’s non-consensual and a clear violation of privacy. Post #MeToo movies, like The Rental, tend to more accurately portray it as creepy.
For a fascinating study of voyeurs in cinema, and their portrayal, we recommend this provocative video essay by Pop Culture Detective.
Main image: The Girl Next Door, 20th Century Fox.