Peeping Tom (film)

"Whatever I photograph, I always lose."

"Do you know what the most frightening thing in the world is? It's fear. So I did something very simple. Very simple. When they felt the spike... touching their throat, and knew I was going to kill them, I made them watch their own deaths. I made them see... their own terror as the spike went in. And if death has a face, they saw that too. But not you. I promised I'd never photograph you. Not you."

"I'm afraid. And I'm glad I'm afraid."

"Take me to your cinema."

"Instinct's a wonderful thing, isn't it, Mark? A pity it can't be photographed. [...] So, I'm listening to my instinct now. And it says all this filming isn't healthy, and that you need help."

"The silly bitch! She's fainted in the wrong scene!"

"Perhaps one would not be so disagreeably affected by this exercise in the lower regions of the psychopathic, were it handled in a more bluntly debased fashion. One does not, after all, waste much indignation on the Draculas and Mummies and Stranglers of the last few years."

"He [Powell] has got to the trick knife lovingly embedded in the throat, to the voyeur with sound effects, to a nauseating emphasis on the preliminaries and the practice of sadism - and I mean sadism. He did not write Peeping Tom; but he cannot wash his hands of responsibility for this essentially vicious film."

"Today, I find I am convinced that it is a masterpiece. If in some afterlife conversation is permitted, I shall think it my duty to seek out Michael Powell and apologise. Something more than a change of taste must exist."

"Reading now what I wrote in 1960 I find that, despite my efforts to express revulsion, nearly everything I said conceals the extraordinary quality of Peeping Tom. See it, and spare a moment to respect the camerawork of Otto Heller."

"The way you feel for this man who’s been tortured by his father and can’t help what he’s doing. Scorsese investigates that same area — they’re never heroes or villains in his movies, they’re something in between. And the critics at the time just couldn’t handle feeling sympathy for this serial killer. They wanted it to go away."

"[Powell's reported reaction to Leo Marks' script] Michael said, "Oh, that's me, a man who kills people with his camera"."

"For a morbid desire to gaze is one of the commonest obsessions in life. Unfortunately Michael Powell's new film is just a clever but corrupt and empty exercise in shock tactics which displays a nervous fascination with the perversion it illustrates."

"Even brilliant colour photography by Otto Heller cannot reconcile me to a film as loathesome as this. It exploits fears and Inhibitions for the lowest motives. It trades In the self-same kind of obsession that it relates."