Horror Daily Double: Peeping Tom, Man Bites Dog

Lush in color and lurid in content, Peeping Tom is director Michael Powell’s ego run unchecked. Told from the perspective of a movie set focus puller who after work murders women with a camera to capture final moments of genuine fear on film, Powell flips the bird on late-’50s British norms and dares to create a sympathetic figure out of a psychosexual sadist. It took Martin Scorsese’s drum-banging to finally get the movie released uncensored and in color decades later, though the movie had long since killed Powell’s career. Today, Peeping Tom is seen as an equal to the also 1960-released Psycho, and it pulls audiences even further in than Hitchcock’s masterpiece by using repeated camera POV shots to essentially ‘implicate’ the viewer as witness and participant.

Available on Amazon Video, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play

He’s witty, he’s urbane, he’s a serial killer. Man Bites Dog is a black-and-white comic mockumentary in the style of Spinal Tap, if Nigel Tufnel liked to strangle and dismember people. (We’re not claiming he did; perhaps Rob Reiner left that footage on the cutting room floor.) A camera crew follows Ben around the streets of Brussels as he pontificates on art, rapes, wipes out non-whites, and otherwise kills whoever catches his fancy on a day-to-day basis. Eventually, the people recording him take a more active hand in the proceedings. Whereas Peeping Tom bristles up against the boundaries of good taste, Man Bites Dog crosses that line and craps all over it. Not for the faint of heart, but if you’ve seen The Office — another documentary experiment in depicting soul-sucking malaise — you’re good to go.

Available on Amazon Video, iTunes