Slasher classic Peeping Tom returns to cinemas with 4K restoration - see the new trailer

Watch: An exclusive look at the trailer for Peeping Tom's 4K restoration

Michael Powell’s horror classic Peeping Tom is being re-released with a special 4K restoration, and Yahoo UK has been given an exclusive first look at the new trailer.

The 1960 serial killer movie stars Austrian actor Carl Boehm as Mark Lewis, a disillusioned man who films women as he kills them in order to capture their final looks of fear on camera.

In the chilling new trailer for Peeping Tom, which will be coming to UK cinemas from 27 October, the cold and calculating Lewis can be seen laying out his traps for the unsuspecting women he intends to kill.

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A dark tale of obsession and desire, the movie sent shockwaves across the country and horrified viewers with its violent and twisted narrative — something the audience at the time were not used to.

Peeping Tom was so controversial that it was removed from British cinemas after just five days, and it effectively destroyed Powell’s filmmaking career.

But views on the film have since changed, with the director seen as being ahead of his time thanks to his unique exploration of themes like voyeurism and psychopathy. The movie has also been hailed as a huge influence for the evolution of the slasher movie genre.

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As such, it has retroactively become regarded as a horror masterpiece. The film’s resurgence was also thanks to one director: Martin Scorsese.

The auteur behind Mean Streets and Raging Bull was a driving force for Peeping Tom’s redemption in the eyes of the movie-going public.

Speaking about the movie’s 4K restoration, Scorsese said: “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 cross the line into danger, easily. 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."

The Taxi Driver filmmaker adds, “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.

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“It is also a shock to the system, a deeply unsettling, and, I find, absolutely lucid picture about the danger of making art.”

The film has been restored by The Film Foundation and BFI National Archive in association with Studiocanal, and it will first premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 7 October before its general release later in the month.

Peeping Tom will also be featured in the BFI’s Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger, a UK-wide programme celebrating the director and his screenwriting partner Emeric Pressburger. It will be held from 16 October to 31 December, 2023.

Following its theatrical re-release, the 4K restoration of Peeping Tom will be coming out as a Special Edition UHD, Blu-ray and DVD on 29 January, 2024.

The restoration will feature several special features, including featurettes reflecting on the legacy of Powell and the efforts that went into restoring the classic.

The Peeping Tom 4K restoration will be released in UK cinemas from 27 October.