Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Figure 83. The Spiral Staircase
This prototype of the voyeur-eye was later applied by other film directors,
particularly Michael Powell with Peeping Tom (1960), a controversial British horror film
that focuses on a young man who kills women while using a handheld movie camera to
record their twisted features and dying expressions of terror. The film is similarly charged
with psychological density and deals with the issue of voyeurism from the audience point
of view as they watch the protagonist’s actions. One could also point out the stylistic and
thematic similarities to Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or Carpenter’s Halloween, as both films
contain a contorted Freudian plotting and play mercilessly on audience voyeurism and
identification with their villains.
The screening of the film at the hotel makes most sense as a way of externalising
the image which is first linked to a subjective vision but transformed afterwards into a
larger metaphor. While Helen and the other spectators are watching the silent movie, the
camera moves to one of the rooms upstairs to reveal the actual murder of a crippled girl,
who cannot yell for help from her room. Now, as viewers, we again only see the
murderer’s wide-open eye peering out from an open closet with a rack of dresses (fig. 83).
As the young lady tries to pull her dress over her head, the murderer strikes and we see her
arms convulsively cross in terror. Meanwhile, the guests downstairs are also watching a
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