Michael Powell
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Connections, in both directions
Though Michael Powell's Peeping Tom does turn out to have a connection here, not once is one of modern horror's new standards ever given its due.
With references to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and even Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (the first movie "to show the killer's point of view," we're told), Scream 4 is like a perpetual film studies course, a reboot with a lesson plan.
Fun, fancy window dressing that occasionally hits the right note – name-checking the great but often unheralded Peeping Tom as the first true slasher movie will undoubtedly give film buffs a warm glow – but also slightly detracts from Scream 4’s true purpose: taut setpieces of bloody carnage.
Despite the surveillance/found footage trend of presenting deaths as supposedly being caught on amateur camera – either by accident or filmed Peeping Tom style by the voyeuristic killer – this theme only gets paid lip service.
Last Night in Soho (2021)
Directed by Edgar Wright
influenced by Peeping Tom (1960), The Red Shoes (1948)
Visuals Themes
Wright throws in references to Michael Powell’s notorious thriller Peeping Tom and to Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy among other films.
The color schemes and decors evoke Powell-Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes” (1948) and Michael Powell’s London terror “Peeping Tom” (1960): so much movie madness in the Big Smoke.
It’s billed as a Swinging Sixties-influenced psychological horror in the vein of Repulsion, Peeping Tom and Vertigo, but don’t let that fool you.
Now, he satiates his appetite for British thrillers like Peeping Tom and 70’s Italian Giallo films with his most audacious project yet.
Later on, he also imitates the lush look of Hammer Studios’ horror films as well as the seediness of that all-time great serial killer flick, Peeping Tom .
En esta reflexión sobre la lascividad de la mirada hegemónica, sobre la construcción de los personajes femeninos en el cine de horror, sobre lo que separa a víctimas de victimarios, Wright regresa a los viejos problemas planteados por Peeping Tom (1960) de Michael Powell y, sesenta años después, les da un contexto dolorosamente contemporáneo.
Black Swan (2010)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
influenced by The Red Shoes (1948), Black Narcissus (1947)
Plot Visuals Themes
Inspired by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 film, The Red Shoes (which, in turn, was inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fable), Black Swan focuses on shy and serious Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a ballet dancer with extraordinary technical ability, but little passion.
The Red Shoes and its theme of losing one’s self to a part is an obvious influence, but it’s another Powell and Pressburger film, Black Narcissus, with its sex-starved nuns, that hits closer to home.
Stark cinematography only emphasizes this to the point where it feels like Black Swan must be consciously attempting to counter the lurid but astounding palette of the original tragic ballerina film, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger’s masterpiece The Red Shoes.
The mere prospect of a film that in many senses crosses Powell and Pressburger 's " The Red Shoes " with Roman Polanski 's " The Tenant " is certainly enough to raise an eyebrow, as the very notion screams potential camp classic in this day and age.
If Roman Polanski had made The Red Shoes (1948), the results might have been something like Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.
No backstage ballet story can be seen without " The Red Shoes " (1948) coming into mind.
The vehicle for their reunion is the title railroad line, which will take them from the trauma of their father’s death a year before to the Black Narcissus–like convent to which their mother (Anjelica Huston) long ago fled.
He also wants the brothers to visit their mother (Anjelica Huston), who has gone off to be a nun in a "a convent in the foothills of the Himalayas," like Deborah Kerr in "Black Narcissus."
He hands out detailed daily schedules prepared by an alopecia-afflicted research assistant who's travelling in another carriage, and also has a secret agenda: to find the trio's mother – played, of course, by Anjelica Huston – who has become a Catholic nun and moved to a remote convent in the Himalayas (echoes here of Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus are just one from the usual Anderson crop of cinematic and cultural references).
I like the film much more when it's content to steal unashamedly from the 1940 The Thief of Bagdad : adventure, spectacle, good humor and adventure, leading me to suppose that if Aladdin wasn't going to commit to being a dramedy like Beauty and the Beast, it should at least have gone for being a straight-up comedy swashbuckler that didn't take its romantic subplot seriously at all; as it stands, it's awfully close to being a great story, but it keeps having to settle for pretty damn good.
A lot of early exposition time is also used to explain the chicanery of Jafar (voice by Jonathan Freeman), the Sultan's evil vizier, whose chilling, bony features suggest a composite of Nancy Reagan (the animators have mentioned this as a deliberate reference, along with a more pointed one to Conrad Veidt in "The Thief of Bagdad") and Captain Hook.
Families today will note how heavily Disney’s Aladdin borrowed from this version of The Thief of Bagdad: Disney’s treacherous grand vizier Jafar is overtly modeled on Veidt’s Jaffar, who similarly plots to marry a princess who is in love with a beggar who claims to be a prince, and whose dwarfish, childlike sultan father (Miles Malleson) is the archetype for Jasmine’s father.
The same low-flame romance was mirrored in Disney's " Aladdin " (1992), greatly influenced by both versions of the "Thief," combining Abu and Ahmad as "Aladdin."
Anticipating the swashbuckling fare of Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power, not to mention the Disney-ride silliness of Pirates of the Caribbean (and an animated Aladdin that seems to lift whole segments from Thief) this star vehicle for Douglas Fairbanks was a sensation in 1924.
Aladdin this is not.
They both do their best to lend the film an appealingly spooky vibe that hearkens back to critically-acclaimed films with similar subjects, such as The Devils and Black Narcissus.
Written by “Annabelle” screenwriter Gary Dauberman and James Wan, it’s lush, operatic, hardcore Catholic horror from the depths of “The Omen” and “The Exorcist,” with hints of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus,” washed with medieval overtones.
The Nun could have stepped away from the rest of the franchise by fully embracing the melodramatic camp suggested by the idea of a convent full of evil nuns, much like Powell & Pressburger did with Black Narcissus (1947) and Ken Russell with The Devils (1971).
Film buffs will instantly recognize elements of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus” (1947), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958), William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” (1973) and Richard Donner’s “The Omen” (1976).
I don’t recall seeing one of those in Powell and Pressburger‘s nunnery drama Black Narcissus (also namechecked).
No longer a passive spectator to her life, it becomes an active participant in it, recalling the vicious killer-camera used by the Peeping Tom in Michael Powell’s 1960 horror classic.
Invoking the classic serial-killer POV of Peeping Tom , the camera stalks Cecilia with long shots and from behind doorways, creating menace with negative space to the point where the frame itself becomes the villain.
Bloom is more akin to the sociopaths in Taxi Driver and Peeping Tom.
But while “Nightcrawler” plays first and foremost as a lurid, borderline-satirical thriller about a disturbed individual who pushes the disturbed logic of 21st-century media to its ultimate conclusion, Gilroy clearly has some larger questions in view, along with a cinematic legacy that includes “Taxi Driver,” “Network” and Michael Powell’s 1960 shocker “Peeping Tom,” a movie whose influence only continues to grow.
Midsommar (2019)
Directed by Ari Aster
influenced by Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948)
Visuals
Aquí, por supuesto, la influencia de Black Narcissus (1947) es una de las más importantes referencias que Aster dio al joven fotógrafo Pawel Pogorzelski ( Hereditary ) y se nota.
Among the movie’s strengths are its glaring yet muted color palette, which thrums with pale shades of yellow and blue—a callback to the low-fi Technicolor of vintage horror flicks like Black Narcissus (1947).
Even in the age of sprawling “cinematic universes,” it’s rare to see a movie that feels so comprehensively imagined and lived in: from its unsettling murals depicting bizarre rituals, to the realization of those rituals, from its elaborate Runic alphabet to a thrillingly choreographed dance number which unfolds like maypole bop by way of The Red Shoes.
It gets a bit outlandish—something of an ill-advised attempt to mimic the “Ballet of the Red Shoes” sequence in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger ‘s The Red Shoes—but there is no denying that the way the sequence begins, with Sebastian gently lifting Mia into the air when he realizes gravity no longer holds them, is pure magic.
See: The Red Shoes, every version of A Star Is Born; writer/director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) definitely has.
In Whiplash, the attitude toward music is akin to that toward dance in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948).
A director who mutters stage directions like, “use the sickness that’s always been inside your,” approaching his muse while channeling Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom .
It’s a clean break, not unlike the sea change that occurred with Michael Powell when he made Peeping Tom , or Alfred Hitchcock, with Frenzy .
To both my surprise and relief, Lee’s 3-D version of Martel’s novel has moments so magical, they recall the splendid imagery of bygone classics such as The Thief of Bagdad.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by Black Narcissus (1947), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Visuals
The Grand Budapest Hotel is spry and sly, with tickling tributes to cinematic forebearers; there’s a sequence lifted whole cloth from Hitchcock that, no lie, made me clap in my seat, while a mountaintop set-piece put me in mind of both Black Narcissus and the 1941 Goofy short “The Art of Skiing.”
There are direct allusions to films that have popped up frequently in Anderson’s oeuvre: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Man Escaped, L’enfance nue and many Lubitsch films.
He was an uncredited writer on Hitchcock's "Blackmail" (1929), and the two remained friends through their lives.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
Directed by Peter Jackson
influenced by The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
Visuals
And not only is Serkis's work surprisingly sensitive and nuanced given the technological wall between him and the rest of the movie, the effects work itself is deservedly legendary: Gollum was easily the best visual effects work in CGI history at his '02 debut, and while he's been surpassed a few times since then ( Avatar , the recent Life of Pi , the Jackson/Serkis collaboration King Kong ), it's shocking how much better Gollum has aged than pretty much any other 10-year-old CGI you could think of - compare, for example, Spider-Man from the same year, which looks absolutely rinky-dink now - not just because his realism remains largely intact, but because of the care and detail put into his visual personality by a very talented roster of effects artists, visual effects made with love that will, for that reason, still look good fifty years on, just like Ray Harryhausen's skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonauts do today, or going even further back, the parade of wonders in Alexander Korda's production of…
The slasher film as we know it traces back to 1960, when Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” first shook unsuspecting moviegoers.
Although older films like Peeping Tom and Psycho laid the groundwork for the slasher, its golden age was between 1978 and 1984, which saw the release of classics like Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
The single most punishing moment of Strange Days owes a specific debt to Michael Powell�s definitive treatment of voyeuristic pleasure, Peeping Tom (1960), and I could see couples huddling closer together and others slouching lower in their seats as a true high-tech perversion played itself out onscreen.