Voyeur is the kind of documentary that will make your skin crawl.
It will force you to think back to all the possible times you could have been a victim of this kind of behaviour.
And then it will make you mad.
The creepy new Netflix documentary follows the story of Gerald Foos, an American man who purchased a motel in the 1960s with the sole purpose of perving on people.
Foos installed special vents above each room in the Manor House Motel in Colorado so he could spy on each of his guests.
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“They couldn’t hear me, they couldn’t see me, it was exactly what I wanted,” he explains in the documentary.
Over the almost 30 year period that Foos, and then his friend, owned and operated the Manor House Motel he witnessed the private moments of thousands of people.
Foos kept meticulous records of each “viewing session” and during that time he saw sex, fights, and supposedly, even a murder. He logged the intimate details of his guests – how old they were, what their kinks were and how many times they had sex.
But Foos said during that time he also witnessed a lot of the mundanity of human life – people watching TV, eating dinner, clipping their toe nails.
By the 1980s Foos could no longer keep his dirty little habit a secret. He contacted journalist and author Gay Talese and told him about his “research”.
Talese followed Foos’ story and kept his secret for several decades before finally publishing a piece about him in The New Yorker, followed by a book called Voyeur in 2016.
Top Comments
"But neither man has really considered the victims in this story – the thousands of innocent people, mostly women, who had their most intimate moments exploited without their knowledge."
Excuse me? How on earth have you concluded that the victims who were spied upon were "mostly women"? Are you assuming that men wouldn't care so much when their privacy was invaded? I've seen the documentary, and also read the book - and there is absolutely no evidence that the voyeurism specifically targeted women.