Peeping Tom

Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) is one of cinema's most notorious cases of a masterpiece destroyed on contact. Half of the celebrated Powell–Pressburger partnership behind The Red Shoes, Powell directed this study of a voyeuristic killer to such savage reviews that it effectively ended his career in Britain — only for the film to be reclaimed decades later as a landmark.

Karlheinz Böhm plays Mark, the soft-spoken focus puller who films his victims as he kills them, implicating the viewer's own gaze in his compulsion. Powell, working in lush Technicolor, makes the film a disquieting meditation on cinema itself — on watching, recording and the cruelty latent in the act of looking — years before such ideas became academic commonplace.

Released the same year as Psycho, it was buried by a press that found it beyond the pale; its rehabilitation owed much to Martin Scorsese, a tireless champion who helped restore both the film and Powell's reputation. Now regarded as a foundational work of the psychological horror film and a key text on spectatorship, Peeping Tom stands as proof of how far ahead of its audience a great film can be. Scholars now treat it alongside Psycho as a founding text of the psychological horror film, and its rehabilitation is a cautionary tale about the perils of being ahead of one's time.