Peeping Tom

Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) is one of cinema's most notorious cases of a great film destroyed on contact with its audience. Powell, one half of the Powell and Pressburger partnership behind The Red Shoes, made this study of a voyeuristic killer and received reviews so savage that they effectively ended his career in Britain. Decades later the film was reclaimed as a landmark.

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

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 counted a foundational work of the psychological horror film and a key text on spectatorship, Peeping Tom shows how far ahead of its audience a great film can be. Scholars put it alongside Psycho at the root of the genre, and its long exile is a cautionary tale about the perils of arriving before your time.