Peeping Tom (1960)

Michael Powell's Peeping Tom arrived in 1960 and was met with such revulsion that it effectively ended his career in Britain. The plot concerns Mark Lewis, a focus puller at a film studio who moonlights photographing pin-up girls and, at night, murders women with a blade concealed in his tripod while his camera runs. He is assembling a documentary on fear, and the fear he wants is the fear on his victims' faces as they watch themselves die in a mirror mounted on the lens. The film was banned in Finland until 1981 and rated morally objectionable in part by the National Legion of Decency, which remains a more honest piece of criticism than most of what followed it.

The picture's interests are formal and psychological. Mark is the product of a father who filmed him through childhood experiments, including his mother's deathbed, and that inheritance is presented as horror pathology, not as a plea for sympathy or a case study in care. Women in the film exist as subjects of the camera's predation, and the film knows it. Helen, the final girl, is drawn to the morbid gaze herself. There is no equity critique on offer, no representation agenda, no environmental sermon, no economic grievance. The nudity is deployed for discomfort, the disfigurement for shock, and the trauma for dread. Anyone arriving with a modern checklist will leave empty-handed.

Its reputation has since reversed. The British Film Institute ranks it the 78th greatest British film, and it is credited as a progenitor of the slasher and found-footage traditions. The radicalism lies in the address to the audience, the suggestion that sitting in the dark and watching is its own complicity. That is a provocation about cinema, not a program for society, and the distinction holds. We are left with a nasty, brilliant object that refuses to instruct anyone in anything.