Peeping Tom, 1960

Mark (Carl Boehm) is a nice, quiet young man whose hobby is photography. To be precise: photographing women at the moment he kills them. Director Michael Powell, who had worked on many of the British cinema's most imaginative "class" productions (The Thief of Bagdad, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes), practically committed career suicide when he filmed this Leo Marks script about a sexual psychopath (and played the killer's father). But Peeping Tom stands as one of the most intimate parables of the relation between the voyeurs in the audience — that would be all of us — and the lurid images that give us so much pleasure. Seeing something erotic or grotesque, or both, we crave more. And after Peeping Tom and Psycho (which came out two months later), we got plenty.