“Do you know what the most frightening thing in the world is? It’s fear.” — Mark Lewis

Every horror movie is, at some level, about watching — but Peeping Tom, Michael Powell’s 1960 psychological horror-thriller, is the one that admits it out loud. It’s a movie about a man who can’t stop watching, made by a man who spent his life on the other side of the lens, released into a world that wasn’t ready to be told what cinema actually asks of us. The result is a fascinating double ruin: a killer destroyed by the camera in childhood, and a director destroyed by a camera of his own.

The killer first. Karlheinz Böhm plays Mark Lewis, a soft-spoken young man who works at a London film studio as a focus puller — the crew member whose job is literally keeping other people’s images sharp — and who, on the side, shoots glamour photos for a seedy newsagent. Upstairs in his late father’s house sits a darkroom and a private screening room where Mark watches his own footage over and over. Because Mark, you see, is a killer: he murders women with a spiked blade hidden in his camera tripod while filming their faces as they realize what’s happening, so he can capture the exact moment of terror.

It’s genuinely unsettling stuff, and Powell has the nerve to make us complicit. The camera on Mark’s shoulder becomes our point of view, and the movie repeatedly forces us into the killer’s eyepiece. There’s no way to watch Peeping Tom passively — you’re implicated from the first frame, and the film knows it.

What elevates all this from grisly gimmick to genuine tragedy is the empathy the film generates for Mark. He’s no boogeyman; he’s shy, awkward, almost childlike, and the movie patiently unpacks where he came from. His father, a famous psychologist, used little Mark as a lab rat for his experiments on fear, terrifying the boy on camera around the clock, waking him in the night with a lizard thrown onto his bed. Mark was never allowed to just be a kid, and the film frames his murders as a ghastly continuation of the experiment — a search for the perfect recording of fear.

There’s a devastating subplot involving his blind neighbor Helen, played by Anna Massey, who befriends him and eventually screens his childhood footage in a sequence that’s heartbreaking precisely because Mark narrates it with such flat, damaged calm. He can’t even recognize that what happened to him was monstrous. That confusion is the horror — and notice that in a film about seeing, the only person who truly trusts Mark is a woman who can’t see at all.

And then there’s the director, because Peeping Tom is as much a confession as it is a thriller. Powell, the man behind The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, filled this movie with himself: the studio where Mark works, the film-within-a-film shooting there, the director character who treats his actresses with casual cruelty, and above all the camera itself, presented as an instrument that’s inherently predatory. The famous moment when Mark photographs a woman’s face and we see it refracted through his lens, warped and distorted, is basically a thesis statement about the medium — a great artist asking whether the act of looking is itself an act of violence.

Audiences in 1960 were not ready for a beloved director suggesting that cinema might be a voyeur’s machine, and the damage was immediate and career-ending: the film was pulled from circulation within days, financiers closed their doors, and Powell — who co-wrote the screenplay with Leo Marks — found himself effectively unemployable in British cinema, scraping together scattered, underfunded work abroad for the next thirty years. He described the aftermath as being sent “into the wilderness.”

The irony is that Psycho came out the exact same year, and Hitchcock walked away with his legend enhanced while Powell walked away in ruins. Both are about isolated killers obsessed with spectatorship and the audience’s guilty hunger to see — but where Psycho cloaks its perversity in grease and melodrama, Peeping Tom is cool, clinical, and honest.

Honest, and gorgeous, too. Powell, the great colorist of British cinema, shoots it all in saturated Eastmancolor that turns the tawdry rooms into a garish fever dream. Carl Boehm is gentle and creepy at once, impossible to imagine anyone else in the role, and Anna Massey grounds the film as its emotional conscience. Moira Shearer, the ballerina from The Red Shoes, shows up in a wonderful extended cameo as a stand-in who walks into Mark’s apartment and walks out of it dead — a scene that’s somehow both ghastly and elegant.

The legacy story is where the rehabilitation gets really satisfying, because once the film resurfaced, its DNA turned out to be everywhere in modern horror. Start with the most obvious inheritance: the killer’s point of view. Every horror movie that puts the audience behind the murderer’s eyes — the opening POV stalk of Halloween, the drifting camera-eye of Black Christmas, the whole slasher tradition of the subjective tracking shot — is following a trail Powell blazed in 1960: the camera becomes the killer, and watching becomes a kind of participation.

Then there’s the found-footage vein. Mark Lewis is cinema’s original killer-cameraman, and you can draw a straight line from his home screening room to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and all the way to The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, where the very act of recording is what summons and sustains the horror. The killer’s home movies prefigure the deadly broadcast of Videodrome, the cursed tape of Ringu and The Ring, the home-video nightmares of Sinister, and the killer-documenting-his-crimes conceit of Man Bites Dog.

Brian De Palma deserves his own sentence in this ledger: from Sisters to Dressed to Kill and Body Double — a film about watching a murder through a lens — he kept returning to Powell’s question of whether the director’s gaze is pleasure or predation, and got away with it simply by making his movies a decade or two later.

The film’s psychological approach proved just as contagious. Mark Lewis is a killer with an actual explanation, a case history we’re invited to understand, and every horror film that humanizes its monster rather than simply unleashing it — The Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter‘s tormented Francis Dolarhyde, the grief-stricken ghosts of The Babadook and Hereditary — owes something to Powell’s refusal to treat his killer as a cheap bogeyman. Even the art-house provocations that implicate the viewer, from Funny Games to Caché, are playing on the same board Powell set up: what the person behind the camera — and the person in the seat — really wants to see.

The most bittersweet chapter of the legacy, though, is the giallo. Almost as soon as Powell was chased out of British cinema for these techniques, Italian filmmakers picked them up and ran wild with them, to international acclaim. The giallo thrillers of the 1960s and 70s — Blood and Black Lace, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, the gorgeous-murder tradition that Mario Bava and Dario Argento built into an entire genre — are practically assembled from Peeping Tom‘s toolkit: the masked killer whose crimes we witness through his own eyes, the traumatic origin story, the fetishistic attention to the mechanics of murder, the color splashed over terrible violence. Argento’s black-gloved murderer is Mark Lewis with an Italian accent and a better tailor — Powell had made one of the first great giallo films without knowing the genre existed, and the Italians got celebrated for it while he got blacklisted. Proof that Peeping Tom wasn’t too much for audiences, it was simply too early, and too British, for its own good.

Which brings us back to the confession. Mark Lewis ends his film the only way a man made of recordings ever could: watching his own death footage, whispering about the fear his father’s experiments could never quite capture. Powell, ruined by a movie about a ruined man, spent thirty years in the wilderness before the world caught up to what he’d been saying all along. Both stories end the same way — the film outlives the man, the images outlive the shame. Peeping Tom is tense, strange, unexpectedly sad, and still one of the most honest movies ever made about why we sit in the dark. Watch it, and then try to pretend you’re innocent.

Previous Icarus Files:

1. Cloud Atlas
2. Maximum Overdrive
3. Glass
4. Captive State
5. Mother!
6. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
7. Last Days
8. Plan 9 From Outer Space
9. The Last Movie
10. 88
11. The Bonfire of the Vanities
12. Birdemic
13. Birdemic 2: The Resurrection
14. Last Exit To Brooklyn
15. Glen or Glenda
16. The Assassination of Trotsky
17. Che!
18. Brewster McCloud
19. American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally
20. Tough Guys Don’t Dance
21. Reach Me
22. Revolution
23. The Last Tycoon
24. Express to Terror
25. 1941
26. The Teheran Incident
27. Con Man
28. Looker
29. 1776
30. Here
31. The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.
32. The Cable Guy
33. A Chorus Line
34. Carrie
35. Millenium
36. Mindhunter