Peeping Tom (1960) ****

After a string of successes with his longtime partner Emeric Pressburger (known together as The Archers), including The Red Shoes (1948) (review) and The Tales Of Hoffmann (1951) (review), Michael Powell branched out on his own in the late 1950s. His second solo effort, Peeping Tom (1960) (released two months prior to another, more famous, progenitor of the slasher, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho)—with its exploration of obsession, perversity, and childhood trauma—caused great controversy and was vilified in contemporaneous reviews, essentially killing Powell's career and ruining his reputation. 

Having been critically reappraised since then, it is now (rightfully) seen as an influential and important work, as well as one of the greatest movies about moviemaking. Filled with lurid, voyeuristic subject matter, beautifully captured in Eastmancolor by cinematographer Otto Heller, and frantically scored by Brian Easdale, PT is a fascinating, playful, and disturbingly sympathetic portrait of a sensitive and shy serial killer—wonderfully brought to life by the dashing Karlheinz Böhm—that continues to captivate, as it holds its audiences complicit.