Peeping Tom is a 1960 psychological horror film by the British film director Michael Powell. The film takes its title from the character "peeping Tom" the voyeur in the tale of Lady Godiva, and is an horrific tale of voyeurism, serial murder and child abuse.
The film was written by the World War II cryptographer and polymath Leo Marks, and starred Carl Boehm and Anna Massey. The story revolves around a young man who murders women while using a portable movie camera to record their dying expressions of terror.
Powell was already an experienced director, famously in his partnership with Emeric Pressburger, but Peeping Tom was his first real horror film. After its release, Powell was ostracised by the film world, and never regained his former success. His offense, it seemed, was to have made a horror movie that was genuinely horrific. However, in 2004 the magazine Total Film named Peeping Tom the 24th greatest British movie of all time.
Some film critics have perceived this film to be the predecessor to the slasher films that would follow in the succeeding decades. In fact, Peeping Tom was released to theatres shortly before Alfred Hitchcock established the Slasher Film genre for American audiences with Psycho.
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