The Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom is a 1960 British psychological horror-thriller film directed by Michael Powell, written by Leo Marks, and starring Carl Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey and Maxine Audley. The film revolves around a serial killer who murders women while using a portable film camera to record their dying expressions of terror, putting his footage together into a snuff film used for his own self-pleasure. Its title derives from the expression "Peeping Tom", which describes a voyeur. The film's controversial subject matter and its extremely harsh reception by critics had a severely negative impact on Powell's career as a director in the United Kingdom. However, it attracted a cult following, and in later years, it has been re-evaluated and is now widely considered a masterpiece, a progenitor of the contemporary slasher film, and the grandfather of found footage films. The British Film Institute named it the 78th-greatest British film of all time, and in 2017 a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers and critics for Time Out magazine saw it ranked the 27th-best British film ever. The music score was written by Brian Easdale and performed by Australian pianist Gordon Watson.