Mark Lewis is a focus puller at a film studio who tops up his wages taking glamour photographs in a room above a newsagent. By night he films women as he kills them, chasing a look of pure fear. The habit comes from a childhood spent as his scientist father’s subject. Downstairs live Helen and her blind mother. Mark grows close to Helen. The question is how long before the camera turns on her.

1960 was a pivotal year for horror, with Psycho in America and Peeping Tom this side of the pond. Both films rest on ideas that felt almost unheard-of then. Psycho was a hit and locked in Hitchcock’s reputation. Peeping Tom was torn apart by critics, quietly buried by its distributors, and all but ended Michael Powell’s standing in British cinema. Years later Martin Scorsese saw a proper print — the widely shown US version had been slashed to pieces — and started telling anyone who would listen that it was a masterpiece ahead of its time. He helped get it into the 1979 New York Film Festival and onto a US re-release under his name. After that, the critical weather changed.

Peeping Tom is a masterpiece. It feels like a walk through the underside of London and of the film industry itself. Voyeurism, the abuse of a child in the name of science, paid-for glamour work, a young cameraman building a film out of dying faces: heady material now, and radioactive in 1960. Powell took the risk and paid for it. It is satisfying that the film outlasted the first reviews.

Powell’s direction and Carl Boehm’s cold, inward Mark do most of the damage. Anna Massey is the human temperature in the house: curious, kind, and in more danger than she knows. There is a particular chill in Mark’s home movies of himself as a boy, and in the way the camera is not just a witness but a weapon. I cannot think of another British film quite like it.

It also turns the gaze back on us. Watching Peeping Tom is a kind of peeking. Mark and Norman Bates even rhyme: polite, ordinary, and watching.

It has been called a slasher before the slasher, and you can see why once Halloween arrives. The killer’s eye is already the camera.

A genuinely disturbing film, and one that now has the reputation it always deserved.

5 out of 5 stars