Peeping Tom

Released within months of Psycho and destroyed by the same critics who would later canonise it. Michael Powell had made The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death; after this he did not direct a significant British film again.

The reason is not the violence, which is minimal. It is that Mark kills women while filming them, with a mirror fitted to the camera so they watch themselves die, and the film is completely explicit about what that makes the person in the cinema seat. Powell cast himself as the father who tormented Mark as a child, and cast his own son as the young Mark, which is either brave or unwell.

Scorsese spent years pushing for its reissue. It is now taught. In 1960 one critic wrote that the only satisfactory way to dispose of it would be to shovel it up and flush it down the drain.