Peeping Tom is a psychological thriller film released in 1960 and directed by Michael Powell. The film is about a lonely and socially awkward young man, Mark Lewis (played by Carl Boehm), who works as a cinematographer in a film studio during the day. At night, however, he leads a secret life as a voyeuristic serial killer who captures the terrified reactions of his female victims on film, filming their deaths as he murders them.
Mark's obsession with fear is deeply rooted in his traumatic childhood experiences, particularly his father's experiments on him as a child, which involved filming Mark's reactions to various stimuli – including fear – for a scientific study. As a result, Mark developed a fetish for fear and a compulsion to record the reactions of his victims as he kills them, recreating the same experiments his father performed on him.
As the film progresses, Mark forms a friendship with Helen Stephens (played by Anna Massey), a young woman who lives in the same apartment building as him. Helen is drawn to Mark's shy and thoughtful demeanor, and she develops a crush on him. Mark, however, is more interested in Helen's vulnerability and fear, and he invites her to his apartment to watch the footage he has collected of his murders.
Horrified by what she sees, Helen confronts Mark about his activities, but he refuses to stop. Mark becomes increasingly unstable as the police close in on him, and he begins to see himself as a victim of his own obsession. In the film's climactic scene, Mark attempts to recreate the experiments his father performed on him by filming his own death as he is confronted by the police.
Peeping Tom was initially poorly received upon its release, with critics attacking the film's subject matter and the graphic nature of its violence. However, the film has since become recognized as a groundbreaking work of British cinema, often cited as a precursor to the slasher genre and a critique of the male gaze.