20 Cult British Films You Need To See Before You Die

8. Peeping Tom (1960)

Pioneering horror film which was so shocking to the film audience at the time it was released, it received a savage mauling by the critics and effectively ended the hitherto well-respected Michael Powell's career. The film follows Mark, a nice, shy young man with a dark secret past time - he likes to kill women on camera and capture the expression on their faces as they die. Apparently Mark's psychopathology derives from the fact that his father used him as a guinea pig as a child and subjected him to scary experiments while capturing it all on camera. Peeping Tom was merely ahead of its time but it was also genuinely disturbing for a horror flick in 1960. What Mark gets up to with these young women could be called 'snuff' and the film does indeed turn its audience into voyeurs. Hyperbolic criticism was levelled at Peeping Tom but it had a huge influence on aspiring film makers who watched it in the cinema - for example Martin Scorsese, who led a one man crusade to rehabilitate the film. Peeping Tom is now widely regarded as one of the greatest British horror movies ever made and it is a psychoanalyst's wet dream to deconstruct.