14. Peeping Tom - Murder Through the Lens (1960)
Released in the same year as Psycho and grappling similar psychosexual issues in the killer as Psycho, Peeping Tom famously took an absolute mauling from the critics who saw it as thinly veiled perverted pornography and it sunk the career of director Michael Powell. Of course as the years have passed, the film has been reappraised as a suspenseful horror classic but looking at some of the kill scenes, it is easy to see how a naive 1960 audience found it controversial. The first scene in the film is a big can of controversial worms. Mark Lewis (played by Karlheinz Bohm) meets a prostitute. Little does she know that he is secretly filming her with a camera under his coat. He follows her into her house, murders her and we see him watching the film later on with the credits rolling. He's no Peeping Tom! He's a Snuff bunny! I'm not sure if the legend of snuff was floating about at that time, if not, director Powell was a pioneer and he created a corker of a film in Peeping Tom which still chills us to this very day.