8 Chilling Old-Hollywood Movies You Need To See

Upon its release in 1960, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom was greeted with absolute scorn from British critics and dismissed as a "Psycho cash-in" by American audiences. But this film is far rom that, and deserves so much more.

We follow Mark Lewis, a movie cameraman with a disturbing compulsion. Following years of "scientific" abuse into the effects of fear by his father, Mark has become obsessed with capturing fear on film and sets about murdering women to do so.

Peeping Tom did so much for horror cinema, but the resulting outcry over the film being "obscene" and voyeuristic tends to eclipse that. As Scream 4 rightly states, Peeping Tom was the first film to give an audience a murderer's perspective, a trait so common in the horror-slasher genre today.

Aside from its impact on cinema, Peeping Tom is also a wonderfully written and performed character study into a disturbed mind and dares to show us what caused the dysfunction. It was all too much for British audiences, who shunned the film as crass and disturbing.

Audiences we much kinder to Hitchcock's very similarly themed Psycho, and Peeping Tom was left to languish under the label of schlock. The movie still hasn't received all its dues for being ahead of its time, being masterfully made and daring to dive deep into the depths of disturbance... But we're getting there.