Steeped in voyeurism and anxiety, Peeping Tom is as unsettling today as it was in 1960. Carl Boehm delivers a haunting performance as Mark Lewis, a painfully withdrawn photographer and aspiring filmmaker whose childhood was shaped by psychological experimentation at the hands of his father. Mark channels his obsession with the camera into photographing pin-up models — and documenting their murders on 16mm as quasi-scientific snuff films. Powell crafted a film that forces viewers to confront the uneasy relationship between cinema, desire, and violence, but upon release, it was met with critical outrage. (In 1960, Dilys Powell excoriated its "vulgar squalor" and dismissed it as "essentially vicious" in the The Sunday Times, though she would recant decades later and proclaim it a "masterpiece.") The backlash fully derailed Powell's career, despite his earlier stature as one of Britain's most celebrated filmmakers. Today, Peeping Tom is recognized as a thrilling, disturbing, and beautiful landmark of psychological horror, a film that implicates its viewers as accessories to death-by-cinema. (Text courtesy of Chicago Film Society)

35mm from Rialto Pictures

Preceded by: "The Miracle of Change" (J. Leighton Pierce, 1984) – 7 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema