While I was having a patented Lay In Bed All Sunday Morning session, I watched Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom”, a British proto-slasher that was banned in the UK for a long time. It was beautifully made with a well written script, obviously hugely Hitchcock-influenced but for the most part it apes him successfully, which is to say that it follows the formula for a great thriller. It came out the same year as Psycho and bears many similarities, so there are obvious comparisons, but this movie is unique in many ways - enough to set it apart.
The most interesting aspect I would say is the ambiguity that the tone and character arc for the killer-protagonist is. I think it’s easy to mess up the “do I sympathize for him even though I know he’s a villain?”-dynamic with movies like these, but this one does it nearly perfectly and probably set the standard for many that followed as well.
It was also definitely interesting to see a movie that depicted haughty-toity British people, with that old celluloid technicolor look, in very sleazy subject matter (especially for the time, so it’s no shock it was so divisive in the still very stuffy British popular culture... this was like 15 or so years before the infamous “video nasty” campaigning). It was made by someone who had a great deal of experience making films, so the allegorical content related to the killer filming his victims, and his camera obsessions, shone through (to me) as a self-critique of genre films and filmmakers.