Carl Boehm playing Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom, U.K., 1959
Psycho, with its magnificently pitiable madman Norman Bates, came out a year later, and there's no question about that film's greatness and influence. But this icky Brit horror film, written by Leo Marks and directed by Michael Powell, deserves inclusion as an early study in psychosexual sadism. Young Mark's little quirk is that he can feel erotic fulfillment only when he films his female victims as he murders them. The movie camera, Powell says, is a fatal weapon, in a crime committed for the pleasure of... you, dear complicitous viewer.