The British critics who reviewed it in 1960 did not merely dislike it. They were horrified. They called it disgusting, depraved. The producers, panicked, pulled the film from distribution, cancelled its British release, and sold the negative to an obscure distributor. The director never fully worked in Britain again.

PEEPING TOM (1960) was Michael Powell's first solo feature after the end of his long partnership with Emeric Pressburger. The screenplay was written by Leo Marks, a wartime cryptographer who had spent the war selecting agents to operate behind enemy lines, people who would not hesitate to kill. He considered himself therefore unusually equipped to write a study in psychological compulsion.

The lead role had been intended for Laurence Harvey, who became unavailable after the success of Room at the Top. Powell cast the Austrian actor Karlheinz Böhm a serial killer who murders women while filming their fear.

Powell himself played the killer's father in the home movie sequences that explain the character's psychology. Powell's own son Columba played the killer as a child.

Martin Scorsese first heard of the film as a student, in a version so cut and degraded it was barely recognisable. He spent years tracking down a proper print. In 1979 he paid for Powell's flight to New York, which Powell could not otherwise have afforded, to attend the film's American re-release and hear a new audience respond to it.

Powell had described the film as "the most sincere of my films...almost a romantic film."

He also said it "truly ruined me."