The killer, Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), comes across as a nice, quiet guy, but his life revolves around voyeurism: he's a focus puller on a movie set, he moonlights by taking photographs of scantily clad women for the corner druggist to sell, he wants to be a director. We soon learn he's the son of a notable psychologist, who was studying the effects of fear, and who filmed his son during many seemingly cruel experiments.
If the script is often clever, the casting is brilliant. Lewis catches the eye of Helen (Anna Massey, daughter of one of Powell's favorite actors, Raymond Massey), whose blind mother can "see" his true nature most clearly ("I don't trust a man who walks quietly"). Powell cast Moira Shearer, star of his film The Red Shoes, as one victim, and, in the role of the director of the film within the film, he cast a blind actor. Most unsettling, he cast his own son in the home movies of the father's cruel experiments, and himself as the father. Maybe the brutal cynicism of Powell's message was too much for society in 1960, but as the predecessor of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and TV's Death Scenes: Caught on Tape!, it should find a good home today.
