CREDITS PEEPING TOM, 1960 dir: Michael Powell Carl Boehm Anna Massey Shirley Anne Field Moira Shearer Brenda Bruce

“Do you know what the most frightening thing in the world is? It's fear.”

Reviled on release, Michael Powell's disturbing serial killer movie is now rightly lauded as one of the great British films.

Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), the disturbed son of a sadistic film-maker, has a fear fixation and a lethal movie camera, which he uses to kill women while filming their reaction to their own deaths. Like I said, disturbing.

Mark Lewis’s house stood at 5 Melbury Road, off High Street Kensington near Holland Park. Although its neighbour, number 7, still stands, number 5 was demolished to make way for a block of flats.

Peeping Tom location: The home movies: Director Michael Powell's house, 8 Melbury Road

Director Powell brings a creepy self-involvement to the film. He not only plays Mark's sadistically obsessed father, who wields the camera in the film's ‘home movie’ scenes, but his own home was just across the street from the killer's house, at 8 Melbury Road, which is still there. An impressive Norman Shaw Victorian artist’s property with enormous windows, the house’s garden was used for home movie footage.

Mark’s first victim, Dora (Brenda Bruce), is picked up in Newman Passage, just off Oxford Street, W1, and takes the killer up to her room above the Newman Arms, 23 Rathbone Street alongside. After remaining virtually unchanged since filming, the exterior of the pub has recently been given a bright, new – and horrible – repaint.

Peeping Tom film location: Furtive photos at the newsagent: now Caffe V, Rathbone Place, W1

The newsagent, where apparently respectable gent Miles Malleson (who also played the Caliph in Powell’s classic The Thief of Baghdad) buys The Times and The Telegraph – plus a selection of adult photographs for five shillings each – and above which Mark Lewis has his studio, is now a restaurant, Caffe V, 29 Rathbone Place at the southwest corner of Percy Street.