Eyes Without a Face (1960)
HORROR-THON 2020 • POD PEOPLE
10/10
DIRECTOR: Georges Franju
STARRING: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel
RELEASED: 1960
RUNTIME: 1 hour, 30 minutes
WATCH ON: HBO Max, Criterion Channel
SCARE LEVEL: Low-level jump scares, high dread
WOULD I WATCH IT AGAIN?: Every October
A young woman drifts around a big country house in a smooth white mask with nothing on it but a pair of sad eyes. She wears a long silk robe. She doesn’t scream. She looks like she’s waiting for someone to tell her what century it is. The image is the whole reason this movie lives in your head for weeks.
Dr. Génessier is a celebrated Paris surgeon. His daughter Christiane’s face was destroyed in a car accident while he was driving. The world thinks she is missing and presumed dead. She’s actually locked away at the family estate, wearing that mask.
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The doctor is obsessed with fixing what he broke. His assistant Louise is a woman whose face he once repaired, and she owes him forever. She lures young women back to the house, and the doctor removes their faces to graft onto his daughter.
One graft seams to take, but the skin starts to fail and they’re back to square one. The police get suspicious and send a young woman as bait. That is when Christiane finally decides she’s done being her father’s project. She stabs Louise, frees the lab dogs her father has been experimenting on who aren’t in a forgiving mood, lets the doves out of their cages and walks off alone into the dark woods.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
I love this movie. It’s horror for people who say they don’t like horror. It’s slow, and it’s beautiful. Georges Franju shot it in black and white so crisp you could cut yourself into it. Maurice Jarre’s score sounds like a creepy carnival waltz. It’s still a horror, though. There’s a surgery scene in the middle where the camera doesn’t look away, and reportedly had audience members fainting at early screenings. It holds up, and I’m not ashamed to admit I often look away.
Christiane is the part I can’t shake. She barely speaks. She does her acting almost entirely with her eyes and posture behind a mask, with no expression that lives in your nightmares for a few days. She calls her fiancé just to hear his voice and hangs up without a word. It’s a scene that is so upsetting, it doesn’t compare to anything with a scalpel.
The mask has influenced everything from slasher villains to runway shows, and you can see why. It’s blank and eerie, but in a way beautiful. On a Halloween costume scale, it’s peak “I’m a film person.”
Yes, it’s also where the Billy Idol song title comes from.
Fun fact for your next dinner party
When released in the U.S. in 1962, it was heavily edited, dubbed in English, and was titled “The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus.” There is no character named Dr. Faustus in the film.