Mysterious skin
Still one of horror’s prime cuts…
EYES WITHOUT A FACE 15
1960 OUT NOW DUAL FORMAT
Georg es Franju’s skin-peeling chiller famously made seven people faint at its 1960 Edinburgh Film Festival screening. On release, it was reviled as an artist’s excursion into trash cinema. Nonetheless, this oddly lyrical tale of a plastic surgeon maiming kidnapped girls to restore his daughter’s monstrously damaged beauty is the first great surgical horror film. Only Franju’s second feature (after 1959’s harrowing psychiatric drama The Keepers aka Head Against The Wall), it’s ironically less bloody than arty abattoir expose Blood Of The Beasts (1949), which made his name. But Franju’s horror, as the well-made doc packaged here insists, is unsettling and faintly surreal, not a series of screaming shocks. Scripted by crimemasters Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, hot from their Les Diaboliques and Vertigo triumphs, the film has a unique mix of pulp story and visual poetry. Forbidden to include gore, animal experiments or mad-scientist shenanigans for fear of European censors, Franju included all three but with enviable delicacy.
Franju’s poetic and peculiar universe is the key to the film’s success, real and surreal all at once, with a genre mix that throws the viewer subtly off balance. Melodrama and crime thriller meet dark fairytale here as Louise ( The Third Man’s Alida Valli), the face-finding, girl-snatching secretary, roams Paris just ahead of the police. Meanwhile, Edith Scob’s masked heroine Christiane is both princess and prize experiment locked up in her father’s clinic. What gels it are Franju’s tense sequences of exquisite images carried along by Maurice Jarre’s jaunty waltz themes – Valli driving a mysteriously floppy passenger through an inky rainstorm, the scraping horror of a tomb being crowbarred.
By contrast the terrifyingly realistic faceremoval scene (“Pliers!”) is so visually unsparing and surgically accurate that it’s still a squirminducing experience. Yet Eyes Without A Face retains a subtly un-natural quality. Woods, car rides and even a café coffee chat are shot through with dread, their pearl-and-velvet monochrome luminous in this deft Blu-ray transfer. Deliberate but detached performances from Pierre Brasseur’s arrogant Genessier, and a guilt-ridden Valli keep things subdued but never naturalistic, as they plot and slice. Behind her eerily blank mask, Edith Scob is riveting, her eyes, gestures, and gliding walk conveying the anguish that her immobile face can’t. Tim Lucas’ classy chat track underlines the film’s pivotal position, resonating with Universal 1930s classics like Bride Of Frankenstein, and exerting a lasting influence on everything from Mario Bava and Jesus Franco’s ’60s Euro-horror, to John Carpenter’s Halloween and Leo Carax’s Holy Motors, which managed to lob in a masked Scob. An authoritative, meatily packaged release that’s positively cultural catnip
Kate Stables for horror lovers.
Extras › Commentary › Documentary › Short films › Featurette › Booklet