Eyes Without a Face

If ​The Night of the Hunter (1955) is the most savagely beautiful fairy tale in the history of movies, Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face is a close second. The contradictory tone of Franju’s film—it’s chilly and tragic, lurid and graceful—is essential to its ethereal horror, a lingering unease as solemn as it is terrifying. Like many of the best horror movies, it holds the awful corruptibility of man in one hand and an empathetic pity in the other, taking advantage of the horror genre’s potential to show human beings at their best and worst extremes.

The story is a pulpy blend of mad-scientist butchery and damsel-in-distress scares. The stoic, gravel-voiced Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), an expert on heterograft surgery, is called in to identify the corpse of his vanished daughter, whose face is badly disfigured; he claims the dead woman at the morgue is his daughter Cristiane, thus prolonging the torment of another man, Mr. Tessot, whose daughter has also disappeared. 

When Génessier returns to his Gothic mansion in the suburbs of Paris, however, the film offers its first cruel twist: Cristiane is in fact alive, detained by her father and forced to wear a mask to cover her badly scarred face (the result of a car accident while her father was driving). The previous scene between Dr. Génessier and Tessot becomes heartbreaking in retrospect, as we realize the woman in the morgue was likely Tessot’s daughter, though he’ll go on clinging to the hope that she’s alive (the first of many instances in which the film’s chills are rooted in identifiable human despair). Génessier, when he’s not performing medical tests on the army of dogs he’s chained up in a subterranean kennel, has taken to abducting beautiful, blue-eyed girls with the help of his assistant, Louise (Alida Valli), and attempting surgeries in order to remove their faces and graft them onto his daughter. No surgery has yet been successful, though this only intensifies Génessier’s madness and deepens Cristiane’s sorrow.

Dr. Génessier remains an enigma throughout the film: while there are glimmers of his pain and tenderness (particularly regarding an injured young boy in his hospital who needs life-threatening brain surgery), he treats Cristiane (Edith Scob) more as a captor than a father and is unable to view human beings as anything more than surgical-experiment guinea pigs. The character is portrayed as a mad scientist more than a haunted, lonely father, but regardless he’s a villain who demonstrates the frailty of human will and morality. Cristiane remains the film’s most poignant and sympathetic character, especially during a morbid climax that leads to an ironic, grisly fate for Dr. Génessier.

Eyes Without a Face was produced by Jules Borkon, a successful producer who had noted the popularity of the Hammer horror films and sought to initiate a new string of horror productions in France. For his first project, he bought the rights to Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's novel and enlisted Jean Redon and Claude Sautet to adapt the screenplay; Boileau-Narcejac, as they were known, had also written the novels on which Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Clouzot’s Diabolique were based. The dreamy surrealism and elegant depiction of human desire from those two classics continue on to Eyes Without a Face. 

Borkon convinced Georges Franju, who had become celebrated for a series of candid, troubling documentaries during the 1950s, to make Eyes Without a Face his second fiction feature. Franju, a longtime admirer of such fantastical directors as Méliès and Feuillade, eagerly agreed, hoping to bring legitimacy to a horror genre that was often deemed inferior by French critics (a deprecation that was obvious from Eyes Without a Face’s middling critical response in 1960). The one-of-a-kind Franju, with his blend of documentary bluntness and fondness for spectacular stories, was the perfect choice to helm the film: it’s as though a photojournalist has stumbled into a gorgeous nightmare, observing everything with grim fascination and abject disgust. One of the most unsettling examples is a series of still photographs, edited into a montage through time-lapse dissolves, depicting another failed heterograft as Cristiane’s initially pristine new face devolves into a mass of pustules and dead skin. The moment is both tragic and disturbing, though it’s conveyed by Franju in a series of nondescript frontal photographs that might have been taken by a medical examiner.

Franju relies heavily on his collaborations with cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan and composer Maurice Jarre. Schüfftan had shot a number of majestic, innovative films since the silent era, including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis ​(1927), for which Schüfftan developed a special effects process utilizing miniature sets and mirrors to illustrate that film’s futuristic city. In Eyes Without a Face, Schüfftan films much of the action with clinical detachment (even a bloodstained murder late in the film is composed of simple reverse-angle medium shots) while sudden jolts in perspective provide truly unnerving scares. The best example is a low-angle POV from the perspective of a woman strapped to an operating table: she wakes from anaesthesia to see an unmasked Cristiane standing over her, glimpsing her disfigured face from a drug-induced haze. Maurice Jarre, meanwhile, relies upon two musical motifs, a jaunty waltz and a more somber theme for Cristiane, aurally conveying the movie’s sad, off-kilter tone (much as he would do for Franju’s Judex remake three years later). 

Somehow, Eyes Without a Face made it past French censorship boards in early 1960, though it still generated a great deal of outrage and traumatized audiences when it was released. At its first film festival showings, many viewers walked out or even fainted, especially during a heterograft scene that unflinchingly observes Dr. Génessier’s surgery: the special effects are primitive but the effect is jaw-dropping as the doctor removes a poor victim’s face, with no visual cutaways or musical score to provide reprieve. In terms of onscreen gore, Eyes Without a Face is considerably graphic, but it’s effective not because of its violence but because of its impassive tone and emotional subtext: we’re not simply watching another mad serial killer, but an egomaniac dealing with grief whose experiments are filmed with icy matter-of-factness.

1960 might be deemed the year in which modern horror began: within four months of each other, Eyes Without a Face, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, and Hitchcock’s Psycho were released in France, the U.K., and the U.S. respectively. Cumulatively, these three movies changed the way audiences thought about horror, hero and victim, author and audience. All three are groundbreaking in their own way, but Eyes Without a Face might be the most distressing, a grisly fairy tale that somehow found its way into our own real world. Franju explained it best when he said of the film’s tone, “it’s a quieter mood than horror…more internal, more penetrating.” Indeed, Eyes Without a Face was one of the instigators of a great tradition in French horror—continuing through  Repulsion (1965) and Inside (2007), among others—that weds intense genre thrills to a somber portrait of humanity in despair. The scariest movies, Franju reminds us, are the ones that emphasize what’s so human about horror.

Originally published by Joyless Creatures (October 6, 2014). 

Eyes Without a Face

Grade: A–

Runtime: 90m.
Countries: France/Italy
Premiere: January 11, 1960 (France)
US Release: October 24, 1962

Director: Georges Franju
Producer: Jules Borkon
Writers: Jean Redon, Pierre Gascar (dialogue), Pierre Boileau (novel), Thomas Narcejac (novel), Claude Sautet (adaptation)
Music: Maurice Jarre
Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan
Editor: Gilbert Natot
Cast: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Alexandre Rignault, Beatrice Altariba, Charles Blavette, Claude Brasseur, Michel Etcheverry, Yvette Etievent, René Génin, Lucien Hubert