Unlike many of the spookers that we talk about in this hallowed lecture hall, Les Yeux Sans Visage is not one that I discovered walking behind the rows at my local VHS rental shop when I was nine. Instead, I was shown this for the first time by one Micah Bucey, a former New York actor who is now the pastor of Judson Church in Washington Square, when I was somewhere in the post-Vassar but pre-Drama Desk years of my early adulthood. And like a clinical Cocteau film that is an indictment of the French bourgeois society, which can't confront the horror and trauma of its not too distant past and is loaded with callbacks to the Nazi occupation, the story of a month in the life of the Genessiers unfolds in almost exactly 90 visually poetic, dreamlike, melodramatic, gothic fairy tale minutes. It explores the psychology of darkness from a complex moral point of view.

I would say that it continues a clear French literary obsession with the face and the tradition of disfigured and masked heroes and anti-heroes, like those in Dumas" Man in the Iron Mask, or Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs, and perhaps, most directly, Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera. And of course I say most directly because there it ties neatly into cinema. And I think like Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, like Almodovar's The Skin I Live In, like Goodnight Mommy, dare I say like The Human Centipede, it traffics in the subjects of science and medicine, or their perversion, playing into the fears we have of doctors and surgery, the things that kind of make our pulses pound in waiting rooms, regardless of what country we happen to be in. It makes those concepts feel grotesque and amoral.

Like those films, Eyes Without a Face concerns itself with ideas of ideas of identity and its creation, its recreation and its destruction. Director Georges Franju said things like, “My goal is always reality and I cross it with tenderness. Violence is not the goal, but a means of achieving it. Violence is the argument. I believe there's nothing but the truth, whether it's beautiful or not, and consequently only the truth matters.” Franju once described a medical documentary about trepanning as not a horror film, but as a terror film, which is worse. What came of his philosophies, crossed with a certain degree of surrealist visual storytelling by way of Bunuel and Dali, caused an uproar and resulted in decades of dismissal, recuts, bad dubs, and worse drive-in pairings before it was ultimately reappraised as a work of horror art. And while much contemporaneous criticism called it puerile or compared it to, “Tennessee Williams in one of his more abnormal moods,” Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called it “Perhaps the most austerely elegant horror film ever made.” Cahier de Cinema didn't think it was a horror film at all.

I would say that there's some subtle misdirection at work here that I think would have the full support of, say, a Gretchen McNeil. The story is of the obsessive love of a genius father for his only child whom he has effectively destroyed and the lengths that he's willing to go to restore her. And it's in following that idea to its most dangerous extreme that we find the true horror of Eyes Without a Face.

As far as I'm concerned, it had me at the first glimpse of Alida Valli as Louise. She'd begun her career in 1935. I'd seen her in things like The Killer Nun and of course in a standout role in Dario Argento’s Suspiria as Miss Tanner. When we first see her in this film through the wet windshield around two and a half minutes in. Valli could be a slightly zaftig Sarah Paulson in a Ryan Murphy period piece. She evokes Marion Crane from Hitchcock's Psycho, which was released the same year. But when she checks her rear view mirror, it starts to become apparent that Louise and Marion Crane are on opposite sides of the same coin. Each is kind of a distorted, wet. windshield version of the other. One is a not exactly innocent victim and the other is something else entirely. Louise's desire for freedom from her grisly obligations is never stated, but it's suggested really beautifully in moments where, for example, her eyes follow an airplane flying over the Genessier family crypt.

As Génessier, Pierre Brasseur feels like a more refined Dr. Moreau. I would say that he exploits his notoriety and his position in society to get away with the kind of work that he's doing. His donors, shall we call them, seem to be from lower social classes than he is, but so are the police. In his walled-in country estate, Génessier is a kind of gentler Dr. Heiter from The Human Centipede. But this film shows us that the suburbs were no kinder in 1960 than they were in 2009, and that bad things happened in good houses.

Génessier is obviously a complex character. We see him being very kind, for example, to a boy and his mother at his clinic. And we know from whence springs his villainy. He knows that what he's doing is wrong, but he can't back away from that wrongness. He admits that he's wronged and continues to wrong Louise, whose duty to Génessier comes from a similar place. He's restored her face and she will do anything he asks to show her gratitude. And her seams are still visible beneath the bourgeois camouflage of five strands of pearls, which are not unlike the collar a dog's master might make it wear.

I think it's also perhaps worth pointing out that when Louise is in Paris and she finds the character of Edna waiting online at the theater, they're seeing lonesco's Victim du Devoir, or Victims of Duty, which is an absurdist existential one-act play, not one of lonesco's best-known, but it's set in a bourgeois house, and it concerns, among other things, theater and performance and the relationships of parents and children. It's the comforts of the bourgeoisie that Louise uses to lure Edna to the Génessier villa. And it's especially appropriate or symbolic, I think, given that both Génessier and Louise could be described as victims of duty: Génessier's to [his daughter] Christiane, Louise's to Génessier. These are ideas of misplaced devotion and distorted love.

On the surface, Alida Valli is dangerous. She's got a hard expression and wild eyes and a very purposeful stride. But below the surface, it's Edith Scob that we need to worry about. Christiane would not look out of place at the Rothschild's famous masquerade or Truman Capote's Black and White Ball. Her mask is this object of really strange beauty. It's plaintive and it's expressionless and it gives her an aspect like that of Garbo at the end of Queen Christina where we can project any emotion onto it that we as viewers perceive. Her eyes plead from behind it. It's so beautifully made. It's like a slightly idealized version of Scob's own face, only just uncanny enough to unsettle us. Christiane is delicate and she's ghostly. She's both present and not present. She's living and dead. Masks and the concept of identity go hand in hand, and beneath the sort of placid plasticity of this prosthesis, when she's wearing her silk banyan and floating through this house without mirrors, she's lost what we understand to be her identity—the identity of a woman in France in 1959. And she is slowly and beautifully going insane.

In the third act, she describes her own face as if she were describing a mask, feeling like rubber and being hateful to the touch. Maskless, she seeks out her transplant, greedily exploring the face on the slab with her hands in this moment that we know in 2023 is going to reveal Christiane's true face. Through the ether-induced haze, Edna experiences Christiane’s face in much the same way that Mary Philbin experiences Lon Chaney's unmasked face in the 1925 Phantom of the Opera. It's made more horrible by being less distinct. And in this, Franju is kind of telling us that whatever is behind the mask is more horrible than whatever he can show us. And our imaginations fill in the shadows. Edith Scob gives a breathtaking performance in this role—and a very theatrical one too. She operates like a classical tragedy and an actor who is both hobbled and aided by the fracturing of the tools in her arsenal of expression. I think that Scob is akin to Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby. She's this kind of fashionable waif being controlled by the men around her.

I think that aesthetically, this is an incredibly stylish film. It's loaded with really solid visual storytelling, and that storytelling is deployed via dreamy cinematography. I think that it also goes with that saying that nightmares are dreams too. Genessier's secret operating theater is straight out of The Black Cat, which we talked about here at Scare U. To bring it into a more contemporary frame of reference, the operating theater is out of Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story, season two. There's a Fornazetti Cammei table lamp in Jacques’ flat, for crying out loud. So style is indulged.

From our vantage point, the performance of the surgery itself, which is sort of a hallmark moment, a moment that everybody thinks of when they think of Eyes Without a Face, is probably more and less brutal than it would have been to an audience in 1960. Because while the doctor is certainly drawing blood and he's slicing up a woman's beautiful face on screen with medical detail, he's also doing it without the kind of anesthetized rigor that we now understand is required now that face transplantation is becoming more and more real. This is more ‘low-tech Travolta’ than it is bleeding-edge microsurgery.

I think the score of this film is really odd. It feels totally period appropriate, but perhaps genre mismatched. Many films from the 60s, especially the stranger, creepier, more esoteric ones, are frequently scored with heavy doses of harpsichord. In Dead Ringer from 1963 with Bette Davis and Bette Davis, the harpsichord is chilling and straightforward, and sets us up for a lurid, noir-ish revenge tale. But here, the opening strains feel a bit comedic. And I think that the first time viewer probably assumes that Larry David is about to curb their enthusiasm. But as we go on, the score begins to feel more contrapuntal and ironic than comedic. I think it's to their credit that both the director and composer know when to abandon music altogether in favor of organic sound. The conclusion of the film is foreshadowed by the sound of barking dogs that are kept mostly out of sight, but build a palpable tension. The surgery is underscored only by the dialogue of the operating theater, “scalpel,” “clamp.” And of course it features a Citroen DS, which is the car of choice for eccentric villains from Gaumont to Disney Studios.

And I wondered as I watched it again to prepare for this conversation, Was Franju predicting the future? The first partial face transplant was performed in France by a French plastic surgeon. The techniques used were developed and tested on dogs. Did we know in 1959 about the probability of the human bodies rejecting foreign tissue? Or was he just inspiring legions of future imitators? Because without Chrstiane and the impassiveness of her blank mask, would John Carpenter have accessorized Michael Myers with one almost twenty years later?

To hear our take on Eyes Without a Face, click here.

Bradford Louryk