‘My face frightens me. My mask frightens me even more…’
A lifetime of watching horror has at once dulled my senses and destroyed my mind. There wasn’t much to destroy in the first place, but when I should have been going to University and reading books, I was instead taking in endless horror sequels and franchises. One depressing offshoot of this is that there aren’t many horror films left that I haven’t already seen. Rarer still, a film in the genre that is widely considered a classic. Eyes Without a Face, a masterwork of French cinema, is one of those rare, exotic beasts that I was yet to tame. Until now…
Doctor Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) is a physician by day and mad scientist by night. When his daughter Christiane has her face destroyed in a horrific car accident, the doctor responds in a way that any good father would, by practicing complicated skingraft surgery on dogs and stealing the faces of various young women in order to restore his daughter’s former beauty.
There are various reasons why it has taken me so long to watch Georges Franju’s horror masterpiece. You have to be in the mood for both a black and white film and subtitles, but Eyes Without a Face is a surprisingly unchallenging watch in some ways. It evokes both Aesop’s Fables and the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm in both its grim simplicity and its dark undertones, and its far reaching influence can be spotted in everything from Edward Scissorhands to the Halloween franchise (director John Carpenter cited Christiane’s mask as a part inspiration for Michael Myers’ visage).
The strangely hypnotic score underpins a film of fine performances and inventive cinematography with Franju using every trick of the light at his disposal to drape the cityscapes of Paris in an eerie darkness. Other than classic fairy tales, the sinister ruminations of gothic literature also loom large as a searing inspiration, with Genessier sharing more than a couple of strands of DNA with that other famous mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein.
Eyes Without a Face deserves its reputation as a classic of the genre and I’m glad I finally got round to seeing it. Every fairytale needs a moral. Be careful what you wish for seems as good a sentiment as any…