Eyes Without a Face (1960) Georges Franju

Eyes Without a Face (1960) Georges Franju [1:30]

Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face may be a half-century old black-and-white horror film in danger of getting buried among more current scares, but it still knows how to deliver top-notch suspense and some disturbing chills. 

Professor Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) is a brilliant but arrogant plastic surgeon obsessed with restoring his daughter Christiane’s (Edith Scob) face, mutilated after an auto accident. Genessier, with the help of an assistant (Alida Valli), kidnaps beautiful young women and surgically removes their faces, hoping to replace Christiane’s face with one of theirs. 

Comparisons to Frankenstein are, of course, inevitable; the idea is so familiar that you might be tempted to skip this one and move on to something more modern. But how many new ideas do we really see in contemporary horror films? Aren’t so many of them variations on a theme? 

What separates Eyes Without a Face is Franju’s atmospheric, gothic cinematography, a consideration of both the beauty and horror of things hidden. The film contains only one scene that’s truly disturbing in both 1960 and 2013, but the power of the story lies in its sustained, almost unbearable tension.  

Eyes Without a Face arrives as a Criterion DVD and Blu-ray upgrade on October 15, 2013, just in time for Halloween. This rerelease contains several extras including:

Blood of the Beasts, Franju’s 1949 documentary about Paris slaughterhouses

Archival interviews with Franju on the making of the documentary, the horror genre and cinema in general

A new interview with Edith Scob (Blu-ray only)

Excerpts from a 1985 documentary about Eyes Without a Face called Les grands-pères du crime 

A booklet with essays by novelist Patrick McGrath and film historian David Kalat

4/5