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A 1960 black and white French-Italian co-production hardly seems like horror gold; one would assume it has dated badly and fails to scare or convince, but in reality it seems scarier than ever. Eyes Without a Face is a film of subtlety more than gore, lighting and strange imagery that haunts the viewer and makes this truly the stuff of nightmares, and is a film that has inspired cinema and art ever since, even if all too few people even know its name.
To start with, something about the film’s premise feels disconcertingly modern. A brilliant surgeon crashes his car and leaves his daughter Louise horrifically scarred and in need of a new face, for which he starts abducting participants for a transplant. This is the sort of surgical horror that one associates more with recent cinema and not something over fifty years old and in monochrome. And the film is so much more than just this; it is about identity, individuality, and the disgust of society. We never truly see the face of scarred Louise, only a blurry image from the viewpoint of one of her father’s victims. The shots awkwardness and repulsion seems to show the rejection from and monstrous nature of the outside world, not Louise’s own delicate movements. Her father, acting out of the guilt he feels beneath a harsh cold exterior, becomes ever more monstrous yet at the same time cannot quite bring himself to kill his victims. The film is thus at times a creation of brilliant and strange contradictions, leading its director Georges Franju to claim it was about anguish not horror that becomes ever more terrifying. It seems too that he was onto something, for as the film progresses this becomes worse and worse until its eventual mysterious crescendo. And there are still moments of pure horror, such as a surgical scene that is still hard to watch no even by today’s standards.
Yet it is the film’s strange and haunting imagery that you remember most, for this is a film that still after all this time looks fantastic, each shot lit with love and care to make it astonishing. Working alongside its own evocative and poetic imagery, most noticeably the cold white mask Louise wears to hide her shattered visage, with only her beautiful eyes shining through. The mask is haunting and cold making her look strangely innocent and almost doll-like throughout the entire piece, and something that seems to have entered popular conscientiousness even if the original source is oft forgotten. Yet throughout the imagery of this film is hauntingly beautiful until its unforgettable climax that is both strangely beautiful and terrifying, searing itself into the back of the viewer’s mind. Along with this comes the soundtrack again, eerily beautiful at times and almost jolly at others, acting only to disturb the audience further and add to the picture’s bizarre lyricism.
In its day the film understandably horrified many of the great and good. The Financial Times claimed that it was ‘the most horrid film you could ever fear to see’ and there were many other such shocking reviews and numerous walkouts at screenings; yet it’s stood the test of time remarkably well. For though its images have been copied time and again they never match the original, lacking its unique poetic sense and thus pale in comparison. Eyes Without A Face does not have the fame or infamy of many other iconic films but that is exactly what it is, and it remains a strange, disturbing and maddeningly beautiful work.
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