OK, running more than a little bit late for the “Quelle horreur!” round table, but…well…some French excuse. I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve finally pulled my act together and completed my entry.
Eyes Without a Face/Les yeux sans visage
“With a few exceptions scattered throughout the past hundred years or so of feature filmmaking, the French never really embraced the horror film. Instead, the French response was cinema fantastique. Certainly it had elements of horror, sometimes more overt than others, but more traditionally recognizable characteristics of horror were mixed into a dreamy mist that also included romance, science fiction, mystery, and melodrama all spun with a disregard for logical narrative structure and progression in favor of a dreamlike (or nightmare) quality. Of the many films that make up the body of cinema fantastique, few have developed an enduring reputation, good and bad, quite like that of Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage, aka Eyes without a Face.
Keith Allison is the chief Bacchanologist at Teleport City.
#1 by JASON FARRELL on March 26, 2015 - 11:43 am
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I saw this for the first time not that long ago and, despite the fact that Lucio Fulci is in my top 4 favorite directors and that DAY OF THE DEAD is one of my favorite films, the face surgery scene really affected me in a way that a gore scene hasn’t since TAXI DRIVER. It’s one thing when an exploitation hacks do it, and quite another when you’re watching a film that is about as close to perfectly directed then you can get.
Even with that perfect direction, I can’t say that this will ever be a favorite film – its far too sad and cruel.
#2 by The Rev. on March 27, 2015 - 12:33 pm
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I still haven’t seen this, and really should. Especially since I caught The Awful Dr. Orloff a year or so ago, which is basically Jesus Franco’s version of this movie (based on what I’ve read of this one).
#3 by El Santo on March 30, 2015 - 9:25 am
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There’s an entire mini-genre of Eyes Without a Face copies. The Italians (unsurprisingly) seem to have gotten there first with Atom Age Vampire, and Franco was still at it at least as late as 1988, when he made Faceless. The Horrible Dr. Hichcock takes an unmistakable detour into Eyes Without a Face territory, too, at the end, and if you look closely, you can even see a bit of the Franju movie in Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory. I’m sure there are a few more examples that I’m forgetting, but you get the point.