DVD Tuesday: Eyes Without a Face finds poetry in horror

• Jul 10, 2007 08:53 PM ET
• by Maitland McDonagh

DVD Tuesday: Eyes Without a Face defines the beauty in the darkness and gets under your skin like a fishhook.

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Long, long ago in a world far, far away, I spent years trying to see French filmmaker Georges Franju's poetic horror film Les Yeux Sans Visage/ Eyes Without a Face (1959). I'd seen pictures and read plot synopses. Everyone said it was great. But this was before consumer VCRs, let alone DVD or Tivo. It never showed up on TV or at any of my local revival houses and I lived in Manhattan during the golden age of revival houses.

I finally caught it when a college-age friend who "borrowed" the 16mm print that had been rented by the film department and projected it on a classroom wall for a select group of friends. And it was everything I could have hoped: Haunting, eerie, elegant, morbid, incredibly beautiful and deeply, deeply creepy. I subsequently saw it every time it showed up anywhere, bought the smudgy, deeply inferior VHS tape and snatched it up on DVD when Criterion released it in 2004, looking more gorgeous than ever.

The plot is the stuff of cheap 'n' nasty grindhouse fare (and was briefly released in US grindhouses, cut and retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus): Renowned plastic surgeon Dr. Genessier (veteran French actor Pierre Brasseur) accidentally disfigures his daughter, Christiane (willowy ingenue Edith Scob, still working regularly), in a car crash. Hoping to restore her beauty through full-face grafts, he fakes her death and begins kidnapping young women as donors. But each graft goes wrong: The new face looks flawless at first, then rots and sloughs away, leaving Christiane mutilated again, her raw flesh covered by an impassive white mask through which only her eyes are visible. But as with so many things, the raw material matters less than what you make of it, and Franju (best known before Eyes as a documentarian) took the standard horror tropes mad doctor, sinister experiments, isolated clinic, baying hounds, kidnapped coeds and fashioned a cool, troubling, B&W fable of night and fog, skeletal trees and gleaming wet streets. He never forgot he was making a horror film, even if he liked to say Eyes was actually "an anguish film," a thing of "horror in homeopathic doses."

The pivotal scene in which Genessier calmly marks off the perimeter of a girl's face, then gently rolls it off her skull is the stuff of nightmares. Not especially bloody, in fact, the marker may be worse than the scalpel, but the kind of thing that lodges in your memory and festers. And yet they pale next to the sight of Christine gliding through her own stolen life like a chic spirit, or wandering into the woods, arms arced gracefully from her sides and doves fluttering around her head.

Its influence is everywhere. The rip-offs, like Mansion of the Doomed (1976) and indefatigable schlockmeister Jesus Franco's Faceless (1988), with an all-star exploitation cast ranging from Telly Savalas, Christopher Mitchum and Helmut Berger to French porn star Brigitte Lahaie. The play within the movie Ringu 0: Baasudei (2000), the prequel to the original Ring (2000). Sissy Spacek's haunted, hand-flaring walk after the prom massacre in Carrie, David Cronenberg's early experiments in body horror.

And now that facial transplants are within the realm of possibility coincidentally, the first partial was done in France in 2005 Eyes Without a Face is spookier than ever.

PS: No, the score isn't an extended version of Luciano Michelini's "Frolic," the raucous theme for Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's an original composition by Maurice Jarre, and its carnie brashness is the perfect counterpoint to the film's stylish visuals.

But yes, the movie was the inspiration for Billy Idol's "Eyes Without a Face."

Things to consider:

Show everything or hint and let viewers' minds fill in the worst how do you prefer your horror?

What's your favorite horror film and why?

Have you ever been struck as much by the look of a horror movie as by the content?

Previously in DVD Tuesday

Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! - Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http:/ / community. tvguide. com/ thread. jspa? threadID= 800073953#comments"> Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases