Eyes Without a Face

Georges Franju, co-founder of the Cinémathèque française, made Eyes Without a Face in 1960, and produced one of the strangest and most beautiful films in the European horror canon. Where the genre traded in cheap shocks, Franju aimed for something closer to a dark fairy tale, and the censorship controversies and fainting audiences that greeted it across Europe only sharpened its mystique.

Pierre Brasseur plays the eminent surgeon whose love for his disfigured daughter has curdled into monstrous obsession; Édith Scob, her face hidden behind an eerily serene mask, gives the daughter a ghostly, drifting poignancy. Maurice Jarre's lilting, almost fairground score plays against imagery of clinical horror, and the film's surgical centrepiece — filmed with documentary calm — remains genuinely difficult to watch. Yet the dominant mood is melancholy and dreamlike rather than merely frightening, the cruelty wrapped in a strange, sorrowful beauty.

Initially dismissed by some critics as exploitation, the film has come to be regarded as a landmark, its influence visible in everything from John Carpenter's masked killers to the work of Pedro Almodóvar, who paid open homage in The Skin I Live In. Poetic, tender and unforgettable, it is horror raised to the level of art — a film whose central image, that blank and gentle mask, drifting through the surgeon's silent house, refuses ever to leave the mind once it has been seen.