Eyes Without a Face

Georges Franju, co-founder of the Cinémathèque française, made Eyes Without a Face in 1960, and it is one of the strangest and most beautiful films in the European horror canon. The genre then 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, and 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 images of clinical horror, and the surgical centrepiece, filmed with documentary calm, is still hard to watch. Even so, the dominant mood is melancholy and dreamlike more than frightening, and the cruelty comes wrapped in a strange, sorrowful beauty.

Some critics dismissed it at first as exploitation. Its influence has since run from John Carpenter's masked killers to the work of Pedro Almodóvar, who paid open homage in The Skin I Live In. It is poetic and tender as well as frightening, horror made with an artist's patience, and its central image, that blank and gentle mask drifting through the surgeon's silent house, is very hard to shake once it has been seen.