Eyes Without a Face

Though recent events have redefined masks as symbols of caution and courtesy, their role in the horror pantheon is steadfastly sinister. From the myriad Phantoms of the Opera to Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, false faces have long obscured embittering deformities or sociopathic personalities. The genre has trained us to be wary of anyone sporting a facial covering, for any reason at all.

Georges Franju’s 1960 classic Eyes Without a Face invites us to revise our assumptions. Here the mask-wearer is Christiane Génessier (the unforgettable Edith Scob), a young woman whose face was disfigured horrifically in a car accident caused by her father, a celebrated plastic surgeon (Children of Paradise’s Pierre Brasseur). Determined to restore her countenance to its prior state through revolutionary skin-grafting techniques, and indifferent to what becomes of the unwilling flesh donors procured by his loyal assistant/enabler, Louise (Alida Valli), Dr. Génessier emerges as the villain of the piece, despite being the polar opposite of “masked”: he is the public face of the surgery he pioneers.

Christiane, meanwhile, exhibits supreme tenderness to the perpetually barking dogs that her father keeps caged for use in his experiments, and who do not recoil at her appearance. She’s also deeply ambivalent to his practices and sympathetic toward the frightened women lured home by Louise—though, as a virtual prisoner herself, she hasn’t the power or nerve to intervene. The mask she’s forced to wear is not terrifying by design—indeed, it’s so nondescript that at first glance, aided by Eugen Schüfftan’s black-and-white photography, she presents as a barefaced woman whose smooth, sculpted features betray neither age nor emotion, apart from her wide-set, entreating eyes. Of course, it’s this uncanny quality that makes it one of cinema’s most haunting disguises.

Like The Third Man, which also capitalized on Valli’s sphinxlike mien, Eyes Without a Face employs incongruously jovial music (in this case, a Fellini-esque waltz by the legendary Maurice Jarre) and a willingness to subvert familiar tropes to proffer a sui generis genre experience. Franju, perhaps best known as a documentarian, felt he’d made less a horror movie than a tale of anguish—“more internal, more penetrating”—and, without question, its key themes (the marginalization of the physically aberrant, the mutual compassion of those robbed of agency) invest its sensational story with profound humanity. What otherwise might be tagged the film’s money-shot sequence—the removal of a victim’s face, intact, like a slice of bologna—is not creepshow-scary, but instead matter-of-factly unnerving, like the slaughterhouse footage of Franju’s landmark 1949 nonfiction short, Blood of the Beasts. In a sense, everyone wears a mask in Eyes Without a Face, but which ones conceal and which ones reveal are not readily apparent.