Halloween 5: Eyes Without A Face

Hi there! We are five days away from Halloween as I’m So Glad My Suffering Amuses You continues its countdown of Weird Shit as we look at movies, TV shows and comic books with themes often associated with Halloween, tales of the supernatural, stories of horror but stories that are slightly off, strange, outside the norm. 

You know, weird shit.  

Over the last two days, we’ve explored stories of body horror such as the movie about a mad scientist turning men into snakes or the day before that when space travelers are turned into salamanders.

Today’s subject once more about body horror but it’s the horror not of transformation but of mutilation.

Today, I’m So Glad My Suffering Amuses You presents our look at a horror film from 1960 that I first saw a few days ago.

Les Yeux Sans Visage

Yes, it’s a French film. In English, the title is Eyes Without a Face. 

The film’s credits take place as headlight limned trees pass along a roadway along with a rather jaunty music score.

We’re on a night time car ride just outside when the woman drive stops along a riverbank and dumps a female corpse into the river.

Later the body is recovered which Dr. Génessier identifies as his missing daughter, Christiane Génessier. Before her death, she had been horribly disfigured in an automobile accident for which  Dr. Génessier was at fault.

Following Christiane's funeral, we follow Dr. Génessier back home, a large mansion adjacent to his clinic and a kennel with numerous caged German Shepherds and other large dogs along with caged doves; the dogs and the doves are used in the doctor’s experiments.  He resides here with his assistant Louise, the dead body dumper we met at the start of the movie. Also living there is Christiane who is not dead.

Seems Dr. Génessier is looking to fix Christiane’s face by grafting on the face of another woman. The dead woman dumped in the river was a failed attempt to do that. The doctor’s misdirection on the dead woman being his daughter was to avert an investigation into the woman’s death and keep people from looking for Christiane while he goes about his work.

Christiane, isolated and lonely, tries to call her fiancé Jacques Vernon who works with Dr. Génessier at his clinic but hangs up without saying a word. Her only contact outside of her father and Louise are the caged dogs and birds who accept her, unaffected by her appearance.

For most of the film, Christiane wear a white, expressionless face mask. 

Louise lures a young Swiss girl named Edna to Génessier's home. Génessier chloroforms Edna and takes her to his secret lab.  Dr. Génessier performs heterograft surgery, removing Edna's face.

This is a particularly creepy scene.

The doctor successfully grafts the skin onto his daughter's face.

Later the heavily bandaged and faceless Edna escapes but falls to her death from an upstairs window. The poor girl was captured, tortured, her face taken off and then she dies and for what?

The procedure doesn’t work.  Christiane's face rejects the grafted tissue and she has to wear her mask again.

Christiane again phones Jacques and this time says his name but the phone call is interrupted by Louise.

Jacques reports the call to the police. The police have noted the disappearance of several young women with blue eyes and similar facial characteristics. The police have a lead concerning a woman whom Jacques recognizes as Louise.

Inspector Parot, an officer investigating Edna's disappearance, “volunteers” a young woman named Paulette, arrested for shoplifting, to help investigate by checking herself into Génessier's clinic.

Louise goes into action, lures Paulette to the house, Dr. Génessier knocks her out and drags her to the secret lab.  But before he can get all mad sciency with his scapel, Louise tells the doc the police want to talk to him.  

Meanwhile, Christiane has had it with this shit. She frees Paulette, stabs Louise in the neck and releases the hounds.  While Dr. Génessier returns from his chat with the police, the dogs, driven mad by pain and confinement, maul him to death, disfiguring his face in the process.

Christiane walks slowly into the woods outside Génessier's house, with a dove on her hand as she vanishes from view. 

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I stumbled across Eyes Without a Face late one night on TCM, Turner Classic Movies. This is a strange movie with a rather odd approach to the subject matter. Director Georges Franju was instructed to not include too much blood (which would upset the French), to not show animals getting tortured (which would bother the English) and leave out mad-scientist characters (which is a no-no for Germans). The thing is the novel the film was based on was just filled with blood, torture and mad scientist shenanigans.

There’s an almost documentarian detachment from the characters and their actions. Director Georges Franju had made a number of documentary features in his career so adopting this level of detachment in Eyes With A Face made the film less lurid and exploitative.

But the matter of fact approach also serves to ratchet up the horror.  The scene where Dr. Génessier performs heterograft surgery, removing Edna's face is made more disturbing by the doctor’s dispassionate approach to his work. He calmly marks an outline around Edna’s face, then methodically works his scapel along the outline as he slowly and surely peels the skin from her face. If Dr. Génessier acted more the part of a mad scientist, wide eyed, his blade flashing as he maniacally hacks away at his hapless victim’s flesh, we would be horrified, true but as a viewer, safe in the knowledge that this is an exaggerated horror staged for the benefit of creating a horror film. But director Georges Franju takes that safety away from the viewer. Without the dramatic flourishes we come to expect from this kind of horrific scenario, we are less an audience entertained by horror; we become observers, complicit in Edna’s torture and mutilation. 

Wow! Those film classes I took in college weren’t a total waste after all. I just needed to work in the word “dichotomy” to make it a perfect film analysis. 

The American release in 1962 was given an English-language dub and re-titled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. Oddly enough, the most horrific scene in the movie, the heterografting scene, was reduced.  During its 1962 release in the United States, the film was put on a double bill with The Manster, a schlocky horror movie with about an “invasion from outer space by two-headed creature killer”.  It’s kind of like a double feature of Halloween and MacBeth. 

Speaking of Halloween, John Carpenter has suggested Eyes Without A Face inspired the idea of a featureless mask for Michael Myers. 

Prior to running into this movie by happenstance while scrolling by TCM on cable, I had never heard of Eyes Without A Face.  I had heard the Billy Idol song "Eyes Without a Face”. There is, by the way, a connection between the movie and the song. Idol was aware of the movie when he wrote his song and the story from the movie informs the lyrics of the song. 

Whew! This is some heady stuff.

Today, we looked at a story with someone losing a face. In tomorrow’s Halloween Countdown of Weird Shit post, we’ll look at what happens when someone lose their brain.