Eyes Without a Face (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Within the late 50's, horror films like Henri-Georges Clouzot's masterpiece Diabolique increased their shock value by adding in more gore and sexuality, trying to push the limits of the studios. Director Georges Franju wanted to take the themes of the macabre to a whole new level with Eyes Without a Face; and he greatly succeeded. The film's main protagonist Christiane is a young woman who's face was destroyed in a car accident and now must conceal her face behind a mask. Her father Dr. Genessier who is quite obviously a sociopath, is obsessively attempting to construct a new face for her, sending his assistant out to abduct beautiful women and bringing them back to his estate to perform hetero-graft surgery, which involves removing their faces and grafting the skin onto his daughter. 

In Georges Franju's horror classic Eyes Without a Face there is one key scene that will have you gasp with shock and horror, and when it happens you'll know exactly what scene I am speaking about. When this film opened in 1960 according to L' Express, "The spectators dropped like flies," and when premiering at the Edinburgh Film Festival it was said that seven people actually fainted. The film became so scandalised that the French establishment tried to deny that the film even existed; with one critic nearly losing her job after stating that she liked it. In England, Isabel Quigly a film critic for The Spectator, called the film "the sickest film since I started film criticism". What makes Eyes Without a Face truly such a disturbing and powerful film is that the themes of the inhuman evils of science and the grotesque practices of medicine isn't too far from the truth; when thinking not so far back to the horrific scientific tests used on prisoners in the Nazi Auschwitz prison camps or the Unit 731 camps of the Imperial Japanese Army.