It was the impossible, intolerable taboo horror of its day … does it still shock as it once did, or are audiences now too jaded to appreciate its brilliance?  George Franju & Eugen Schüfftan ride the divide between clinical brutality and dreamy surrealism.  Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli and Edith Scob brought horror up to date with this one, initiating an international flood of medical horror cinema. Friend Steve Nielson once noted the film’s seminal effect, comparing it to the rock band Velvet Underground. Not very many people bought their records, but everyone who heard them started a band. Now on 4K Ultra HD.

Eyes without a Face
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 260
1959 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 90 min. / The Horror Chamber of
Dr. Faustus, House of Dr. Rasanoff, Occhi senza volto, Los ojos sin cara / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date October 14, 2025 / 39.95
Starring: Pierre Brasseur, Edith Scob, Alida Valli, Francois Guérin, Béatrice Altariba, Juliette Mayniel
Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan
Production Designer: Auguste Capelier
Special Effects: Charles-Henri Assola
Film Editor: Gilbert Natot
Original Music: Maurice Jarre
Written by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Pierre Gascar, Claude Sautet from a novel by Jean Redon
Produced by Jules Borkon
Directed by Georges Franju

When critic Raymond Durgnat first wrote about the films of Georges Franju, the director’s Eyes without a Face was considered to be an ‘impossible’ item for America, with content completely unsuitable for mainstream American audiences. In 1959, films of surgery were not for public viewing. The Production Code routinely censored films that had even tiny cutaways to simulated surgery, such as brief shots in Robert Day’s 1958  Corridors of Blood.

Franju’s producer reportedly told him he had permission to run wild with his fantastic mad doctor movie, as long as he avoided nudity and blasphemy, topics disallowed in France and Italy. Franju instead fashioned a dispassionate, horrifyingly graphic tale of medical abominations. A rogue doctor conducts surgical crimes without detection. The horror happens in a handsome French chateau behind a private clinic.

Before Criterion gave Franju’s Les Yeux sans Visage its DVD debut in 2004, it was known to a very small group of dedicated horror fans. I myself had only seen 16mm prints — the edited and dubbed The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus around 1972, and the French version, at 1980’s FILMEX Horror Marathon. Both screenings were shocks to the brain. This was a work of art about Things Unthinkable.

Does Franju’s Les Yeux sans Visage still have the impact it once did?  Are we recommending ‘one of the scariest movies ever’ to a horror audience raised on entertainment focused on sadistic torture and mutilation?  A main ‘feature’ of modern TV crime shows are simulations of mutilated or half-dissected human bodies.

We think that Franju’s masterpiece is still the pinnacle of ‘medical horror,’ a normally sleazy subgenre known for downmarket sleaze. Always the fantasist, Franju pitches his show somewhere between the pulp fiction of   Louis Feuillade and the reality of modern medical miracles … that can obviously used for awful purposes. Morbid thoughts run to abominable Nazi crimes, medicine misused for political purposes never ceased, as in the forced / surreptitious sterilization of women in the Third World. Evil is where you find it.

Savant has reviewed Criterion’s Eyes Without a Face on DVD and Blu-ray. We also covered a UK edition with different extras, a Tim Lucas commentary and a short subject by Georges Franju that we wanted to see ever since first reading Raymond Durgnat’s Franju book. This time out, we have a new 4K Ultra-HD encoding to enjoy. Criterion’s upgrade is icing on the ice-cold cake for this eerily beautiful, delicately brutal ‘shocker.’

Eyes Without a Face has a screenplay by the mystery writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the source authors for H.G. Clouzot’s  Les diaboliques and Alfred Hitchcock’s  Vertigo. The bare synopsis reads like deplorable pulp trash with a misogynistic bent: a mad doctor commits surgical crimes that involve the murders of beautiful women. One must look back to the pre-Code years to find a similarly taboo horror classic: Erle C. Kenton’s  Island of Lost Souls was immediately banned in England for its theme of vivisection. In 1959, any movie about sick surgery performed on women would be accused of rotten taste.

Movies that threw in a Nazi angle went even further, trivializing the Holocaust for box office profit. In 1958, Astor pictures released a sleazy item that did just that, Richard Cunha’s  She Demons. It played to kiddie matinees.

By contrast, Eyes Without a Face has the look of ‘quality’ French cinema. Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is a celebrated plastic surgeon who runs his own private clinic. But he maintains a secret surgical lab in his basement for unorthodox experiments. Hiding in Génessier’s villa is his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), the victim of a car accident. Christiane lost most of her face; she’s recuperating from a forbidden operation to replace it with a face surgically stolen from another young woman. Christiane has a fiancé, who believes her to be dead.

Aiding Génessier in his crimes is his assistant Louise (Alida Valli), who facilitates kidnappings and corpse disposals with the clear conscience of a true believer. We hear that Louise is one of Genessier’s earlier surgical success stories. She wears a pearl necklace to hide a scar on her neck. Raymond Durgnat noted that the choker collar echoes Louise’s function as a faithful dog.

Eyes Without a Face has horror aplenty, yet requires patience for its measured, deliberate pace. Its infamous surgery scene is a shocker that becomes less important with repeated viewings. We witness the destruction of beauty with the cool precision of the professional surgeon. The human image we most identify with, the face, can be taken apart in just a couple of minutes. Génessier has no problem lifting a mask-like graft section in one piece. It is a case of organ theft, but one that obliterates one’s perceived personality, identity.

Film festival audiences were taken by surprise in 1959 — an Edinburgh screening was noted for walkouts and heated critical outrage at Franju’s cinematic abomination.

Critic Pauline Kael reacted to the film’s bizarre poetry but couldn’t distill its essence. But subversive poetry is a central motif for director Franju. Continuing the philosophy of Louis Feuillade, Franju’s films promote the notion that the reality we know is a mask, behind which lie things we do not wish to acknowledge. All that good meat we eat is derived from the unending slaughter of animals:  Le sang des bêtes.  Not on display in a war museum are the most obvious products of war, maimed and disfigured soldiers:  Hôtel des Invalides.  a presumably pampered wife is so unhappy that she’ll resort to murder, yet the social tyranny is so entrenched that even being caught will not give her closure:  Thérèse Desqueyroux.

Like the old French aristocracy, Génessier has wealth, fame, and a grotesquely inflated opinion of himself. His patients interest him only to the degree that they will enhance his medical reputation. He’s so caught up in his genius that he’ll kill innocent victims to mend his disfigured daughter. Génessier is not doing this for his daughter, but for himself. Christiane is a symbol of a failure that must be corrected.

Some politicians can rationalize the mass killing of women and children, as part of a longer strategy of ‘national stability.’  Other powerful men will compromise human lives just for profit. What crimes might a sociopathic doctor commit?  We remember an old 60 Minutes episode about a ‘celebrity’ plastic surgeon in France who performed wonders with facial injuries. Impossibly puffed-up and self-important, the surgeon regaled the interviewer with stories of his unique talent and daring techniques. When it comes to surgery, we all want someone so skilled that our particular problem is his daily routine. The Frenchman on the old TV show behaved like a Génessier in the making.  ^*

Once upon a time, horror films were beautiful. Many of Franju’s images extend motifs from Jean Cocteau. The naked trees seem like skeletons. Are the lonely trains in the fog transporting souls to the next world?  Génessier’s dogs are suffering humanity, and the doves loosed by Christiane symbolize both Freedom and Madness. Christiane’s mask mimics Cocteau are in Blood of a Poet, conjuring the expected associations with mannequins. The mask erases Christiane’s emotions, leaving us with her staring eyes. Edith Scob’s delicate gestures remind us of fairy tale illustrations. She holds an odd poses, clasping her hands in ‘calm anxiety.’  A crossing gate warns the student Edna Grüber (Juliette Mayniel) that she’s on a journey sans retour. She arrives at the Génessier manse in the middle of a dark, lonely wood, a place that fairy tale heroines — and practical modern women — are told to avoid.

The film’s text encourages unconfirmed interpretations. Louise takes pride in the crimes she performs for her beloved employer. Did Génessier operate on her to correct a deformity, or to hide a former identity?  That would make her like one of the criminal women in the next year’s  Circus of Horrors, who use their repaired faces to begin new lives as circus performers?

Most of the chills in Eyes Without a Face are of ‘the worst has already happened’ variety. The downhearted fiancé doesn’t come to the rescue like Prince Charming. Part of us doesn’t want him to, considering what he’ll find. The same goes for poor Edna, making her escape scene nearly unbearable. None of these traumas are resolved, compounding the tension. Near the finale, the latest sacrificial victim Paulette (Beatrice Altariba) lies helpless, strapped to a gurney. Christiane approaches, looking like something out of a surreal nightmare.

Eyes Without a Face was a pariah from the start. British critics were becoming intolerant of Hammer horror, and Eyes far outpaced the carnage depicted by Terence Fisher. The show wasn’t suitable for the convential American market, either. Horror films were supposed to be just scary enough to bring in the kids, but not so rough for parents to put Saturday matinees off-limits. American-International knew this; they ran into some parental flak with the release of their violent, macabre  Black Sunday.

Franju’s movie received no U.S. release when new. Not that many family newspapers covered it. The progressive French critics were too busy promoting the New Wave. Franju was unlike any other director of the older generation, yet still part of the Old Guard that Cahiers du Cinema used as a punching bag in their manifesto-like reviews.

Horror experienced a ‘mad surgery’ vogue around 1960, that some critics say was inspired by Eyes. But the Medical Horror subgenre didn’t start with Franju. A film would have to be a blatant rip-off to be convincing: of the list below, only Jésus Franco’s thriller smacks of outright plagiarism. It’s also apparent that some ideas were just ‘in the atmosphere’ and waiting to congeal in various places.  Peeping Tom,  City of the Dead and  Psycho all came out more or less simultaneously. Although very different in approach, they share similar story structures and themes.

•  Cunha’s  She Demons    January 1958
•  Cass’s  Blood of the Vampire    August 1958
•  Trivas’  Die Nackte und der Satan    July 1959
•  Romero and de Leon’s  Terror is a Man    November 1959
•  Hayers’   Circus of Horrors    April 1960
•  Majano’s  Seddok, l’erede di Satana    August 1960
•  Vadim’s  … et mourir de plaisir    September 1960
•  Ferroni’s  Il Mulino delle donne di pietra    October 1960
•  Furie’s  Doctor Blood’s Coffin    January 1961
•  Franco’s  Gritos en la noche    May 1962
•  Green’s  The Brain that Wouldn’t Die    August 1962
•  Leder’s  The Frozen Dead    October 1966

This of course doesn’t take into account Reginald le Borg’s gothic mad surgery film  The Black Sleep from way back in June of 1956, or several Mexican ‘medical horrors’ that had been circulating for the better part of a decade, certainly in Europe if not in the States. Chano Urueta’s  El monstruo resucitado has mad surgery galore, and it was made way back in 1953.

When talking about genre films, we probably too often claim that one picture hasn’t been bettered. But we’ve seen no surgical horror picture that has more to say, or says it as well, as Eyes without a Face, and there have been plenty of attempts. The most alarming is Pedro Almodóvar’s relatively recent  The Skin I Live In. Its twisted premise makes the anatomical restructure of an entire human being seem far too easy, as if Dr. Moreau could completely re-invent a human being, changing its sex at the same time. Almodóvar’s peculiar fantasy connects with human experience, but to what intended effect we aren’t certain.

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Eyes without a Face upgrades one of the company’s biggest successes. Their follow-up Blu-ray arrived in 2013; a BFi disc came in 2015, with different extras. The new release is touted as a completely new 4K digital restoration.

Criterion, we are happy to say, hasn’t goosed the pictorial values to make Schüfftan’s images look like something from 2025. Textures are everything in this film, from the doctor’s shiny Citroën to the rough bandages wrapped around poor Edna’s face. We mostly respond to the slightly sharper picture and individual shots where the contrast is more acute. 4K sees into darker areas of the frame, giving us more of a hint of the flayed face on the lumpen corpse in the back of Alida Valli’s little car. A better look at the final shot now shows Dr. Génessier’s eye to be torn free of its socket. George’s Franju stages these shocks in a chillingly matter-of-fact way.

As with most Criterion discs, the video extras are placed on the second Blu-ray disc. Blu-ray’s lossless audio presents Maurice Jarre’s amazing music score at its best. The sharp violin notes under the titles cut like a razor. The dogs barking in Génessier’s horror chamber is unnerving.

The previous extras are all present, beginning with the notorious short subject The Blood of Beasts, a documentary about slaughterhouses that made Franju’s reputation as a notorious filmmaker. Anyone that eats meat needs to see this; on a literal level it rubs our complacent noses in the daily carnage that supports our way of life. The reduction of mass killing to a mundane and orderly routine conjures nightmare visions of war crimes, if only because our mental tendency is to compartmentalize similar horrors together.

A short Franju interview repeats some of the stories we’ve already read in print. It is set in a demeaning ‘mad lab’ TV set with bubbling colored liquids and a costumed horror host. Better is Grandfathers of Crime, a ‘two authors at home’ visit with the genial Gallic thriller team of Boileau-Narcejac.

Also present is a mysterious, highly creepy original French trailer, a coming attraction tease that barely shows anything. It is accompanied by the crudely exploitative trailer for Lopert’s U.S. exploitation double bill of The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus and The Manster, a mish-mosh that samples every gory scene and misidentifies Edith Scob as Juliette Mayniel. A narrator announces that a reviewer likened the classic film to “Tennessee Williams in one of his more abnormal moods.”   Back in 2002 I remembered that film collector Mike Heenan in Phoenix possessed the rare Faustus/Manster trailer and put him in touch with the people at Criterion.

Also present is an interview with the actress Edith Scob. She passed away in 2019, but not before Tim Lucas and others conducted several very good interviews with her. Ms. Scob talks about her roles in Franju’s Eyes and Head Against the Wall and offers her personal memories of the director. She describes the experience of wearing the mask — once in place, the thing had to remain on for hours.

An insert pamphlet features short essays by Patrick McGrath and the esteemed David Kalat. Does their praise oversell Eyes Without a Face?  The quiet, elegant film spends more time contemplating horror than dishing it out by the bucketful. But viewers weary of cookie-cutter scare films or who respond to magical masterpieces like Beauty and the Beast will be amply rewarded. Eyes Without a Face is far, far too good to be marginalized as a cult film.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Eyes without a Face
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Georges Franju’s 1949 documentary Blood of the Beasts
Archival interviews with Franju
Interview with actor Edith Scob
Excerpts from the 1985 documentary Les grand-pères du crime, about screenwriters Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
The original French Trailer, plus the Lopert trailer co-billing Eyes with The Manster for American release.
Insert pamphlet with essays by Patrick McGrath and David Kalat.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + one Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: October 11, 2025
(7388yeux)

^*  The fictional Dr. Génessier reminds us of an actual French serial killer from World War II. The infamous  Dr. Petiot claimed to be part of the resistance but may have worked for both sides. Fronting the illusion that he ran an underground railroad for people wanting to flee to Argentina, Petiot took large sums of money from desperate fugitives sought by the Gestapo, mostly Jews. He murdered them with fake inoculations. The ghoulish doctor’s biggest problem was the disposal of human remains.

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