“A masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality. In the movie’s sinister first scene, anxious-looking Alida Valli drives by night through the deserted suburbs of Paris, searching for a place to dump the inert humanoid passenger slumped in the backseat. The look is black on black, with gleaming highlights; the musical accompaniment is gleefully carnivalesque.... It's one of the three movies (along with Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO and Michael Powell’s PEEPING TOM, both 1960) that created the modern slasher-shocker.”
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice (click here to read the complete review)

“Haunting... gorgeous, intensely disquieting black and white images.
The unearthly beauty of Franju’s imagery is never merely decorative..
but is the real substance of his terrible, gentle, poetic art...
Franju shocks us by embracing and then transcening the grotesque.”
– Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times (Click here to read the complete article)

“Georges Franju’s seminal 1959 horror film... A dream of a movie
– a disturbing kaleidoscope of charged imagery and devilish suspense.”
– Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine

(1959) A mysterious, plastic-raincoated woman drives through the night, stopping to dump a corpse in the river, its face concealed by a hat; later she stalks a young female student through the streets of Paris. A distinguished surgeon lectures to a rapt audience on the difficulties of the “heterograft,” then goes to police headquarters to identify the body of his daughter, horribly disfigured in a car crash — but the edges of the facial wound of this corpse are so clean they might have been cut with a scalpel. And who’s that huddled face down on her bed on the — locked — top floor of the doctor’s house? For his second feature, Georges Franju, co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française and award-winning documentarist, invested a script by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (authors of Clouzot’s Diabolique AND Hitchcock’s Vertigo) with “exquisite, dread images . . . a vague, floating, almost lyric sense of horror” (Pauline Kael) in a savage parody of the scientific method gone to its Faustian limits (the film was originally released in the U.S. as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus).

With the great Pierre Brasseur (Children of Paradise) as the doctor; Alida Valli (The Third Man) as the nurse/mistress with her own secrets; and the ethereal Edith Scob, haunting in her simultaneously beautiful and creepy mask. Scob floats through operating room and dog kennel in her high-collared, almost iridescent white coat as doves fly past — made all the creepier by the stark b&w cinematography of Eugen Schüfftan, creator of the special effects for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and a suitably eerie score by Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia). Not for those squeamish about scalpels, graphic facial surgery, or angry dogs, but “although the plot is as wildly fantastic as anything Hollywood ever dreamed up, Franju invests it with a weird poetry in which the influence of Cocteau is unmistakable” (Phil Hardy, Encyclopedia of Horror).

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• Critical Essays on EYES WITHOUT A FACE
• Filmmakers' Biographies

“The 1950’s saw a renaissance in horror movies…Eyes Without a Face is the ultimate expression of this new found maturity. Director Georges Franju brings an arthouse sensibility to a storyline that shrieks horror, mixing traditionally pulp elements such as a mad surgeon, with lyricism, symbolism and an auteur’s eye for an eerily beautiful mise-en-scene. The result, in retrospect, is Jean Cocteau meets John Carpenter. Franju’s best work, that rare horror movie which disturbs and delights: a thing of savage splendor.”
– Gavin Collinson, BBC Four

“Eyes Without a Face is austere and elegant: the exquisite photography is by the great Shuftan, the music by Maurice Jarre, the gowns by Givenchy…it is in some peculiar way a classic of horror.”
– Pauline Kael [Click here to read Pauline Kael’s review from The New Yorker]

“…the organ-transplant movie, a genre that perhaps begins at the height of glory with Eyes Without a Face.”
– Ed Park, Village Voice

“Mr. Franju is one of the most accomplished, least-known of French directors.”
– Caryn James, New York Times