ORROR movies have traditionally received little to no respect from educated, art-house-type audiences, so it’s hardly surprising that Georges Franju’s haunting “Eyes Without a Face” (“Les Yeux sans Visage,” 1960) was totally ignored by the foreign-film crowd when it opened in the United States in 1962. At the time, of course, viewers wouldn’t have easily recognized it as an “art film,” since it was released dubbed, on a double-bill with some long-forgotten shocker, and retitled “The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus.” (Was “Eyes Without a Face” somehow not a scary enough concept? Or was the wily distributor hoping to rope in unsuspecting fans of Christopher Marlowe?) But “Eyes Without a Face” will rise from the grave of B-movie oblivion this Halloween, when it begins a two-week run on Friday at Film Forum in Manhattan in a new, freshly subtitled print. “Dr. Faustus” will not be present.

The doctor here is one Professor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), an eminent specialist and lecturer who is, so to speak, on the cutting edge of plastic surgery and organ transplantation. In the venerable tradition of mad scientists, Génessier is afflicted with an obsession: He’s determined to replace the face of his daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob), which was ruined in an automobile accident. (Génessier himself was at the wheel.) So he dispatches his devoted assistant, Louise (Alida Valli), to kidnap girls who might make suitable face donors; but the transplants never seem to take, and the logistical problem of what to do with the now faceless abducted women is sort of vexing, too. The doctor becomes more desperate, Christiane begins to lose hope and eventually the authorities start to wonder whether something nasty might be going on at Génessier’s highly regarded clinic.

This is boilerplate genre plotting – supplied by Thomas Boileau and Pierre Narcejac, the thriller-writing team also responsible for the screenplay of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Diabolique” (1955) and the novel on which Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958) was based. But the story, though reliably horrifying, is really no more than a pretext for the creation of gorgeous, intensely disquieting black and white images, chief among them that of unlucky Christiane, her wide eyes gazing expectantly through the holes in the smooth doll-like mask she wears between transplants. (Franju grants us one brief, blurry glimpse of her real face; it’s enough).

That inert mask, with human eyes peering through, is poignant and almost metaphysically disturbing: a demonic mixture of the mechanical and the animate. Christiane moves tentatively, with the odd, floating grace of a ghost, and at times it is, paradoxically, only the presence of the mask that reminds us that she is in fact corporeal. Dressed in shiny Givenchy gowns, she looks like a Christmas tree angel come to uncertain life.

Whatever this strange territory is, it’s far from that of the horror-exploitation genre; it’s closer to the domain of the great German Romantic fabulist E. T. A. Hoffman (one of whose stories Franju long hoped to film). And Surrealism is in the neighborhood, too. There’s a startling, heart-stopping shot of Christiane embracing one of the dogs her father keeps to experiment on; the Great Dane’s head is about as large as hers, and when they’re cheek to cheek, they look incongruously right together – not quite a match made in heaven, but the best they can do in the hell that Génessier has provided for them. It’s an image worthy of Magritte or Cocteau, and a perfect illustration of Franju’s stated aesthetic: “What pleases is what is terrible, gentle and poetic.”

The faint-hearted should be warned that “Eyes Without a Face” does occasionally tilt toward the terrible end of the scale, most notably in a pretty graphic transplant sequence. When Génessier begins to cut along the edges of the donor’s face, the operation appears reassuringly fake – in black and white, he might almost be simply tracing over the thick outline we’ve seen him draw on the victim’s skin – until a thin stream of blood starts to trickle down her neck. The effect is profoundly shocking, in the way that Surrealist dream imagery aspires to be: we feel the sudden incursion of the irrational, the unspeakable, in the hushed precincts of sleep.

Franju’s career as a filmmaker was baptized in just this sort of blood; his first mature work was a short documentary about a Paris abattoir, “Le Sang des Bêtes” (“The Blood of Beasts,” 1949), which is one of the most upsetting films ever made, as well as one of the most beautiful. The unearthly beauty of Franju’s imagery (captured, in “Eyes Without a Face,” by the cinematographer Eugene Shuftan) is never merely decorative, never the icing on a dubious gâteau, but is the real substance of his terrible, gentle, poetic art. What distinguishes the great horror films, after all, is not the ability to repel the audience, but the rarer ability to attract it – to make us look at what we would not otherwise be able to look at, to see the beauty in the worst, the direst possibilities. Although that may sound perverse, and I suppose it is, it’s a perversity that has a long lineage in French culture (Baudelaire, Lautréamont) and that may be viewed as itself a kind of mask: beneath the facade there is, often, an essentially religious reverence for reality, in all its sometimes appalling manifestations.

“Eyes Without a Face” ends with a shot of Christiane walking off into the distance, surrounded by doves. It ends in exaltation. This is, to say the least, unexpected, more shocking than the shocks that horror movies are designed to produce. Franju shocks us by embracing and then transcending the grotesque. “Eyes Without a Face” is among the few films in the genre – Carl Dreyer’s “Vampyr” (1932) is the only other one I can think of – that holds our attention without any recourse to narrative suspense. We barely care how the story will turn out: the suspense is in the images themselves, in the tension generated by our attempt to resolve the contradictory emotions they arouse.

Franju (who died in 1987, having made just eight feature films) once said, “A film should be a succession of apotheoses,” which has a bit of a mad-scientist ring to it. But in this picture Franju, operating in the remote, ill-equipped theater of genre filmmaking, comes awfully close to achieving this impossible ideal. That may account for the movie’s unusual serenity. The mood of “Eyes Without a Face” is rapt, awestruck. And in the horror chamber of Georges Franju, it’s as quiet as flowing blood.  

Terrence Rafferty is the author of “The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies.”