Eyes Without A Face
Brasseur, Edith Scob, Alida Valli (1959).
France doesn't go in for the horror genre much. But this example, directed by Georges Franju, created quite a stir in its day.
For one thing, it was rare for a director of Franju's then eminence - he was almost a founder member of French cinema - to take on a Phantom Of The Opera type of potboiler.
Pierre Brasseur plays a famous surgeon whose daughter has been horribly disfigured in a car accident and who tries restoring her beauty by skin grafts that require him to obtain the living tissues from sacrificial victims.
Franju once made a wholly engrossing, but stomach-churning movie on a Parisian slaughter house, Le Sang des Bêtes (1949), and he injects the same cruelty and lyricism into what is essentially a perverted romance.
Hollywood wouldn't give it a second glance - definitely not for slasher fans. But anyone who appreciates the poetry of horror will be riveted.
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