Great French horror that puts most old mad scientist movies to shame by digging much deeper into its characters. It’s about a doctor who kidnaps pretty girls so he can literally slice off their faces and graft them onto his daughter who was disfigured in a car accident that he caused. The operation never goes right, so he’s got to keep doing the ghastly deed again and again. The doctor is a stone face behind which stirs a mix of hubris and guilt. His female secretary and accomplice helps him out because he performed a similar medical miracle on her, but she’s not thrilled about it. Meanwhile, the daughter herself hides her ravaged face all day in her father’s mansion and she’s getting awfully lonely.
No matter how you shuffle these cards, no one here has a chance at happiness. And that’s part of what horror is all about.
The gore here—that one blood-dripping face removal scene, especially—turned stomachs and turned off critics in 1960 and it’s still effective today. Director Georges Franju got his start with a short documentary called Blood of the Beasts, about the inner workings of a slaughterhouse, in which he closely showed horses and cows being killed, sliced, bled and gutted. So, he’s not a afraid of a little scalpel-to-the-face action here. He’s also remarkably adept at setting strange and disturbing scenes with just a few small details.
Adapted from the novel by Jean Redon, partly by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who’d jointly written the books that Vertigo and Diabolique were based upon. Real masters of suspense.