Eyes Without a Face

Pros: Guaranteed to freak you out. Do not watch alone.
Cons: Not available on DVD. Subtitles on VHS are white, and therefore sometimes illegible.

This 1959 French movie begins as a determined woman drives frantically into the night, glancing behind at the hatted figure in her backseat. Jaunty circus-music plays in the background as the figure slumps over like a sack: it is apparently a corpse....

Pros: An artsy horror film, beautiful cinematography, strong performances
Cons: One macabre scene caused grown men to faint (but they were just Scots)

We don't typically associate the horror genre with the French. Horror films developed mainly in America and Britain and (to a lesser extent) in Germany, but seemed in inherent contradiction with French sensibilities. Artsy films, romances, farces, ...

Pros: transformation of cliches into art, DVD extras
Cons: will still be too horror genre for some, too arty for others

"Les yeux sans visage" (Eyes without a Face, 1960) has some very conventional scifi/horror elements, including a mad scientist/surgeon, a secret operating theater, and a set of hounds. In one of the excellent bonus features on the Criterion disc, ...

Pros: very French, poetic horror film about identity
Cons: really no way out of this madness we call life

Eyes Without a Face, released in 1960 has the creepy quality of a tale told by a mad man with details that all seem perfectly ordinary to the teller of the tale but to the viewer are horrible and unsettling in the most seductive ways. Its been said ...

Pros: Franju's Direction, Script, Look, Cinematography, Score, Tone, & Cast.
Cons: None.

Georges Franju is considered to be one of France's finest film directors before the era of the French New Wave in the 1950s. One of the co-founders of the Cinematheque Francaise, Franju would help France re-emerge from its post-war fallout as for 10 ...

Pros: Creeps into your skin and establishes colonies.
Cons: If you're looking for safe old horror watch Scream instead.

The Mask, or caricature, is a trope of theater that extends at least as far back as the theater of Ancient Greece, where actors wore masks that were especially constructed not just to indicate character and personality, but were also constructed so the...

Pros: A masterpiece of its kind.
Cons: Subtitles hard to read.

“Eyes Without a Face.” otherwise known as “The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus,” is without doubt one of the creepiest films ever made. Don’t watch it alone. And don’t watch it before bedtime if you’ve been having trouble ...