‘He was telling me how great it was’: For Edgar Wright, this terrifying masterpiece released 65 years ago is one of the best films of its genre.

It can’t be said enough how much physical media, especially 4k UHD, is outperforming streaming. The fact remains that cookies have continued to suffer over the years from platform shocks and, more broadly, from the underlying trend of dematerialization. Among the media’s staunch supporters are famous filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan, Guillermo del Toro and Edgar Wright.

The latter, who is also returning to the cinema very soon with the new version of Running Man, is an authentic film buff and also an absolutely incredible collector, with thousands of films in his library.

in 2011, He agreed to pitch to the well-known publisher Criterion (Which, we imagine, he must have almost an entire catalog!) Top 10 of his favorite films. Including no less than three French films, three masterpieces in fact. And one of them is, he says, perhaps the greatest horror film ever made: George Franju’s Eyes Without Faces.

“I became obsessed with horror from a young age”

“I became obsessed with horror from a young age” he says. “My father knew this, he often told me about the best horror movies he had ever seen. They were black and white, French and in his own words ‘really, really nasty.’

He told me he was a mad surgeon who tried to restore his daughter’s disfigured face in a car accident by mutilating young women and stealing their beautiful skin. And he was telling me how great this movie was, how scary it was, and how I should see it. but…

He couldn’t remember the title of the movie. I tried to study the library’s horror movie guides, but without the internet and plot keywords, I was stuck for a long time.

Years later, I saw his face and immediately called my father. I told him the crucial piece of information he was missing, the exact title of the best horror movie he had ever seen. I then agreed and told him that it was a really extraordinary film.”

Faceless horror, the face of horror

faceless eyesSo this is the unfortunate Christian Genesier, disfigured after a car accident. Her father, a highly respected surgeon (an enthusiastic Pierre Brasseur), wants to change his daughter’s face. But in order to do this, he has to transplant skin that he took from young girls…

in the masterpiece George Franju (which we can never repeat enough, is an authentic horror movie), Edith Scobie wears an eerie, gloomy, lifeless, silent mask. Undoubtedly the first example of what was later called a theory strange fieldor “disturbing field”.

The word “Uncanny” is the English translation of the Freudian term unheimlichWhich translates to “disturbing oddity” in French. Kesako? It’s actually a scientific theory by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, first published in 1970, that the more human-like an android robot is, the more disgusting its imperfections seem to us.

For a little history behind the mask, we owe it to Henri Assola and Georges Klein. The tandem has already created the Quasimodo mask worn by Anthony Quinn at Notre Dame in Paris. For a long time, masks were made from plastic imported from Great Britain, from the sap of the rubber tree.

But French chemists have recently developed a more effective method. Latex masks were now cast on plaster molds that reproduced the faces of the performers. This production detail is important: it shows Franjoux’s desire to make Christian’s mask a second face, whose beauty must be opposed to the real one.

“From the moment when we can see the horror of such a film, because the theme is based on horror, from the moment when we see what is terrible, even grotesque and poetic in the reality that expresses, that is, in the everyday reality and which is very close to us, then I have achieved my goal. Georges Franjou will talk about his remarkable film.

Want to discover this pure gem of a genre? It’s available on DVD/Blu-ray, VOD and even streaming.