Watch the Disturbing French Horror Classic that Inspired Halloween

Poetic and unnerving, Eyes Without a Face has some unforgettable imagery

Discussing the terrifying blankness of the killer Michael Myers' mask in his seminal 1978 horror movie Halloween, John Carpenter once joked that it was because he "didn't have any money to make a mask." But he also conceded he might have been influenced by an older film. "Maybe it was because of an old movie called Eyes Without a Face," he said in a 2003 DVD special feature (per Wikipedia).

The mask in that film — a French classic from 1960 — is also white and featureless, and if anything, even more haunting. It's molded to the face of Christiane (Édith Scob), a young woman who suffered terrible facial disfigurement in a car accident. The mask replicates Scob's delicate, ethereal beauty, but its lack of expressions, its immovable smoothness, renders it frightening and sad. Christiane's eyes stare out from the mask as if imprisoned, filled with tragic, awful wonder.

Christiane's father, Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), is an experimental plastic surgeon. We first see him lecturing a rapt audience of Paris socialites about his revolutionary heterograft techniques in his emotionless baritone, promising a future without aging. In reality, he's colluding with his mysterious assistant Louise (Allida Valli) to abduct young women and steal their faces in the hope he can restore Christiane's.

After one such failed experiment, Génessier and Louise pass off the victim's body as Christiane's. If they succeed in the future, she will need to become someone else. Christiane exists in a terrible limbo, without a face, without a name she can use, maybe without a self. In some of the eeriest scenes ever put to film, she glides around Génessier's empty mansion like a specter, in her inscrutable mask and strangely regal white housecoats, as if searching for a reality to inhabit. In the background we hear the constant yelps of the dogs the doctor keeps in a dungeon-like cellar to perform his experiments on.

Eyes Without a Face is based on a pretty lurid horror novel. You can imagine it would be adapted into something very Gothic and histrionic. But that's not how it panned out, partly to appease European censors and partly because of the artistic instincts of its director, Georges Franju, who saw himself as belonging to the fantastical traditions of early French silent serials and filmmakers like Jean Cocteau.

To adapt the novel, Franju hired writers whose own books had been turned into two of the greatest psychological thrillers of the 1950s: Les Diaboliques and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. If you've seen those movies, you'll have some idea of the haunted psychic terrain Eyes Without a Face drifts into. Beneath an almost placid surface, there's a deep, frightening well of obsession, cruel mastery, and loss of self.

But Eyes Without a Face lives on most of all in its imagery. The movie contains a few brief, genuinely horrifying sights that are all the more disturbing for their contrast with the film's sober, poetic atmosphere. But it's the frightening blankness of the mask, and the pleading of the eyes that stare through it, that have echoed through the last 65 years as one of the most indelible images in all horror.

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Eyes Without a Face is available to stream on Tubi and HBO Max. It's also available on 4K and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.