Faces, Sharks, & Dreams

This week we’re beginning with Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux sans visage), Georges Franju’s 1960 horror classic, a film that finds itself in conversation with last week’s featured title . . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

Eyes Without A Face, a film all about beauty and the grotesque, would make a great wall projection at a party—offering both a good dose of gorgeous imagery and a procession of the wild and shocking. It’s a piece with an incredible legacy of inspiration (Halloween! The Skin I Live In!). Some of the ideas it conjures revolve around motivations to kill, faces, and space. Spoilers below.

1. The crimes of Dr. Génessier and his assistant Louise look, from a remove, like the work of a serial killer. Pretty, blond women are disappearing off the streets of Paris. And up close, their crimes have something in common with those of Buffalo Bill. Like Bill, Génessier is harvesting skin for practical ("practical") use: he’s removing faces and grafting them onto his disfigured daughter Christiane (a procedure he can never quite succeed at). He’s making his own kind of skin costume. Génessier, though, doesn’t quite look like a serial killer. He’s maybe more of a mad scientist—obsessed with a medical breakthrough, morality-be-damned. He’s running a medical operation, not trawling in a white van. But we learn that he was driving the car that crashed and disfigured Christiane. Personal guilt and trauma—not a mere obsession with science—seem to be driving him. And, as Christiane points out, he’s obsessed with control. He cares little about her torment or her misgivings about his face harvesting project. There’s also some kind of sexual, or at the very least aesthetic, taste at work in his choice of victims. They're all pretty, young women. When the police send an informant into his clinic to catch him, they tell her to lighten her hair to catch his eye. Is Génessier’s difference from Bill a matter of substance or style? From a victim’s perspective, of course, it doesn’t matter. But these are two perpetrators with a fare amount in common. Their connection underlines the way in which acts of violence, especially male violence, though they may look and feel distinct, might originate from similar psychic places.
2. Eyes Without A Face’s obsession with faces is multi-layered. Génessier and Christiane both believe that Christiane has no life—no real self even—with a disfigured face. Christiane refers to herself as “dead” (all quotes here are from English subtitles). Yet she experiences her blank, featureless mask as more frightening than her real face, even if Génessier and Louise think it an improvement. She understands what John Carpenter and Debra Hill understood with their Michael Myers mask: that there’s something unsettling about a human visage without features. It reads maybe as pre-human (an uncanny valley-ish experience of the nearly lifelike) or maybe as post-human (dead, dying). Either way, the mask scares Christiane even though she’s its wearer. And when she receives a new, transplanted face that takes (for a time), it turns out to be a kind of mask itself. For her, it is an improvement, but not an untroubled one. As she tells it, “When I look in the mirror, I feel I’m looking at someone who looks like me, but seems to come from the Beyond, from the Beyond.” There’s something uncanny, something otherworldly, in her new face—a face that looks natural, but is not hers. Loss of one’s face, in this world, is irremediable. An authentic experience of self cannot be recovered: a new, beautiful face still only a mask.
3. Franju introduces Christiane by way of a visit from Génessier. After he drops Louise off at the clinic, we watch him drive his car to his residence, park it in the garage, climb stairs, walk through the house, go up another flight of stairs and down a hall, climb a third flight of stairs, and—finally—reach her room. Garage door included, he's been through six closed doors. The journey has taken just about three minutes. He's encountered no one along the way. The procession through unoccupied rooms builds suspense. Franju is drawing things out, making us wait. It's a wait heightened by the moments on the second and third staircases where Génessier stops for a beat—considering, it seems, what lies ahead. The journey serves also to emphasize the cloister that Christiane lives in, the depth of her isolation, cocooned beyond all these rooms. Franju's found an understated way of shaping emotion through space and architecture—moving ever in and up toward doomed Christiane.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

4. Leave it to me to generate killjoy commentary out of one of the more silly, universally humored films of the year. Dangerous Animals (light spoilers ahead) mashes up the serial killer film and the shark movie, a high-concept genre blend that’s undoubtedly one of 2025’s great horror movies for backgrounding teen hangouts. This is really the perfect movie to only half-pay attention to while eating snacks and smoking weed (not a criticism). Serial killers are scary and so are sharks, but for me the most disturbing element is our heroine’s captivity on the killer’s boat. There’s a special kind of bleakness in being trapped on the lawless ocean, at such a great distance from help: the prospect of deliverance feels close to nonexistent. The association with real world abuses—captivity and forced labor at sea a real thing experienced by real people—only adds to the horror. Give me Buffalo Bill’s well over a cell in the bowels of a vessel at sea. Better a shark's mouth than the gory maw of a multinational corporation's shady supply chain.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

5. To my knowledge, there’s no movie like Lindsey C. Vickers’s The Appointment, an experience best likened to a dream about a Twilight Zone episode set in England. A barely available deep cut for years that was rediscovered and rereleased with some fanfare in 2022 thanks to a one-inch tape master found in storage, The Appointment is a difficult film to write a recommendation for. The worry isn’t about spoilers, but that, with a film so unusual, a film that resists clear explanation, I might reveal too much of the shape of the mystery, the feel of it, rather than its solution. What I can say is that The Appointment interests itself in mystical forces and moody, late-night feelings. It’s a film in which even the source of danger isn’t quite clear. Is it coming from outside the home or emanating from within? The Appointment is mind-altering, disturbing, and mysterious—a mystery never truly solved, only deepened.

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday. As I write this, bigoted federal policy has prompted the sudden closure of much of the medical infrastructure for trans youth in Los Angeles, sending frightened families scrambling. The time to resist fascism is now.