Horror Double Feature – Eyes Without a Face & Kuroneko

October 26th, 2011 | POSTED BY Allen Almachar

For my last double horror feature recommendation of the month, I decided to pick two films that I have only recently seen but have fallen in love with almost immediately. Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960) and Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968) are two movies that don’t really have much in common in terms of theme or style, except that they showcase the best in foreign horror. I’ve wanted to see them both for a while, and now that they are available from The Criterion Collection, anyone who is interested can see them as well. Neither falls into a basic outline of what a horror film may entail, but instead, each delves deeper into their characters’ motivations, making the psychological elements more important than the jump scares. The horror is in the minds of the people inhabiting these stories.

Take for example the psychological torment that befalls the young woman at the heart of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face. Christiane Genessier (Edith Scob) was once an angelic beauty, but a horrible car crash left her face terribly disfigured, causing her to wear an emotionless white mask to cover her scars. Her father, the brilliant but psychotic Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur), had been attempting to restructure her face to bring it back to some semblance of how she was, but with little success. Obsessed to the point of madness, Dr. Genessier, along with his assistant/lover Louise (Alida Valli), turn to desperate measures to correct his daughter’s face. These “desperate measures” involve kidnapping, killing, and literally removing the faces of innocent young women and grafting them upon Christianne. However, with each unsuccessful attempt, Dr. Genessier and Louise grow increasingly determined in their procedure, while Christiane becomes more and more psychologically imbalanced with seeing her face continuously changing and falling apart.

Brandi had listed this as her number #2 foreign horror film in our Top 5 on the subject, and now I can see why. This is a great movie, a film that deals with issues regarding beauty, obsession, and familial relationships. The obsessive nature of Dr. Genessier and Louise is startlingly low-key; there is no question that he is a brilliant doctor, which makes him all the more frightening. He is a kind of Dr. Frankenstein, and his daughter has become his Monster, a project he refuses to let go and continues to work on to make perfect. The black and white photography adds to the balance of lyrical poetry. There is something beautiful and yet very wrong about seeing Christiane in her pale white mask, so perfectly fitted as if it were her actual face frozen still. And if that weren’t enough to creep you out, the most memorable scene in the movie, involving an actual procedure in which we see Dr. Genessier slice a victim’s face off, will have you wincing in its detail. For a film that was released in 1960, this scene is surprisingly graphic, the makeup effects working in full capacity. I’ve read that many audience members fainted during this film’s original festival run, and I can believe that. I’d like to think that I’ve grown slightly numb to the kind of graphic content that modern movies have, but the close delicacy with which Dr. Genessier oh so carefully cuts his victim’s face off still had my cringing.

Eyes Without a Face is a film that did not disappoint my expectations for it. Of all the great things that I can say about a movie, I think the most important element is how well it sticks with me long after I’ve seen it. What separates a great film from a very good one is that a great film still has me thinking about it hours, days, maybe even a week later. I think about the acting, or the direction, or how accomplished the cinematography is. I become a bit obsessed with it, wanting to see it again almost immediately. That’s what that film did, and that’s what Kuroneko did as well.




Moving from France to Japan, Kuroneko is a haunting ghost story about love and revenge, wrapped in the violent world of the samurai. Kaneto Shindo, the director who made another notable film, Onibaba (1964), delves into similar territory here, involving a mother, a daughter, and how they settle for brutal and murderous resolutions to their circumstances. It is ghastly and graceful at the same time, mixing romance and horror in equal dosages.

It starts off with a terrible crime. A group of samurai bandits, with steady and heartless procedure, rape and murder Shige (Kiwako Taichi) and her mother-in-law, Yone (Nobuko Otowa). They burn down their home, with the two still inside, and walk away without looking back. Soon after, a number of samurai returning from the wars are found dead in the woods, their throats slashed out. Some people believe that it is a beast terrorizing the neighboring area; others believe that a ghost is haunting the woods, luring victims in and killing with reckless abandon. A young samurai warrior is called upon to enter the woods to investigate and stop whatever it is that is killing the men who enter. But once the young man begins his quest and encounters the eerie presence of two females that look oddly like Shige and Yone, the film leaves the realm of reality and becomes more like a feverish dream. We don’t know what is real and what isn’t, and why these two supposed spirits have taken the form of the two earlier victims, or how they are somehow connected to the man who is sent to stop them.

The excellent direction and keen cinematography of the movie lends to its haunting visuals and unnervingly quiet tone. I love the set pieces here, and how the lighting and use of smoke adds to the mystery of the film. The characters seem to be constantly walking or gliding in fog, whether they are inside or outside of a building. To build upon that, another element that works incredibly well is how the outside world integrates smoothly with the inside world. There were points where I wasn’t even sure whether or not characters were amongst the bamboo trees or in the middle of an enclosed room, or even both at the same time. Perhaps that is a metaphor for the battle that the “spirits” have between the world of the living and the world of the dead. They look and talk like normal human beings, and yet can float through the air with incredible ease, and have a kind of odd connection to that of a cat (which, history has taught us, is never a good sign in horror movies). But what makes this film work is the human element that lies beneath, and how the characters of the ghosts relate to the young samurai. There is a history here that I dare not describe in detail, but how it plays out is heartbreaking yet thrilling at the same time.




Kuroneko is a great film, a beautiful and moving tale while also being a tense and lingering ghost story. I was affected by its stunning visuals and melodic score, and fascinated by its attempt to tackle a topic about revenge in such a way. This, along with Eyes Without a Face, does something that all great films—horror or not—do extremely well, and that is focus intently on the characters at hand, so that whatever the filmmakers choose to do with them, we are invested in it one hundred percent. While they don’t have much that connects them together, I still feel that the two films make for a terrific horror double feature. Both work as an example of great cinematic works of art from foreign countries, and I highly suggest that anyone who would be interested check them out. You won’t be disappointed.

Alida Valli, Edith Scob, Eyes Without a Face, Georges Franju, Kaneto Shindo, Kiwako Taichi, Kuroneko, Nobuko Otowa, Onibaba, Pierre Brasseur