Eyes Without a Face, directed by the supremely talented Georges Franju, is rare in horror cinema for its odd mixture of the ghastly and the lyrical, and it has been a major influence on the genre in the decades since its release. There are images here—of terror, of gore, of inexplicable beauty—that once seen are never forgotten. 

A mysterious woman wearing a raincoat drives through the night, stopping to dump a corpse in the river, its face concealed by a hat and sometime later she stalks a young female student through the streets of Paris. A distinguished surgeon lectures to a rapt audience on the difficulties of the “heterograft,” then goes to police headquarters to identify the body of his daughter, horribly disfigured in a car crash, but the edges of the facial wound of this corpse are so clean they might have been cut with a scalpel. And who is that person who is face down on her bed on the locked top floor of the doctor’s house?   

At his secluded chateau in the French countryside, this brilliant, obsessive surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) is attempting a radical plastic surgery to restore the beauty of his daughter, Christiane’s (Édith Scob) disfigured countenance—at a shocking price.