Horror & Pathos: "EYES WITHOUT A FACE"

By Ian Long

This article is a trailer for my Writing Horror workshop on Friday 13th of June.

Pathos is a feeling of pity or sadness – the stirring of tender, melancholy emotions.

We may not always associate these sentiments with horror, which is all about aversion, hostility and threat. 

But when ‘monsters’ have the quality of pathos - when they can make us feel for them, even pity them - their stories become particularly poignant and memorable.

Think of Frankenstein, King Kong, Carrie, The Fly, and The Substance.  The monsters in these films may be scary, but we empathise with them.  At times, perhaps more than we do with their victims.

And as our minds deal with the 'cognitive dissonance' of these seemingly irreconcilable emotional contradictions, we enter a deeper, more long-lasting state of unease than would result from a simple shock. 

The French horror film Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960) creates pathos around an objectively monstrous character, and demonstrates how this can make for a haunting and memorable story.

It’s a paradox of a film: restrained and dreamlike, but with disturbing ideas which look forward to something as extreme as Pascal Augier’s Martyrs (2008), and much of its power comes from its balancing of conflicting emotions.

The Plot

An eminent cosmetic surgeon is developing advanced skin-grafting procedures with ‘rejuvenating’ effects, using animals for his experiments.

But when his daughter is facially disfigured in a road accident, he has the excuse he needs to try out his methods on human subjects.

He kidnaps young women and tries to graft their faces onto his daughter.  Each attempt fails, and each failure signals the death of the unwilling ‘donor’.

Faces and their expressions are central to the film, which can be read as a dark commentary on the notion that the value of women rests solely on their beauty. 

The Evil Doctor – Génessier

Dr. Génessier is probably one of the most depraved characters in cinema. 

As well as his murders and medical crimes, he commits many side transgressions which show a psychopathic disregard for human norms:

• To divert police attention, he deliberately misidentifies the body of Simone, one of the murdered girls, as his own daughter, Christiane (whom he has reported missing).
  
  
• He keeps Christiane prisoner in his mansion, making her wear a mask at all times (to prevent infection, or because he finds it unacceptable for her to exist in this ‘substandard’ state?).
  
  
• He has Simone’s body interred in his family vault, and presides over a twisted commemoration of 'Christiane’s death'.
  
  
• Afterwards, he angrily berates Christiane for breaking down when she finds an invitation to what appears to be her own funeral.
  
  
• He allows Christiane's grief-stricken fiancé to believe that she is dead​.
  
  
• He humiliates Simone's father, playing the part of the truly grieving parent and saying the other man is fortunate because he "still has some hope" (which Génessier knows to be a truly perverse lie).

But Génessier doesn’t fully fit the cliché of the crazed ‘mad scientist’. He's ice-cold, inscrutable, always in control. 

​He knows what he’s doing.

The Mutilated Daughter – Christiane

Génessier’s flesh-and-blood face is as impassive as a mask throughout the film.

But Christiane’s fragile features – which actually are a mask – somehow communicate a wide range of emotions.

Her passivity makes it hard to determine her attitude to her father's actions, but we project a range of feelings onto her.  We feel - or hope - that she can see his evil.

However, there's a chilling moment when she caresses the cheek of a girl who lies, unconscious, on his operating table. 

Does Christine crave her perfect face?  Or is she feeling sympathy for another of her father's prisoners?

The Corrupt Helper – Louise

The film begins with a woman driving to a riverside location, dragging a body from her car and dumping it in the water. 

The woman is Louise, one of Génessier’s previous patients.  He saved her from disfigurement and she repaid him by becoming his procuress, luring young women she meets on the streets of Paris to his mansion-clinic.

Louise is played by Alida Valli, best-known for playing Anna, Harry Lime’s girlfriend in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949). 

Valli is known as one of 20th century cinema's great beauties, and the fact that she - of all people - is knowingly enticing innocent girls to disfigurement and death gives the story an extra level of cruelty and sadism. 

The Wary Victim – Edna

Louise overhears a young woman called Edna saying she needs a new place to live.  She befriends the girl, and offers to drive her to see a room she can rent. 

​Inevitably, Louise's destination is Génessier’s mansion.

At first, Edna half-trusts Louise.  But she begins to sense something false in her ingratiating manner.  Edna doesn’t want to be driven so far outside Paris.  She doesn't want the room Louise is offering.  She just wants to go home.  

We study her troubled expression, hoping she'll ask Louise to stop the car, get out, and go back.  But something overrides her survival instincts.

The episode proves that seeing a character half-suspecting the danger they're in, but ignoring their misgivings, can be more gruelling than watching one who is entirely oblivious of their predicament.  ​

​Edna’s tension mirrors our own.  But what she suspects, we know.   

The moment of pathos

Christiane finally rebels against Génessier's dominion.  She attacks Louise, stabbing her in the throat (where she wears a pearl choker to cover the scars caused by Génessier's operation) with a scalpel (the tool of his trade).

Louise's response to this is truly disturbing.  She doesn't become angry or try to fight Christine, as we might expect. 

Instead, her eyes fill with tears.  She sinks to the floor, dying, and simply says:

"Pourquoi?" ("Why?")

It's a fleeting moment with huge character significance.  Through it, we finally understand  Christine's enigmatic motives.

Louise is unquestionably a monster.  But she's less concerned with her fatal injury and imminent death than with the emotional wound of Christine turning on her. 

Louise seems to be saying:

“I degraded myself for you.  I made myself into something less than human.  But I did it out of love.  It was my way of caring.  If you couldn’t see that, it was all for nothing.  Now I'm dying, I know my life was meaningless.”

To sum up

Like a lot of good horror films, Eyes Without a Face has the bold simplicity of a fairytale. There are clear echoes of Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, The Babes in the Woods, and others. 

It's a story that both resolves and doesn’t quite resolve, taking us to a strange place, leaving us there, and percolating in our minds long after we watch it.

​Which is the mark of a good film of any kind. 

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My Writing Horror workshop on Friday June 13th

We'll be exploring lots of other horror topics and ideas. 

The aim is to inspire great new stories in the genre.

Places are limited,  so book now to avoid disappointment.

CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS AND TO BOOK

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