If your first thought was the Billy Idol song, yup, this is where the title came from. It's also thought to have influenced the appearance of Michael Myers in Halloween. But contemporary critics hated it, and one of the few positive reviews nearly got the writer fired (not even in France). That might be why it was marketed deceptively as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus in the U.S. I was pretty reluctant to watch it myself, not for lack of reputed quality but for disturbing premises. Still, I mustered the courage.
Christiane (Edith Scob) has been facially unpresentable since a car accident. Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), being her father, a reconstructive surgeon, and the cause of the accident, takes it upon himself to give her skin grafts. Of course, it's hard to find a willing donor for a face transplant, so with the help of assistant Louise (Alida Valli)...well, you can guess. And no, once isn't enough.
To be clear, they don't commit murder like Jame Gumb. They actually try to keep abducted young women alive, without a clear plan for the future. I imagine that if the captives didn't die from the surgery, escape, or kill themselves, they'd be imprisoned for life. And in all likelihood, Génessier would try to make them useful as subjects in experiments, just like his many dogs and doves.
Nor is this a case of sadism. Génessier seems to take no pleasure in what he does, and he admits it's an abominable process. Louise is motivated merely by loyalty for the wonders he did to her face once. As for Christiane, who wears a realistic mask most of the time, she gets less and less on board with the program, partly out of sympathy, partly because her faked death prevents her from reuniting with her ex-fiancé (François Guérin), and partly because she doesn't trust her father not to experiment on her even after a successful transplant.
How much does the audience see? Well, to comply with censors across nations, there's no animal torture and only a little bleeding. The one time the front of Christiane's pre-surgery head appears unmasked, the camera goes blurry. But we do see a facial removal in several-minute detail, which caused many theater goers to faint. I suspect that the U.S. version omitted that scene for the Hays Code.
I'm not surprised that director Georges Franju, for all the deliberate fright, didn't really think of it as horror. He took inspiration from a documentary on trepanation, which he considered the scariest movie he'd ever seen. The gimmick is that the criminals don't come across as mad or especially evil, so their crimes against humanity are all the more jarring.
Was I ready? Yes, but not to the point that I found it predictable or old hat. It was pretty challenging to watch at some moments, just not enough to turn me away. There are a few errors or obvious fakeries that reduce the impact. For example, Christiane's claim that all mirrors in the house have been taken down is easily disproven.
Overall, I consider this simple, 90-minute film a worthy entry in my Halloween-type viewings. I have not decided whether to end the month on it.
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