In the realm of body horror, few films slice as deeply into the psyche as Georges Franju’s surgical reverie and Julia Ducournau’s cannibal feast—two masterpieces that expose the raw underbelly of human transformation.

 

Body horror thrives on the violation of the corporeal form, turning the familiar vessel of the self into a site of dread and fascination. Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960) and Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) stand as twin pillars in this subgenre, each dissecting the boundaries between body and identity with unflinching precision. This comparison uncovers how Franju’s poetic restraint contrasts with Ducournau’s visceral excess, revealing enduring truths about alienation, desire, and the monstrous within.

 

  • Franju’s Eyes Without a Face pioneers clinical detachment in body horror, using surgical realism to evoke quiet terror, while Raw plunges into primal urges with graphic cannibalism.
  • Both films explore transformation as a metaphor for adolescent turmoil and societal rejection, but diverge in their aesthetic approaches: elegance versus savagery.
  • From masked faces to devouring flesh, these works influence modern horror, bridging mid-century surrealism with contemporary extremity.

 

From Scalpel to Tooth: A Dual Descent into Flesh

Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, known in French as Les Yeux sans visage, emerges from the shadow of post-war France, a nation grappling with the scars of occupation and reconstruction. The film centres on Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), a renowned surgeon whose daughter Christiane (Edith Scob) suffers a disfiguring car accident—orchestrated by his own hand. Concealed behind a haunting alabaster mask, Christiane becomes the unwilling subject of her father’s quest for a face transplant, sourcing skin from abducted women in a secluded clinic. Franju, drawing from Jean Redon’s novel, crafts a narrative that unfolds with documentary-like detachment, blending horror with tragedy. The iconic surgical sequence, lit by stark white light against operating theatre shadows, lingers as a pinnacle of restrained revulsion, where the scalpel’s glide exposes not just flesh but paternal hubris.

In stark contrast, Julia Ducournau’s Raw catapults viewers into the ferment of veterinary school hazing rituals. Justine (Garance Marillier), a shy vegetarian freshman, succumbs to peer pressure by consuming rabbit kidney, igniting an insatiable craving for human meat. Her descent spirals through family secrets—her older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) harbours similar appetites—culminating in scenes of frenzied consumption that blur consent, kinship, and carnality. Ducournau, a former biochemistry student, infuses the film with physiological authenticity; the slow-burn awakening of Justine’s hunger mirrors the awkward throes of puberty, where bodily changes betray control. Where Franju’s horror simmers in silence, Ducournau’s pulses with sweat-slicked immediacy, the camera probing orifices and wounds in long, unbroken takes.

The Masked Gaze: Concealment and Revelation

Central to Eyes Without a Face is Christiane’s mask, a porcelain shell that symbolises the erasure of identity. Franju employs it as a surreal emblem, its lifeless beauty echoing the uncanny valley—beautiful yet profoundly wrong. Scob’s performance, eyes wide with unspoken anguish, conveys isolation without dialogue; her nocturnal wanderings through the clinic’s kennels, surrounded by baying dogs, underscore her animalistic demotion. This motif probes the French fascination with the masque, from commedia dell’arte to wartime deceptions, positioning the film as a critique of scientific overreach in an era of ethical voids post-Nuremberg.

Raw inverts this concealment through exposure. Justine’s skin erupts in rashes, her lips chap from gnawing urges, rendering her transformation public and grotesque. Marillier’s physicality—trembling fingers, dilated pupils—mirrors the film’s thesis on repressed instincts. Ducournau draws from Cronenbergian body invasion, yet roots it in feminist awakening; Justine’s cannibalism becomes a rebellion against patriarchal veganism imposed by her parents, devouring the finger of a bully in a bathroom stall that throbs with menstrual undertones. The face, unmasked and smeared, becomes a canvas of liberation, contrasting Christiane’s eternal hiding.

Surgical Precision Meets Primal Bite

Franju’s surgical scene remains a touchstone for body horror minimalism. Shot in a single, unblinking take, the excision of a donor’s face unfolds with clinical poetry: gloved hands peel skin like gift wrapping, blood minimal, the horror in the banality of procedure. Influenced by Luis Buñuel’s surrealism and Soviet documentaries, Franju blurs fiction and reality, evoking the Vichy regime’s medical atrocities without explicit reference. The aftermath—dog grafts failing, faces sloughing—highlights failure’s futility, a meditation on hubris akin to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Ducournau’s effects, crafted by Parisian artisans, revel in excess. Practical prosthetics depict flayed arms and devoured genitals with squelching realism; the leg-chewing sequence, lit by harsh fluorescents, uses reverse shots to amplify ingestion’s intimacy. Sound design amplifies the visceral: cracking bones, slurping flesh, Justine’s guttural moans. This aligns with 21st-century French extremity—think Inside or Martyrs—pushing boundaries post-Saw, where pain is not punitive but ecstatic. Yet both films share a core: the body as battleground for autonomy.

Adolescence Unraveled: Flesh as Frontier

Christiane embodies arrested development, her masked existence a perpetual girlhood stolen by trauma. Franju weaves Catholic guilt—Génessier’s absolution-seeking church visits—into her plight, her doves symbolising purity amid profane science. The film’s climax, where she unmasks to free caged dogs upon her father, affirms monstrosity’s mercy, a poetic inversion of beauty and beast.

Justine’s arc parallels this, her vegetarianism a childish facade shattered by womanhood’s hungers. Family dinners devolve into bloodbaths, Alexia’s bisexuality adding layers of queer awakening. Ducournau interrogates female appetite, long suppressed in cinema, from Carrie‘s telekinetic rage to Ginger Snaps‘ lycanthropy. Incestuous undertones—sisters sharing flesh—probe taboo bonds, culminating in reconciliation through mutual devouring, a grotesque sisterhood.

Cinematography’s Cruel Lens

Eugène Schüfftan’s black-and-white cinematography in Eyes Without a Face employs deep focus and high contrast, isolating figures in vast frames. The clinic’s modernist architecture, all glass and steel, evokes Le Corbusier’s sterility, amplifying emotional voids. Shadows play across the mask, hinting at the face beneath without revealing, a restraint that heightens dread.

Raw‘s Ruben Impens favours handheld chaos and extreme close-ups, flesh filling the frame like abstract paintings. Colour saturates wounds—vermilion blood on pale skin—while wide lenses distort bodies during parties, foreshadowing fragmentation. This kinetic style suits Ducournau’s thesis: the body in motion, uncontainable.

Legacy’s Lingering Scars

Eyes Without a Face influenced Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In and Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive, its mask iconic in fashion and punk aesthetics. Banned initially in Britain for gore, it paved surreal horror’s path, from Repulsion to Possession.

Raw ignited festival fainting spells, boosting Ducournau’s Titane, Palme d’Or winner. It dialogues with global cannibal tales, from Hannibal to The Menu, affirming body horror’s vitality amid #MeToo reckonings.

Special Effects: Artistry in Atrocity

Franju shunned effects for authenticity, using real surgery footage rumoured (though debunked), prioritising implication. Masks by Alexandre Marcus, molded from Scob’s face, achieved ethereal perfection through plaster and wax.

Ducournau’s team layered silicone appliances, animal innards for texture, and CGI sparingly for seamless integration. The clitoris bite, a prosthetic marvel, shocked with hyper-realism, earning practical effects accolades at Sitges.

Both exemplify horror’s evolution: Franju’s suggestion versus Ducournau’s confrontation, united in probing the body’s fragility.

Director in the Spotlight

Georges Franju, born in 1912 in Fougères, France, embodied the avant-garde spirit of post-war cinema. Raised in a Catholic family, he rejected formal education for self-taught filmmaking, co-founding Objectif 49 with Henri Langlois and others to champion artistic liberty. His documentaries, like Le Sang des bêtes (1949), shocked with abattoir realism, blending poetry and brutality—a signature blending Surrealism (Buñuel’s influence) with neorealism.

Franju’s features include Nuits rouges (1952), a poetic crime tale; Judex (1963), a stylish Feuillade homage; and Thomas l’imposteur (1965), adapting Cocteau. Eyes Without a Face marked his horror pivot, produced by Jules Borkon amid censorship fears. Later works like La Faute des autres (1968) and Nuits rouges (1974 remake) explored fantasy. Awards included Venice honours; he influenced Godard and Truffaut, dying in 1987 revered as French cinema’s conscience. Filmography highlights: Le Grand Méliès (1952, doc on pioneer); Hôtel des Invalides (1952, war critique); La Première nuit (1966); La Chambre des officiers (unrealised). His oeuvre, spanning 20+ films, champions the marginalised against institutional terror.

Actor in the Spotlight

Garance Marillier, born in 1993 in Evreux, France, exploded onto screens with Raw, her debut capturing raw vulnerability. Raised in a bourgeois family, she trained at the École Supérieure d’Art Dramatique de Paris, blending theatre with film. Post-Raw, she starred in Ava (2017) as a suicidal ballerina, earning César buzz; La Prière (2018), a redemption drama; and Numéro une (2018) as a corporate climber.

Marillier’s intensity shines in Clash (2016), a tank-set thriller, and TV’s La Garce (2022). International roles include Netflix’s Shadow & Bone (2023). Nominated for Magritte and Lumières Awards, she advocates mental health. Filmography: Project Lazarus (2013, short); Diamond 13 (2015); Reversal (2015); The End? (2023); La Passion de Dodin Bouffant (2023). At 30, she redefines French ingenues with feral edge.

 

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Bibliography

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Bigorne, J. (2010) Georges Franju: le cinéma et le corps. Paris: Éditions de l’Œil.

Buckley, S. (2018) ‘Cannibalism and Coming-of-Age in Julia Ducournau’s Raw‘, Senses of Cinema, 88. Available at: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/raw-julia-ducournau/ (Accessed: 15 October 2023).

Fraser, J. (1977) ‘Les Yeux sans visage: The Surgical Unmasking’, Sight & Sound, 46(3), pp. 162-167.

Hand, C. and Wilson, M. (2019) ‘Raw: French Extremity and the Feminine Grotesque’, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 27(1), pp. 45-62.

Schweinitz, J. (2000) Georges Franju: Biographie. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma.

Vincendeau, G. (2016) ‘Body Matters: French Cinema and the Corporeal’, Film Quarterly, 70(2), pp. 22-31.