Two films reach into the body and refuse to look away. Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face from 1960 and Julia Ducournau’s Raw from 2016 each turn ordinary flesh into something that can no longer be trusted, and they do it with such different tools that their shared power becomes even clearer when placed side by side.

This article examines how these two works handle the same core fears of bodily violation, fractured identity, and the pressures placed on women, while respecting every factual detail from the original comparison and adding the historical threads and later developments that make their influence easier to trace today.

Unveiling the Masked Visage

In Eyes Without a Face, Georges Franju builds a quiet nightmare around Dr. Génessier, a surgeon whose need to repair his daughter Christiane’s ruined face leads him into kidnapping and secret operations. Édith Scob plays Christiane with a fragile stillness that makes the alabaster mask she wears feel like both protection and prison. The story begins with a body being dumped on a foggy Paris night, and from there the tension never lifts. Pierre Brasseur gives Génessier a cold authority, while Alida Valli as his assistant Louise carries out the grim work of finding new faces for the operating table.

The long surgical scene still stands out because Franju lets the camera stay on the work without rushing or cutting away. The scalpel moves with care, the skin lifts, and the reality of what is happening settles in slowly. Christiane’s body rejects the new face, and that failure sits at the centre of the film: you cannot rebuild what violence has already taken. Franju drew on his own earlier documentary Blood of the Beasts from 1949, where he filmed slaughterhouses with the same steady eye, so the horror here feels less like spectacle and more like a record of damage. The film also carries the weight of post-war France, where medical ethics had been tested in ways no one wanted to name out loud.

Christiane moves through the house and grounds with a dove in her hands, her mask turning her into something almost ghostly. At the end she frees the dogs her father has used for experiments and lets the chateau burn. The film adapts Jean Redon’s novel but keeps a surreal edge that recalls Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, yet it never leaves the ground of physical consequence.

The Flesh Awakens in Raw

Raw drops a vegetarian student named Justine into veterinary school and watches what happens when a hazing ritual forces her to taste meat for the first time. Garance Marillier shows the change in Justine as something that starts small and then takes over. Her older sister Alexia, played by Ella Rumpf, already knows the family secret, and their bond turns into a contest of hungers. Ducournau keeps the camera close to skin, sweat, and the sudden urge to bite, so the horror feels personal rather than distant.

Scenes like the finger-chewing in the bathroom or the dance-floor bite land hard because they come out of ordinary moments. The film uses Ducournau’s own veterinary training to make the animal comparisons feel earned rather than added on. When the violence escalates to the chainsaw confrontation, it still grows out of the sisters’ shared history instead of appearing from nowhere. The modest budget forced practical choices that keep the effects grounded, and the result is a coming-of-age story that treats the body as both battlefield and evidence.

Justine’s final act of cooking human flesh for her boyfriend carries a strange calm. The film was a Belgian-French project, and that mix shows in the way it treats desire and disgust as two sides of the same appetite. It sits alongside Cronenberg’s work on bodily invasion but shifts the focus to female experience and the quiet ways society tries to limit what women are allowed to want.

Effects That Linger: From Scalpel to Sinew

Both films rely on effects that feel lived-in rather than flashy. Franju used pig skin and careful prosthetics so the peeled face would read as real tissue instead of rubber. The mask itself was moulded to Scob’s face, and its stillness tells its own story about being trapped. Ducournau worked with effects artist Pierre-Olivier Persin to create limbs that look flayed and blood that behaves like the real thing. Sound plays an equal role: the wet sounds of tearing and chewing were recorded from actual meat work, so the audience hears the body give way.

These choices matter because they keep the horror inside the realm of the possible. Franju’s black-and-white images turn the blood into something almost abstract, while Ducournau’s colour keeps every red tone vivid and hard to ignore. Later films such as Titane and Crimes of the Future show how that same commitment to physical detail has continued to shape the genre.

Transformations of the Feminine Form

The female body in both stories pushes back against what others expect of it. Christiane’s mask represents her father’s attempt to restore an ideal of beauty shaped by war and loss. Justine’s hunger starts as a secret she cannot control and becomes something she eventually claims. In each case the transformation questions where monstrosity actually begins: in the body itself or in the rules placed around it.

The relationships around these women add another layer. Louise acts as a kind of surrogate mother to Christiane, while Alexia and Justine turn rivalry into something closer to mutual recognition. Both films ask whether the urge to consume or repair comes from inheritance or from the world that surrounds the characters. The class settings differ, one isolated in a grand house, the other shared across a campus, yet each reveals how surface order can hide older appetites.

Sound and Silence: Auditory Nightmares

Franju uses long stretches of quiet broken only by the whine of instruments or the sound of footsteps on stone. Maurice Jarre’s score stays sparse, letting the dogs’ howls carry emotional weight. Ducournau fills the frame with wet, close sounds and lets a pop song play over a moment of sudden violence, so the contrast sharpens the shock. In both cases the audio pulls the viewer inside the physical experience rather than letting them stay at a safe distance.

Legacy in Blood and Bone

Eyes Without a Face opened the door for later face-transplant stories such as The Skin I Live In and Face/Off. Its reception at Cannes helped give art-house horror a lasting place in the conversation, even after it faced bans in some countries. Raw caused documented fainting at its TIFF premiere and helped launch Ducournau’s career toward Titane. Together the two films mark a line from measured, almost clinical dread to a more immediate, bodily kind of horror that still asks the same questions about what we are willing to do to remain whole.

Small production stories add texture. Scob wore the mask for extended periods during shooting, and Ducournau worked through her own physical reactions on set to keep the performances honest. Their staying power comes from the way they treat the body as both subject and evidence.

Director in the Spotlight

Georges Franju was born in 1912 and helped shape post-war French cinema through his work preserving films and his own documentaries. Blood of the Beasts showed he could film violence with both precision and feeling. He moved into features with the same eye for detail, and Eyes Without a Face remains his clearest statement on the cost of trying to fix what cannot be fixed. His later films, including Judex and Thérèse Desqueyroux, kept the same interest in surfaces that hide damage. He died in 1987, yet the questions he raised about medicine, beauty, and control still surface in new work.

Actor in the Spotlight

Garance Marillier trained at INSAS and brought a physical commitment to Raw that turned a debut into a defining performance. She trained for the role in ways that included handling real animal tissue under controlled conditions, and the effort shows in how naturally the changes register on screen. After Raw she moved between genre pieces like Climax and more dramatic roles, always carrying the same willingness to let the body tell part of the story. Her later credits include Wild and De l’ombre, and she continues to work across French and international projects.

At Dyerbolical we have long valued films that treat the body as a site of real inquiry rather than simple shock. These two works still set a standard for that approach.

Bibliography

Aldana, E. (2017) New Extremism in European Cinema: Text, Politics and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan.

Fraser, J. (1977) ‘Georges Franju: The Shock of Realism’, Sight & Sound, 46(4), pp. 242-247.

Greene, S. (2016) ‘Interview: Julia Ducournau on Raw, Female Coming-of-Age Movies, and Cronenberg’, IndieWire. Available at: https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/raw-julia-ducournau-interview-1201705123/

Harper, J. (2005) ‘Face Value: Georges Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage’, in European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe, 1945-1980. Wallflower Press, pp. 112-125.

Harris, S. (2020) Julia Ducournau: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi.

Mathijs, E. and Mendik, X. (eds.) (2019) The Routledge Companion to Horror Cinema. Routledge.

Scob, É. (2003) ‘Memories of a Mask’, Cahiers du Cinéma, (582), pp. 40-43.

VanEe, J. (2018) ‘Cannibal Couture: Fashioning the Feminine in Raw’, Horror Studies, 9(2), pp. 251-268.

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