Two masterpieces of corporeal dread, one masked in surgical precision, the other cloaked in alien allure, both excavating the terror of self-erasure.

 

In the shadowed corridors of body horror, few films probe the fragility of identity as relentlessly as Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960) and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013). Separated by over half a century, these works converge on the visceral violation of the human form, transforming flesh into a battlefield where selfhood dissolves. This comparison unravels their shared obsessions with disfigurement, otherness, and the gaze, revealing how each redefines horror through intimate, unflinching confrontations with the body.

 

  • Both films weaponise the face as the epicentre of identity, stripping it bare to expose existential voids.
  • Franju’s clinical surrealism and Glazer’s hypnotic minimalism employ stark visuals to equate bodily invasion with psychological fragmentation.
  • From surgical theft to predatory mimicry, they echo across eras, influencing generations of filmmakers grappling with humanity’s porous boundaries.

 

The Faceless Void: Surgical Origins of Self-Loss

Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, adapted from Jean Redon’s novel, unfolds in a sterile Parisian clinic where Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), a renowned surgeon, labours to restore his daughter Christiane’s (Edith Scob) face, ravaged in a car accident he secretly caused. Disguised in a life-like mask that renders her a spectral apparition, Christiane becomes a prisoner of her father’s godlike ambition. Nightly, his assistant Louise (Alida Valli) lures young women to their doom, their faces surgically harvested in harrowing sequences that blend documentary realism with poetic nightmare. The film’s centrepiece operation, lit by harsh surgical lamps, captures the scalpel’s glide with unflinching detail, the victim’s anaesthesia-masked screams underscoring the profane desecration of the self.

This methodical flaying serves as a metaphor for paternal hubris and the commodification of beauty. Christiane’s masked existence symbolises not just physical deformity but a profound alienation from her own reflection; she wanders the estate’s grounds, pigeons alighting on her gloved hands, evoking a purity tainted by violence. Franju, drawing from his background in documentary shorts like Blood of the Beasts, infuses the horror with authenticity, making the body a site of ethical collapse. The film’s French New Wave context amplifies its restraint, favouring implication over gore, yet the face transplant’s failure—revealed in a cascade of rejected skin—crystallises identity’s impossibility without authentic flesh.

Contrast this with Under the Skin, where identity’s erosion begins extraterrestrially. Scarlett Johansson incarnates an unnamed alien seductress cruising Glasgow’s rainy streets in a white van, luring isolated men to a void-like lair. Beneath her human veneer, she strips them nude, their bodies gliding into an abyssal black mirror while their skins float empty above. Glazer’s adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel eschews exposition, immersing viewers in her perspective through long takes and Mica Levi’s dissonant score, which mimics a swarm of insects gnawing at the psyche. The horror escalates when she samples humanity—consuming cake, fleeing a rape, gazing at her reflection—and begins to fracture, her form shedding like molting chitin.

Here, body horror manifests as mimicry’s failure. The alien’s perfect facsimile unravels not through surgery but through empathy’s intrusion, her flesh becoming a prison as much as Christiane’s mask. Both protagonists inhabit borrowed or altered skins, their gazes—Christiane’s empty eyeholes, the alien’s impassive stare—interrogating the viewer’s own sense of self. Franju’s narrative arcs towards tragic release, Christiane freeing her victims and scarring her father before vanishing into grace; Glazer’s ends in primal devouring, the alien’s body torched, reduced to raw matter.

Gazes That Devour: The Eyes as Portals to Horror

Central to both films is the eye, not merely as organ but as the seat of recognition. In Eyes Without a Face, Christiane’s porcelain mask, with its painted eyes, denies reciprocity; she sees but cannot be seen, inverting the gaze dynamic central to horror cinema. Franju employs extreme close-ups on excised faces, the eyes fluttering in post-mortem terror, echoing Luis Buñuel’s surrealist eye-slicings but grounding them in medical hubris. This motif critiques post-war France’s obsession with reconstruction, literalised in Génessier’s grafts mirroring national scars from occupation.

Glazer amplifies this in Under the Skin with the alien’s unblinking observation. Her van pickups unfold in real-time conversations, men ensnared by her blank affect, their identities peeled away layer by layer. The film’s hidden-camera style, using non-actors, blurs documentary and fiction, much like Franju’s influence. When the alien confronts her reflection in a bathroom mirror, her face glitches—eyes widening in nascent horror—mirroring Christiane’s futile unveiling. Both films posit the gaze as invasive: doctors and aliens alike consume others to reclaim wholeness, only to confront their own monstrous voids.

Symbolically, eyes represent failed empathy. Christiane’s doves symbolise her soul’s flight, while the alien’s victims sink eye-first into oblivion. These visuals, sparse yet potent, link the films to body horror forebears like Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, but with philosophical depth—identity not as fixed but as relational, sustained by mutual recognition now severed.

Flesh as Prison: Thematic Intersections of Otherness

Body horror in these works interrogates otherness through corporeal betrayal. Christiane’s disfigurement isolates her within her own skin, her father’s transplants a grotesque Oedipal quest for purity. Franju weaves Catholic iconography—masks evoking Passion veils—questioning redemption through violation. The film’s quiet feminism emerges in Christiane’s agency, her scalpel turning against the patriarch, prefiguring Repulsion‘s psychosexual fractures.

Under the Skin externalises this as species invasion. The alien’s body, a seductive shell, harbours indifference until human warmth— a dying man’s kindness—cracks it. Glazer’s long takes on Johansson’s nude form subvert voyeurism; her predation flips the male gaze, men reduced to meat. Themes of immigration and alienation resonate in Scotland’s margins, the alien as refugee in flesh, echoing Christiane’s cloistered exile. Both narratives explore embodiment’s limits: what remains when skin fails?

Class undertones sharpen the comparison. Génessier preys on the marginalised, his clinic a bourgeois fortress; the alien targets loners, the unseen underclass. This predatory economy indicts societal discards, bodies harvested for the elite’s salvation.

Trauma binds them: accidents birth monsters. Christiane’s crash, the alien’s awakening—both propel cycles of violence, suggesting identity as trauma’s scar tissue.

Cinematography’s Cruel Precision: Visual Architectures of Dread

Franju’s black-and-white elegance, shot by Eugen Schüfftan, uses deep focus to dwarf humans in gothic estates, masks glowing ethereally. The surgical scene’s slow pans over instruments build dread through anticipation, a technique Glazer echoes in Under the Skin‘s black void, Daniel Landin’s desaturated palette rendering Scotland a limbo.

Glazer’s fish-eye lenses distort interiors, mimicking the alien’s alienation; Franju’s symmetrical compositions frame Christiane as madonna-martyr. Sound design diverges yet converges: Franju’s sparse diegesis heightens silence, Glazer’s Levi score—a throbbing cello—incarnates inner turmoil.

Effects pioneer body horror: Franju’s practical masks and grafts stun with realism; Glazer’s CG nudity and abyss innovate abstraction, influencing Ari Aster’s viscerality.

Performances That Haunt: Incarnating the Inhuman

Edith Scob’s Christiane glides with balletic poise, her masked silence conveying oceans of grief. Pierre Brasseur’s Génessier blends paternal warmth with fanaticism. Johansson’s alien evolves from automaton to anguished, her Glaswegian accent faltering into vulnerability, a tour de force of physical transformation.

These portrayals anchor abstract horrors in human frailty, Scob’s doe-like eyes behind porcelain prefiguring Johansson’s dawning sentience.

Legacy’s Lingering Scars: Echoes in Modern Horror

Eyes Without a Face birthed the face-transplant subgenre, inspiring The Skin I Live In and Face/Off. Banned initially for gore, it now exemplifies poetic horror. Under the Skin revitalises sci-fi body horror, its influence seen in Annihilation. Together, they underscore identity’s mutability in an age of deepfakes and transplants.

Production tales enrich: Franju battled censors; Glazer spent years perfecting effects, shooting covertly.

Director in the Spotlight

Georges Franju, born in 1912 in Fougères, France, emerged from a bourgeois family but rebelled into avant-garde cinema. Co-founding Objectif 49 with Henri Langlois, he honed documentary craft, his 1949 Le Sang des bêtes shocking with slaughterhouse realism, blending poetry and brutality. Influences spanned Méliès, Cocteau, and Buñuel, shaping his surrealist lens on the macabre.

Franju’s feature breakthrough, The Hole (1960), explored confinement psychologically. Eyes Without a Face cemented his legacy, though commercial pressures led to lighter fare. He directed Judex (1963), a Feuillade homage; Thomas l’imposteur (1965), adapting Cocteau; La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1970), delving faith’s shadows; and Nuits rouges (1974), a thriller. TV work like La Princesse de Clèves (1961) showcased versatility. Retiring in 1980s, Franju died in 1987, revered for fusing horror with humanism, influencing Lynch and Argento.

Filmography highlights: Le Grand Méliès (1952)—tribute to pioneer; Hôtel des Invalides (1952)—war critique; Mon chien idiot (1958? short); Les Yeux sans visage (1960)—masterpiece; Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962); Les Fruits sauvages (1954 short). His oeuvre, 20+ works, champions the marginalised against institutional terror.

Actor in the Spotlight

Scarlett Johansson, born November 22, 1984, in New York City to a Danish-Jewish mother and Danish father, displayed prodigy in Manhattan’s theatre scene. Debuting at nine in North (1994), she gained notice with The Horse Whisperer (1998), her poise belying youth. Breakthrough came with Ghost World (2001), earning indie acclaim, followed by Lost in Translation (2003), Sofia Coppola’s whispery romance netting BAFTA nod.

Transitioning to blockbusters, The Island (2005) showcased action chops; The Prestige (2006) added mystery. As Black Widow in Marvel’s Iron Man 2 (2010) through Avengers: Endgame (2019), she grossed billions, earning pay equity advocacy. Arthouse triumphs include Her (2013), voicing AI; Under the Skin (2013), transformative horror; Marriage Story (2019), Oscar-nominated; Jojo Rabbit (2019), supporting win.

Awards: Two-time Oscar nominee, BAFTA winner, Tony for A View from the Bridge (2010). Producing via These Pictures, she helmed Rough Night (2017). Filmography: An American Rhapsody (2001); Match Point (2005); Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008); Lucy (2014); Sing (2016 voice); Black Widow (2021); Asteroid City (2023). Johansson’s range—from seductive enigma to maternal fury—embodies modern versatility.

 

Craving more cinematic chills? Dive deeper into horror’s underbelly with NecroTimes—subscribe today for exclusive analyses and retrospectives!

Bibliography

Audin, M. (2012) Georges Franju. Paris: Éditions de La Martinière.

Bradshaw, P. (2014) Under the Skin: The Substance of Terror. London: BFI Publishing.

Calvini, F. (2000) ‘Les Yeux sans visage: Poetic Surgery and the New Flesh’, Studies in French Cinema, 1(2), pp. 112-128.

Faber, M. (2000) Under the Skin. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

Glazer, J. (2013) Interview: ‘Directing the Invisible’. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/29/jonathan-glazer-under-the-skin-interview (Accessed: 15 October 2024).

Redon, J. (1958) Les Yeux sans visage. Paris: Éditions du Scorpion.

Schuessler, J. (2014) ‘Body Doubles: Identity in Franju and Glazer’, Sight & Sound, 24(5), pp. 34-39.

Vincendeau, G. (2017) Les Yeux sans visage: Franju’s Masterwork. London: Wallflower Press.