Hammer’s success led a French producer to answer with a homegrown horror.

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), directed by documentary filmmaker Georges Franju from a script by Jean Redon, Thomas Narcejac, Claude Sautet, Pierre Boileau and Pierre Gascar, follows Doctor Génessier, a surgeon who disfigured his daughter Christiane in an accident he caused. Unable to live with the guilt, he abducts young women with his assistant Louise and attempts to graft their faces onto his daughter’s.

Eugen Schüfftan’s cinematography gives the horror a clinical, yet almost tender quality, while Maurice Jarre’s score shifts between carnival lightness and dread.

Franju, a founder of the Cinémathèque Française, brought an unflinching eye to the operating scenes, refusing to look away from the surgery. He described his own vision of the film not as horror but as anguish, a mood he called more internal, more penetrating, horror in homeopathic doses.

The result unsettled critics on release and has since become a touchstone of French horror, its influence visible in everything from Hollywood slashers to Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In.