Halloween doesn’t
have to be over once the last trick-or-treater has crept back into the shadows
of the night. You may still be possessed by the spirit of the holiday and in
desperate need of some real scares. In an effort to address that need and help
you find a choice that goes beyond the usual iconography of the season, I’ve
picked three titles that may not immediately jump to mind when it comes to
autumn-tinged chills and terror. They are not self-consciously seasonal
choices, like John Carpenter’s Halloween
or Michael Dougherty’s 2007 anthology Trick
‘R Treat, both excellent choices for cinematic fear on the pumpkin circuit.
Two of them rely more on mood, creeping dread, an insinuating style and, dare I
say, even a poetic approach to storytelling than the usual Samhain-appropriate
fare. And one has an inexplicably bad reputation in the halls of conventional
wisdom, accused of being repellent and tastelessly disturbing when it is in
fact repellent, pointedly disturbing and entirely, rousingly effective in the
shock and scare department, complete with a third-act twist that, if it hasn’t
somehow already been spoiled for you, you will likely never guess. So when
you’re ready, unpack the leftover trick-or-treat candy, get under the blanket
and get ready. One of these—perhaps all three—will be just ticket to freeze
your blood one last time before the more benign portion of our holiday season
begins. You have been warned.
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A night flight through a darkened wood opens
Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960) with a heightened pulse—a woman
races down a deserted highway eyeing her rearview mirror, fearful of the intent
of cars approaching from behind but also keeping an eye on the passenger in the
back seat. Soon the passenger, hidden in a too-big trench coat and hat, slumps
forward, and the movie begins its steep descent into the interior of a twisted
morality well worthy of being cloaked in a dark forest of secrets.
A French-Italian coproduction released in
Europe in 1960 (the same year Psycho
was released) but not seen in the U.S. until two years later, Eyes Without a Face plays like a Grand
Guignol fairy tale with imagery that, unlike the unforgiving slashes and sharp
angles of Hitchcock’s landmark, seeps into the viewer’s subconscious with
poetic assurance and smears the boundaries of our sympathies at the same time.
In an isolated mansion somewhere in that
darkened wood a surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) familiar with past glories has
instigated an escalating series of skin graft experiments in a desperate
attempt to restore the face of his young daughter (Edith Scob), horribly
disfigured in a car accident. The surgeon kidnaps young Parisian girls to use
as unwilling epidermal donors with the help of his devoted assistant (Alida
Valli), a former patient whose own successful facial reconstruction has blinded
her to her savior’s madness.
Given the elusive, seductive strangeness of
the movie’s surrealist mise-en-scène, 21st century
viewers might be surprised at the film’s notorious centerpiece, a shockingly
clinical surgical scene in which Franju’s camera barely glances away from the
horrific procedure being performed, and then only to scan the landscape of
moral conflict glistening like cold sweat across the faces of the doctor and
his helper.
But perhaps even more unsettling and
ultimately frightening is the degree to which Franju allows us access not only
to sympathy for the victims, but also for the daughter, whose dawning
realization of what her father is doing might be as devastating as her own
disfigurement, and even for the surgeon and his assistant, their genial manner
and misguided, sincere love for the girl incapable of coexisting with their
heinous deeds.
The movie is a masterpiece of raised goose
flesh. Even during the film’s most ostensibly placid moments, Franju burrows
under our skin with image and sound— over unadorned tracking shots of
the girl moving aimlessly through the empty halls of the house a faint, insistent,
inexplicable barking can be heard, soon revealed as coming from the basement of
the house, where the doctor’s very first victims are still penned.
If Eyes Without a
Face ends on a note of release best suited for a fairy tale it is a grim
tale indeed, tainted by blood, destroyed loyalties and the prospect of a bleak
future of isolation, as if a masked, faceless sleeping beauty had escaped the
evil queen and made her way into the woods to find only suffocating darkness
where magic should reside.
(Eyes Without a
Face is available in a restored and incomparably gorgeous Blu-ray edition
from the Criterion Collection.)
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