Some quote or other on the DVD jacket proclaims Yeux/Eyes to be “..the most beautiful horror film ever made”. Who am I to argue?
Rewatching it to harvest the above screengrabs though, it occurred to my that the beauty of Franju’s film is one that cannot be properly be communicated by still images. More than anything, it lies in the slow, deliberate camera movement, the delicate, deliberate pacing. In the flow of visual information, withheld, suggested and then, eventually, revealed.
For horror fans in particular, the film makes for fascinating viewing, acting as it does as a bridge between the older formal history of the gothic and macabre in cinema, and the more shocking, visceral future approaching over the horizon – a split which can be clearly observed as Franju takes us behind the socialised ‘mask’ of his film’s world - beyond the gauche, overcooked elegance of the Génessier house, through to the concealed world beneath it – to a place of bare concrete floors, exposed heating pipes and car garages, of caged dogs, sordid brutality and chloroformed victims being dragged around by their elbows; a place where the grotesque reality of Dr. Génessier’s surgeries is revealed to us in sickening close-up.
Looking back, we can see the French fantastique tradition of Feuillade and Fantomas - drawing room mysteries and gentle, elegant surrealism - breathing their last sad breaths. Looking forward, we see the more garish cinema of Franco and Bava, of Fulci and Argento. Of Cronenberg, Romero, “Night of the Living Dead”, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. Of everything, in short, that we think of as defining ‘modern horror’. And always at the crossroads, we’ll find Franju’s masterpiece, and the mixture of desire and repulsion lurking at the heart of all horror, personified forever in the unforgettable, unhiemlich visage of Edith Scob and her white mask.
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