Shocking Sensibilities: Being Taken Seriously in the Horror Genre

        As was noted in the first week of class, many of the earliest films in the 1890s and early 1900s existed without narrative, having the sole purpose to interest or shock the viewer, usually in a single static shot. In his An Aesthetic of Astonishment essay, Tom Gunning dubbed this period of filmmaking as “The cinema of attractions” due to their vaudevillian nature. A certain subset of these “attractions” provided for some of the more macabre human interests, often featuring bloodshed and gore in shorts such as Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1898), which recreates the beheading of its namesake, and Shooting Captured Insurgents (1898), yet another mock execution flick. With the implementation of stronger narratives and the growing complexity of films, most movies grew out of relying on shock to entertain the viewer. The as of then “ungenrefied” horror genre (horror would not be a label to shoehorn movies into until the 1930s) retained this primal shock value. This connection between horror and early film may be one of the causes for the lack of acknowledgment by critics of the artistic value of many movies in the genre.

         One horror movie which I believe has elements of shock reminiscent of the early Edison/Porter films while maintaining its own aspirations to higher filmmaking art is the French film Eyes Without a Face (Franju, 1960). The film centers around a wealthy doctor and his daughter, who was horribly disfigured in a car accident and is kept hidden away from the outside world's eyes in her father's mansion. The good doctor is obsessed with finding a way to restore his daughter to her former beauty and attempts to do so in true horror fashion by abducting teenage girls. He then cuts off their faces and performs a skin graft to reattach it in place of his daughter's own. Her body rejects the new skin, of course, leaving his daughter's new face to slowly decay after every fruitless effort. I was reminded of this film while watching The Unknown (Browning, 1927) since they both involve rather gross surgeries that remove body parts. Although, I guess it also has similarities with Frankenstein (Whale, 1931) since the doctor in Eyes Without a Face also uses this flesh to create a living being; that is, his purpose is to bring his daughter back to life by allowing her to live again in the outside world despite of her past deformity. And speaking of deformities, I also am reminded of our recommended film for last week, The Phantom of The Opera (Julian, 1925), considering the girl also wears a mask to hide her deformities and is nearly more reclusive than Erik. Both stories also originate from France but that's besides the point (Maybe the French have a fear of ugly people?). Another fun tidbit: John Carpenter was apparently inspired by the featureless mask in this film when he was trying to find the one Michael Myers wears in Halloween (Carpenter, 1978).

        Now back to the point. Unlike the arm-removal operation in The Unknown, Eyes Without a Face's skin-graft scene is shown completely in full, forgoing the common principle of the time to leave the bloody details to the viewer's imaginations. The operation is excruciatingly drawn out and while not exactly gory, is tense, and shows just enough to quease even the modern viewer (or at least me). The shock value present here ties the film back to its early silent predecessors, although the graphic mutilation might bring it closer to the Grand Guignol theater's “amusements” mentioned in the Worland text (pg. 36). This scene; however, does not so much set the tone for the rest of the movie, which relishes in a great low-key, almost dreamlike atmosphere. This contrast heightens the effect of the “shock” scenes but unlike many movies with similar sequences, there is much value to be found in the rest of the film's duration as well. Many of the contemporary critics did not think so, however. The director was criticized for wasting his talents on such a “minor genre”. Franju responded by claiming that he was attempting to have that “minor genre” taken seriously. When the film was first released in America, it was retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, which, upon hearing one might imagine they would be seeing a schlocky b-movie. Not so, but this is just one example of how society's perception of the horror genre may hamper the reception of an otherwise great movie.