a review of 没有面孔的眼睛

2019 CULT MOVIE CHALLENGE WEEK 40: Gothic Horror Week + HOOPTOBER NIGHT SEVEN: I serendipitously watched a low-budget remake of this film (Jess Franco's The Awful Dr. Orlof) for the previous week of the 2019 Cult Movie Challenge, and now that I've finally seen the original, the difference between the two movies could not be more apparent. Where to start? For one thing, the way this movie humanizes both the faceless daughter (whom Franco left entirely mute, unconscious, and without agency in his version) and the victims of her father's crimes makes it almost a completely different story. The same goes for the gut-wrenchingly clinical depiction of the face-removal operation -- it never once veers into the realm of pure gore, but it nonetheless hard to watch in the same way as actual surgical footage; it must have felt incredibly transgressive and daring in 1960, a year when even a master like Alfred Hitchcock didn't dare show a knife penetrating flesh or more than the tiniest bit of blood going down a drain.