“Eyes Without a Face” (Les Yeus sans Visage) has been a contentious film since it was first released in 1959. In her book “Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde” Joan Hawkins notes the difficulty audiences and critics seem to have in classifying the film. “Horror but not Hammer Horror, not low horror, not horror horror” (74). In an essay written for the Criterion Collection release of the film David Kalat relates an incident during one screening of the film reported by a French newspaper in which the audience “dropped like flies”; fainting at one particularly ghastly scene.
