Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage | Eyes without a face (1960)

This film is adapted from horror novelist Jean Redon's eponymous 1959 novel. Dr Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is a famous plastic surgeon determined (clandestinely) to graft a face onto his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), whose face has been horrifically disfigured in an accident in a car he was driving. Génessier has a laboratory on his property and carries out experiments on his many dogs, and it is not very far from here that his assistant Louise finds an unsuspecting girl whose face he removes and grafts onto that of his daughter, who has been wearing a mask to hide her disfigurement, and who everyone else believe to be dead. It is this part that people have presumably found the most horrifying, although by today's standards this is nothing: what may have seemed like a horror film sixty years ago now looks more like a film filled with poetic beauty.

To his and Christiane's misfortune the new skin tissue begins to deteriorate and Génessier is forced to find a new victim. And this new victim Christiane will take pity on, will free of her bonds before the operation, kill her father's assistant, set the dogs free to savage her father, and walk off into the night.

Despite the age of the film its power is still extremely very strong, and it is obvious why this has become a cult film.