- guardian.co.uk, Friday May 9 2008 10.25 BST
Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac have two acclaimed classics to their name, having written the novels that became Hitchcock's Vertigo and Clouzot's Les Diaboliques. They also helped adapt this very chilling and perverse tale which relishes playing its outlandish and macabre tale pretty straight, except for Eugen Schufftan's expressionist camerawork.
Georges Franju's film came out in 1960, the same year as Britain's Psycho and Peeping Tom, and while it's not quite as revolutionary as our twin shockers, it does delight in taking you further into the queasy end of horror than anyone in 1960 would have expected. It's still tempting to look away as surgeon Pierre Brasseur blithely works his scalpel round a chloroformed face in a bid to restore the damaged visage of his daughter, mostly seen only in a mask, following a car crash.
Thematically, it's not too far from Universal's mad scientists from horror's first golden age, but Franju mischievously undercuts it with ridiculously jaunty music by Maurice Jarre (Jean-Michel's Oscar-winning dad, usually more at home in sweeping epics) as well as throwing in lots of dogs, doves and tombstones, to eerie effect.
