Bounding Into Halloween, Night 26: ‘May’ And ‘Eyes Without A Face’ Are Here To Pick Up The Missing Parts
We are mere days from the end of Spooky Season, and soon will come the banshee belting of Mariah Carey. It’s a sad time when the only thing horror hounds can do is pick up their pieces of shattered joy, but so many of them don’t know how to put those sharp shards back together and give them new purpose.
That’s why I have called in the experts. One is an amateur surgeon who follows in the footsteps of Dr. Frankenstein, and the other is a legitimate surgeon with plenty of happy faces for you to choose from. Let the healing begin!
May (2002)
This modern cult classic is one of the first movies to become a hit when DVDs supplanted VHS tapes in video stores, and it stars Angela Bettis (Sinister) as the title character. The young May Dove Canady is a shy wallflower who spent her lonely childhood being teased by other kids and living with a judgmental mother (Merle Kennedy).
As a child, May’s mother gives her a creepy porcelain doll named Suzie under the rationale that if May can’t find a friend, making one is the next logical step, but this only makes things worse later on down the line.
Down that very line, May becomes a veterinary assistant. Years of only talking to a doll have left her even more shy, and with the type of social ineptitude commonly found among coroners or funeral directors.
She meets a guy with nice hands, but that falls through when she uses a little too much teeth while caught up in the throes of passion, and her little fling with coworker Polly (Anna Faris) comes to an end when May catches her with another woman.
That’s when she takes her mother’s old advice and begins building a companion, but she has to assemble all the parts first. This is one of those movies that was easy to dismiss by its cover when browsing the video store, but word of mouth spread fast, and May found her way in the “Manager’s Pick” section.
What starts as an arthouse psychological drama goes full Body Horror by the end. Angela Bettis crushes her role and makes a seamless transition from awkward weirdo to confident parts collector. You can collect May on TUBI, while the trailer is below:
Eyes Without A Face (1960)
While May was trying to build happiness with human body parts, the people in this bizarre French classic have much simpler dreams.
Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is a renowned plastic surgeon with a beautiful daughter named Christiane (Édith Scob), but that changes when he causes a car crash, and her face is horribly disfigured.
He tells the authorities that Christiane went missing, while he vows to her that he will fix the damage he has done to her appearance. After fashioning a mask that resembles her likeness, the good doctor starts abducting young women to perform one-sided face transplants.
Unfortunately, Christiane’s body rejects every skin graft, which you’d think a surgeon would’ve already anticipated. Regardless, he refuses to give up and continues his kidnapping operation, but Christiane has other plans.
This is a dark fairy tale steeped in German Expressionism, and an up-and-coming subgenre that would be known as Body Horror. It’s like Hitchcock meets Cronenberg, but in French, and with a very strange music score.
Edith Scob spends most of the film behind a mask, but her eyes tell the story that viewers can’t see. Without giving too much away, there’s a surgery sequence that’s delightfully disturbing for a film this old, and it’s obvious where John Woo got his inspiration for a similar sequence in his 1997 action movie, Face-Off.
Les yeux sans visage (aka Eyes Without a Face) is streaming for free on PLEX, or just watch the trailer:
