Revisiting Eyes Without a Face at Horror 101

I was invited on to my friend Aaron's Horror 101 pocast again to talk about one of my very favorite films. How favorite? I named myself after a character in it. I've written about it on multiple occasions, and I've reproduced the essay I wrote about it for the old Muriel awards a few years ago below the jump.

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Waiting on the Worms

For some incomprehensible reason, my local Pride celebration was held this year on the first weekend of October. The organizers and the local LGBTQ+ community center partner with our local art house to show queer-themed films in the run-up to the event. This year's slate includes a pioneering lesbian rom com (Saving Face), a key film of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s (My Own Private Idaho), and the recent trans horror film, T-Blockers (2023, directed by Alice Maio Mackay). This last film kills three birds with one stone for me: I get to support art made by trans people, I get to support my local art house, and I get to add it to the pile of horror movies for this year's spooky season. Of the three, the first two are more important than the last, particularly in the present political moment. T-Blockers is in a tradition of DIY filmmaking that exists at the fringes of the horror genre and on the fringes of cinema itself, a swamp previously inhabited by the likes of John Waters, Russ Meyer, Kenneth Anger, Joe Christ, Maya Deren, Ed Wood, Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, and The Blair Witch Project. This is not a commercial cinema, though some movies and filmmakers do sometimes escape into a capitalist marketplace. There are so few resources available to filmmakers in this sector that it's a miracle anyone makes any films at all here, so it is with some admiration that I note that Alice Maio Mackay has made six films before she turned 21, all while transitioning. That she is trans is an extra pair of concrete shoes to wear during the process. Maybe things are different in Australia, but the obstacles in her path have defeated more talented directors than her. T-Blockers is a bit of a mess, but it exists outside the demands of what constitutes a well-made movie. That it exists at all is a feat of will that most filmmakers could not muster. It goes to show that if you really want to make a movie, nothing can stop you.

Nota bene: you may find this post overly political. What can I say? I am a trans person living in 2025 America writing about trans art. If you don't want the politics that entails, you might be more interested in my posts on classic Hollywood films. Or engaging somewhere else entirely.

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The Grant Mystique: Dream Wife (1953)

Some years ago I complained that once World War II ended, Cary Grant was content to settle into inane sitcoms rather than the kind of sparkling entertainments he made during his first golden era (roughly 1937 to 1942). Whatever their virtues, films like The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer or Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House domesticated the Grant persona for a post war audience of war veterans moving to the new suburbs on the GI bill. I use the word "sitcom" with malice aforethought. Grant had become conservative with his choices. He would stretch his persona only very occasionally. One of his co-stars during this period described Grant as "the most nervous actor I ever worked with." It seems that the shadow of Archie Leach, the nobody, dogged Grant to the end of his days. The nadir of Grant's post-war artistic conservatism is Dream Wife (1953, directed by Sidney Sheldon). Sidney Sheldon is a name that should be familiar to audiences of a certain age. He is best known as the creator of the television sitcoms, The Patty Duke Show and I Dream of Jeannie. Certain elements of Dream Wife show up in I Dream of Jeannie, as it happens. Its conception of the Princess Tarji (Betta St. John) in particular is the template for Barbara Eden's Jeannie. Sheldon was very successful as screenwriter, as a television writer, and as a producer. He was even more successful later in his career as the writer of trashy romantic suspense novels with titles like Rage of Angels and The Other Side of Midnight. Sheldon had been successful working with Cary Grant before, having written the screenplay for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. That script won him an Oscar. Dream Wife, alas, was NOT a success for Sheldon and it nearly ended the career of its star. After the film failed to recoup its costs--a rarity for any film starring Grant during his major stardom--the actor considered retirement. He went so far as announcing his retirement in the press. He wouldn't make another film for two years. Dream Wife was a disaster for everyone involved. It's also a dreadful film.

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No Strings Attached

I've got no strings
So I have fun
I'm not tied up to anyone
They've got strings
But you can see
There are no strings on me!
--"I've Got No Strings,"
lyrics by Leigh Harline, Pinocchio (1940)

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Note: here there be spoilers. You have been warned.

One of my favorite types of movies is the sub-genre of the crime film where a bunch of characters try to pull off something shady and everything starts to unravel once some element or other goes wrong. Bonus points if the criminals involved are all dumbasses who compound every mistake with wrong decisions. These films are often hilarious. I was not expecting such a film when I sat down for Companion (2025, directed by Drew Hancock). There's a lot of noise surrounding this film about how even its poster is a spoiler, but I caught wise to the obvious spoilers early on. Any savvy viewer will recognize this film's essential nature early on. It's a variant on The Stepford Wives. What happens when a Stepford Wife wakes up to her situation? Got it. But the crime story? Oh, THAT was a surprise. And now I'm spoiling it for you. Cheers, mate.

This is also another film about the singularity along the lines of Her or Ex Machina. Like the AI protagonists in both of those movies, this film's Iris (Sophie Thatcher) has a legitimate beef with the humans who made her. If you are interested in the philosophical dimensions of AI, you are directed to those other two films, because this one is purely pulp entertainment. What philosophy there is is entirely accidental and bound up with the sub-genre rather than with any intentionality on the part of the filmmakers. Mind you, it is in the nature of genre to unconsciously marinate in what's in the culture around it and feed that culture back in the subtext, and that's what happens here. Plus, it has the vitality of pulp fiction. It's an easy watch, which is maybe the best way to smuggle ideas to an audience.

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Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

The Damned (2024, directed by Thordur Palsson) is a film that shows the widening influence of Robert Eggers on cinema. Elements of all of Eggers's films can be spotted in this film, including the visual design of his recent version of Nosferatu. This is a film that dwells in cold and shadow, making extensive use of its bleak Iceland-in-winter location. One could see Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead in this film rather than Odessa Young, but Young is fine in the part of a woman running a remote fishing station in the 19th century. The screenplay is less disciplined than Eggers, though, including an ending that leaves the audience with questions. The rest? Claustrophobic and chilly, a crucible where close company in isolation fails to prevent anyone from going mad. Superstition runs roughshod over otherwise rational people.

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Needles and Pins

The Girl with the Needle (2024, directed by Magnus von Horn) is a film so relentlessly grim that a home viewer might opt out of it before it is too far done. Indeed, the crux of its true crime origins doesn't even come into the picture until the film is half over. An interested audience should seek it out in theaters if it opens nearby, if only to concentrate their attention. I had no such luck. Given the state of the world at this moment in time, I considered whether or not I wanted to see things through to the bitter end. I stuck it out. The film has a point. It has several, in fact. It's a meditation on the precarious lot of women in societies past and present. True. And as such it is very much a film for this moment in time. It's also an interrogation into what true monstrosity entails. It could be mistaken for social realism in its early going before it veers into a full blown Gothic. But then an alert viewer may remember that it gives the audience a warning of its true intentions before the credits even appear, when it projects faces on top of faces in shifting distortions that make monsters of ordinary humans.

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Slouching Toward Bethlehem

I don't think more than five minutes had elapsed at the start of Immaculate (2024, directed by Michael Mohan) before I started thinking about the Magdalene laundries and residential schools. What goes on in the convent depicted in this film is not so far outside the actions of the actual Roman Catholic Church that the film can be dismissed as mere exploitation. Don't get me wrong, it IS exploitation, but that's beside the point. It has such theological and ideological axes to grind that it was bound to find Evangelical Christians and devout Catholics and right wing trolls of all sorts squawking when the film reached its end. This film hasn't got time for their bullshit. It has a particular shape of reality it wants to express and it uses bludgeons to present it. It's crude, but it's brutally effective.

Note: there are spoilers here.

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Couple's Therapy

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Brian De Palma had cast Barbara Crampton as the lead in Body Double, rather than as Craig Wasson's faithless girlfriend. It was Crampton's first film role, and her one scene in the film only asked her to take her clothes off for the part. Crampton, for her part, has proven to be a more capable actress than either of that film's ostensible leading ladies. Deborah Shelton had her lines dubbed by another actress in the movie (perhaps as one of the film's metacinematic in-jokes), while Melanie Griffith was launched into the big time with indifferent results. One wonders what Crampton might have made of that kind of career launch. For her part, Crampton attained cult immortality in Chopping Mall, and in a trio of films for Stuart Gordon. I'll take her performance in From Beyond over any performance ever given by Melanie Griffith, thank you very much. She worked for years in soap operas after that and then vanished from the screen for a decade or so in order to raise a family. She could have slipped quietly into obscurity had Adam Wingard not cast her as one of the victims in You're Next. What followed was an unlikely career resurrection that has seen Crampton expand her cult immortality in a series of daring horror movies. The capstone for this resurrection is Jakob's Wife (2021, directed by Travis Stevens), which Crampton produced herself and which co-stars fellow horror luminary, Larry Fessenden.

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Now You See Him

One of the enduring challenges facing horror movies is finding things that really scare an audience. Most horror movies fail at this, or abstract it in a way that an audience can sidestep their fears and take them out for a walk without any risk. A horror movie that can lay those fears bare and weaponize them against an audience is a rare thing and is likely to alienate a mass audience. The things that scare people are so personal that it's hard to find something that will reliably scare a large audience. Better to offer a thrill ride. I say all of this because the new version of The Invisible Man (2020, directed by Leigh Whannell), is legitimately scary and not in a fun, thrill-ride sort of way. It finds a raw nerve and it exploits it without mercy. What this film plays as a fantasy is all too real for so, so many women who are the victims of abuse. The varieties of abuse are all there on the screen: physical, mental, financial, institutional; the whole of a society geared to dismiss the suffering of women comes under scrutiny of this film's clinical examination. It's like a slap in the face.

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The Darkest Part of the Forest

“Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?” -- Kenneth Patchen.

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Many horror movies take place in what I call "Horror Movie Land", which is some non-specific time in the past, usually in middle or eastern Europe but sometimes in France or the UK or even early America. The time period can vary from the late middle ages all the way up to the early 20th Century (the automobile in Hammer's Kiss of the Vampire is a giveaway, for one example). What they have in common is that these settings are nowhere real. They are, rather, archetypal landscapes, the land of dreams and nightmares conjured up by the Gothic imagination of the Romantics. Think of the bleak landscapes painted by artists like Caspar David Friedrich or Otto Runge, or the Europe of Melmoth the Wanderer or The Castle of Otranto. Almost all horror movies that are set in Horror Movie Land abstract their settings for effect. There's a level of theatricality in all such movies, whether they're shot on a soundstage, as Corman's Poe movies were, or in the landscapes favored by Hammer and Amicus. Osgood Perkins's new film, Gretel & Hansel is set in a more abstract version of Horror Movie Land than usual. The locale is doggedly non-specific (the Hansel and Gretel story is German, but this film doesn't seem particularly Germanic), and the time period seems to exist outside of a historical context. Given the film's origins in a fairy tale, it's entirely appropriate that it exists inside an archetype rather than in a specific time and space. It makes for a strange mood.

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Wills and Fates

"Our wills and fates do so contrary run" -- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

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There's a philosophical problem buried in the second half of Terminator: Dark Fate (2019, directed by Tim Miller) that's new to the series. The Terminator films have always dealt in metaphysics, questioning whether the universe is deterministic or whether it can be affected by free will. This is the dichotomy between the first film in the series and the second. The films since then have mostly tried to have it both ways because if the end of Terminator 2 holds sway, there can't be any more Terminator films going forward. There's too much money at stake for that to derail future films, so these questions mostly get addressed in ways that permit the new films to take place at all, without too much thought about the original dialectic. The new film is mostly unnecessary, as all of the subsequent Terminator films have been unnecessary, except for a brief moment when it veers away from the series' metaphysical dilemma into the realm of epistemology. It asks: "What is the purpose of a killing machine once it has fulfilled its mission?" Then it asks a similar question. "What is the purpose of a mother of the future when that future no longer exists?" It also touches briefly on what it means to be a human being once a trans-human singularity drastically changes the physical bounds of what human beings actually are. It even interrogates, however briefly, the function and moral worth of work in a world where humans are not actually needed to perform that work. All of these questions have been lurking in the underlying structures of the Terminator movies, but this one brings all of them to the surface. It does not, however, dwell too long on them because there's stuff it needs to blow up real good.

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If That Nightingale Won't Sing

The Nightingale (2018) shares some elements with director Jennifer Kent's debut film, The Babadook. Both films are about motherhood. Both films are about women driven to extremes. Otherwise, the resemblance is slight. Where The Babadook was an intimate, almost private film, The Nightingale is altogether more ambitious. It takes its specific story and projects from it a more global portrait of a world that is sick at heart. It's also a good deal more violent. There were walk-outs at the showing I attended, something I can probably chalk up to an arthouse audience unaccustomed to a rape/revenge film that doesn't pull any of its punches. Even accounting for that, it's a rough film to watch. It's not an exploitation movie, not really, but it has the visceral impact of one.

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Sighs and Whispers

The most instantly noticeable difference between Dario Argento's original Suspiria and Luca Guadagnino's 2018 cover version is the way each film chooses to decorate itself. Argento's film often seems intent on burning the viewers' retinas right out of their eyeballs. Many of its best effects are accomplished through abstractions: color, stained glass decor, the pulsing electronic Goblin score. Guadagnino's film, by contrast, is a grey, bleak affair, taking its cues from the dismal world of Fassbinder's 1970s Germany. Both films start with a woman seeking help in a driving rainstorm, but where Argento's opening orchestrates a world of peril and chaos, Guadagnino's opening is a portrait of misery and defeat. It wouldn't be right to claim, as some have, that Guadagnino's film is "artier" than Argento's, because Argento's films from the 1970s are all art objects to one degree or another, both as objects unto themselves and in their contents. Argento made films in which art is dangerous, in which art can be used as a weapon. It shares this theme with the new film. They just have different ideas about art.

Note: this is heavy on the spoilers.

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Mystery and Manners

Good Manners (2017, directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra) is the best werewolf movie anyone has made in the last 37 years. This is, admittedly, a low bar to clear, given the preponderance of Howling sequels that form the backbone of werewolf cinema during that time frame, but it's better than the Ginger Snaps movies, too, and those are pretty good. It might even be better than those two pillars of werewolf cinema from 1981, The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, but I won't swear to that. Like Ginger Snaps, this is a distaff horror movie that finds some of its horror in the biology of women, and some more horror in the social roles women often occupy, salted with problems of class and race.

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New Flesh for Old

Although the real world caught up with Videodrome (1983, directed by David Cronenberg) a long time ago, in the late 2000-teens, it seems especially prophetic. What is the work of Russian bots and Cambridge Analytica and Fox News but the exact same "philosophical" signal as the one behind Videodrome? The Videodrome conspiracy is a right wing authoritarian fantasy made flesh as gooey cyberpunk hallucination. The real world version is, perhaps, even scarier and more insidious, one that has already wormed its way into every corner of the world's media. One lone assassin is never going to take it down, though our real-world Videodrome continues to manufacture assassins all its own. Sometimes on a daily basis.

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What Big Teeth You Have

Although it came during the cycle of werewolf movies of the early 1980s, Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984) doesn't have much in common with The Howling or An American Werewolf in London and their imitators. Apart from a taste for gory transformation effects, The Company of Wolves comes from the tradition of arty European horror movies from a decade or so earlier, indeed going back to the likes of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast or Jaromil Jires's Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Like these films, The Company of Wolves reinterprets the Gothic through a modernist lens, influenced as much by surrealism and by the various European New Wave movements as by the then-contemporary norms of the horror movie. Its director claims that it's not a horror movie at all, but there is a whiff of self-interested deflection in that pronouncement. And besides, Jordan has made several other horror movies of a similar bent, so it's not like a horror movie is out of character for him. But in some ways, he has a point. There is certainly an otherness to The Company of Wolves that sets it apart from its contemporaries.

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Hard Femme

When first we see Jen, the heroine of Coralie Fargeat's blood-soaked rape/revenge fantasy, Revenge (2017), she's the very picture of a sex kitten, done up like Sue Lyon in Lolita and sucking provocatively on a lollipop. Just a few minutes later comes a scene in which she goes down on Richard, her rich, married boyfriend. And then further scenes of her playing the cocktease to Richard's hunting buddies, who have shown up a day earlier than expected. Jen is high femme, dressed in crop tops and sexy underwear and a dress that is cut down to her belly button and gaudy star-shaped earrings. She is an avatar of the kind of girl/woman our culture expects to be raped. Our culture despises what she is: a construction of girly femininity that's designed to titillate the male gaze. If the rape in this movie had played out as it might in "real" life, the defense attorneys for her rapists might have asked, as a legal defense, if she was asking for it and a jury might have decided that, yes, she was. Women like Jen aren't allowed to say no.

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Bullets and Bracelets

Sing, O goddess, the wrath of Diana of Themyscira, daughter of Queen Hippolyta, that brought countless ills upon the scions of Germany. Many a brave soul did her ruinous wrath send down to Hades, many a hero did it yield to dogs and vultures. For so were the counsels of Zeus fulfilled from the day on which Hippolyta, queen of Amazons, and her thoughtless daughter first fell out with one another.

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When I was a kid in the 1970s, I watched the Lynda Carter version of Wonder Woman religiously. I was 8 when the show premiered. It was one of the only times popular culture let me exercise my inner aspirations for my gender identity without betraying them to the world at large. I've heard a lot of women my age talk about how they played at being Wonder Woman in the 1970s using Underroos as costumes and jump ropes as Lassos of Truth. I didn't get to do any of that, though I might have wanted to. My neighbor across the street was such a girl and I was insanely jealous of the fact that she had a Wonder Woman tiara and bracelets. I had to settle for pretending to be Batman, which was acceptable to a point. I couldn't do the things I wanted as play activity, but I could watch the show, and watch it I did. Because it was superheroes and nominally an action show, it was permitted for someone who was perceived to be a boy. But it spoke to me as a girl. Wonder Woman was an aspirational figure: gorgeous, badass, invincible. Hell, even her secret identity, Diana Prince, worked for a spy organization. No life of motherhood and housewifery for her. Moreover, there was a transformational element to Wonder Woman that was absent in her near contemporary rival for girl power superheroics, The Bionic Woman. Jamie Sommers required six million dollars worth of bionic upgrades to become a hero, which was way out of reach to a lower middle-class kid like me. Diana Prince spun around and magically transformed into Diana of Paradise Island. There's a hardcore wish fantasy involved with Wonder Woman's spinning transformation, which maybe explains how Wonder Woman's fantasy gifts seemed more attainable than Jamie Sommers's technological ones. Magic doesn't have a price tag, after all. A lot of girls my age spent time spinning in hopes of becoming Wonder Woman. I did it myself in private moments every once in a while.

Wonder Woman comics in the 1970s were lousy, though. Her best stories generally appeared in team books like Justice League of America, where she was often sidelined in favor of male characters, or damselled. In her own book, the stories were often silly and usually pretty patronizing, even when the creators were aware of her status as a feminist icon. The first Wonder Woman series I ever bought was Kurt Busiek and Trina Robbins The Legend of Wonder Woman mini-series, followed closely by George Perez's revamp in 1987. The Legend of Wonder Woman was a loving pastiche of the original Golden Age version of the character, while Perez's book re-imagined her along more mythological lines. Perez's version is the canon from which the current character is drawn and it populates Wonder Woman's rogues gallery with mythological figures in preference to costumed enemies (though some of those show up too). It also changes Wonder Woman's mission in the world. She is an ambassador for both Themyscira and Amazonian ideals of peace and kindness. Moreover, the Perez comics largely avoid a male gaze when drawing both Diana and the other women who populate the story. The Amazons themselves and their island and Mount Olympus itself are rendered in loving pastiche of Hellenic art and architecture, often crossed with the gonzo spacial experiments of M. C. Escher. Perez provides Wonder Woman with an arch-enemy in Ares, the God of War. These comics are mostly pretty good. They are state of the art (in 1987) traditional comics. They stand out in stark contrast to the deconstructive versions of Batman and Superman and superheroes in general that are their contemporaries.

But they have their issues.

Most comics created almost exclusively by men are going to step on their own dicks when writing about women eventually, and the Perez version of Wonder Woman is no different. In one issue, Diana's friend, Julia, goes off on the god, Hermes, with a righteous anger that's fully justified. At the end of the book, her outburst is written off by the character herself as menopausal, as if women's anger isn't justifiable if there's not an underlying feminine reason. Menopause, PMS, whatever. That's not to say that men can't write about women or Wonder Women specifically--Greg Rucka's superior version of Wonder Woman is largely free of this kind of shit--only that these things often happen when they do. The New 52 version of Wonder Woman, which debuted in 2011, is almost laughable in its anti-feminism. It's as if writer Brian Azarello went through the Perez origin story with the intention of demolishing its finer points, as if he wants to say, "Look! The Amazons are just as bad as Patriarchy." As if to establish a false equivalence between feminism and patriarchy. When Azarello revealed that the Amazons repopulated Themyscira by raping men and selling resulting male children into slavery, I should have checked out (the lovely Cliff Chiang art kept me reading for a while afterward, much to my chagrin). When the New God, Orion, slapped Diana on the ass and she failed to even attempt to rip his arm out of its socket, I did check out. (1) The New 52 more generally pursued a misguided romance between Diana and Superman that was just too much to bear. DC comics of the current decade really doesn't understand the appeal of most of their characters when they aren't brooding dark-night vigilantes.

In any event, these are the poles of depiction that the new film version navigates.

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Maneater

I wasn't expecting Raw (2016, directed by Julie Ducournau) to be funny. I mean, French extreme horror movies like Inside or Martyrs are often grim to a point where they cease being entertainments and become endurance tests. Raw is definitely in the tradition of those films, but Raw isn't like that. Don't get me wrong: Raw is a profoundly disturbing and visceral movie, one that isn't shy about employing a gross-out scene here and there. Nor is its splatter of a slapstick variety, a la The Evil Dead. It's a deadly serious movie. And yet there are laughs to be had; some laughs come from actual jokes, some come from the cinematic audacity of the filmmakers. And some of them come from the way the filmmakers take the horror genre's structure and combine it with a contemporary naturalism. The way this is filmed doesn't feel like it's necessarily a horror movie, but the structure of the film, from its alarming first scene to its final whip of the tale, is derived almost entirely from the genre. I suggested to friends that after the final scene unfolds, I wouldn't have been surprised to find the Crypt Keeper sending the audience to the exit with some ghastly bon mot. Writer/director Julie Ducournau, making her first feature, is keenly aware of her traditions. The resulting film is self-aware and funny without being a parody.

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Living and Dead Girls

This post was written a couple of years ago for a book project. That book has since fallen through, so I'm taking the opportunity to publish this on my own blog. Enjoy.

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The case of Marlise Muñoz has been in the news lately. As I write this in early 2014 a court has recently ruled against the State of Texas, which has a law on the books preventing pregnant women from being removed from life support if they are brain dead even if it is against the wishes of her family or, indeed, of the woman herself. Marlise Muñoz’s wishes on the subject are not in question, and her family sued to have her removed from life support after a blood clot to the brain left her in a persistent vegetative state. This is another skirmish in the ongoing political war over reproductive rights, and in its most brutal essence, the Texas law codifies the fact that some parts of the body politic view women solely as incubators, whose desires and wishes for their own bodies are irrelevant. The court decision in the Muñoz case staves that off for a little while, at least until some other creative legislator tries another end-run around Roe v. Wade. (1)

You might wonder what the preceding has to do with zombies.

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