George Melies and abattoirs featured among the first subjects of documentarist and co-founder of the Cinematheque Francaise, Georges Franju. (Check the Shock Xpress 2 book for a very useful essay on his highly varied oeuvre.) In middle-age though he turned to fiction, earning his valued place in cinematic history via this, one of screen horror's most enduring and richly unnerving confections.

Plot is not at a premium, and modern audiences suckled on a diet of bloody video atrocities may lack the patience for this subtle film, but it's worth staying the course. Professor Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) is a dedicated doctor, probably a genius, and quite patently mad. He experiments with revolutionary new skin-graft techniques ("As to the future, Madame, we cannot wait that long"), in hopes of restoring the features of Christiane, the daughter he so horribly disfigured in a car accident. Genessier is racing against time, however, hemmed in by both Christiane's decaying mental state and the chance that sooner or later the police will track a string of corpses back to his door; each victim being a young woman shorn of her face.

The basic plot is as old as the hills for sure (the police are particularly wooden), though excitingly twisted. This is a film with no hero - it is solely about beauty and monstrosity - and Franju pitches it all at an occasionally excruciating pace (watch as Brasseur climbs the seemingly endless stairs on his first visit to his daughter). But somehow none of that matters - Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without A Face) is a truly surreal, truly subversive little picture.

As Christiane, Edith Scob is one of horror's most remarkable creations. As the elfin-faced heroine, she is also Franju's monster, looking on as her father skins the other women for her. For most of the film she is either turned from the camera or hidden behind an horrifically blank mask: only her expansive eyes speak of the anguish behind. When - briefly - she again gets a living face, she is no more present than before.

Much of the picture unfolds in Genessier's home, a huge, echoingly empty doll's house of a place just outside Paris, in which the principals rattle about to the numbing soundtrack of the howling dogs used in the doctor's experiments. Eugen Shuftan's cinematography has a cold, steely beauty, composing single images that linger long in the memory, not unlike the astonishing visual poetry of Orphee (1950); the sight of Scob in her nightdress and mask wandering in the night surrounded by doves is more than worthy of Cocteau. (The unflinching detail of Genessier's operations to remove a face leaves you grateful for black and white film.)

This welcome reissue allows a whole new audience to experience this long-out-of-circulation meisterwork as its maker intended. Les Yeux Sans Visage is a key work in understanding horror cinema, in appreciating the growth of a name like Canada's David Cronenberg and his 'body horror' films. What Franju gave us over thirty years ago is a unique, poetic and very beautiful film about very ugly things indeed.