10 Foreign Language Horror Films Hollywood Doesn't Have The Balls To Remake

Language: French

Eyes Without A Face (or Les yeux sans visage, to give it its French title) was met with mixed reviews when it was released in 1960, though Georges Franju's adaptation of Jean Redon's novel went on to influence a number of notable filmmakers both in Europe and beyond - John Carpenter admitted that Michael Myers' now iconic faceless mask in Halloween was inspired by Eyes Without A Face.

While Carpenter's classic has never been for the faint of heart, a haunting mask is about all it took from Eyes Without A Face, a film that makes Halloween's slasher scares seem tame with its disturbing story about a surgeon determined to repair his daughter's damaged face by cutting off the faces of other kids and grafting them to his own child's skull.

Despite careful consideration of the standards of European censors during production, the film still caused a huge amount of controversy. Seven viewers are said to have fainted during a screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival (to which director Franju unapologetically responded that he now knows why Scotsmen wear skirts) while a reviewer in long-running British magazine The Spectator called the movie sickest they had ever seen.

With a current rating of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, the opinion of critics softened over time and the film is now considered a marvel of European horror, though it has never appeared on Hollywood's to-do list. Peter Jackson's struggle to get The Lovely Bones (a film that takes a comparatively subtle approach to child murder) adapted for the screen shows how far away the studios are from allowing the mutilation of minors.