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Georges Franju's contribution to the horror genre-through his films Blood of the Beasts (1949) find Eyes Without a Face (1959)-is "shock horror": the employment of graphic, visceral shock to access the historical substrate of traumatic experience.
Franju does not tremble on the brink. He dives in. lie leads us implacably on to the very limits of what our nerves can stand.
-Jean Cocteau1
The trouble with [director Henri-Georges] Clouzot is that he tries to knock the audience's head off. That's wrong; you should twist it off.
-Georges Franju2
When Georges Franju died in 1987, he felt bitterly dissatisfied with the spotty critical reception of his film career. Perhaps some of this neglect can be attributed to his allegedly volatile personality-at least one critic described his reputation as "the Céline of conversationalists, a man of 'torrential vehemence' spitting out excremental expletives like a tracer-stream of olive pits."3 But Franju's shadowy presence in film history probably has more to do with a remarkably multifaceted career that resists convenient categorization into any of its individual components: co-founder (with Henri Langiois) of the Cinémathèque Française (1937), secretary general of the Institut de Cinématographic Scientifique (1944-54), documentarist, fiction filmmaker, Left Bank director, proto-New Wavist, and Surrealist heir. This essay seeks to add yet another label to this unwieldy list: pioneer of the modern horror film.
By examining the development of a horror-inflected aesthetic in Franju's two most significant films, Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949) and Les ¾ß'ç? sans visage (Eyes Without a Pace, 1959), I hope to lend a certain coherence to a career that has not received the analysis it deserves. For it is within the realm of horror, I will argue, that a synthesis of Franju's disparate influences occurs and that his crucial contribution to the genre begins to take shape. I call this contribution "shock horror": the employment of graphic, visceral shock to access the historical substrate of traumatic experience. In order to trace the formation of Franju's aesthetic, we must first turn to Surrealism.
Franju s professional awakening to film coincided with the peak of cinematic Surrealism, and the movements inspiration marks his entire career. Among the films Henri Langlois introduced him to when they met in 1934 were Luis...