Beauty and terror are revealed to be two sides of the same coin in Franju’s haunting fairy tale. After his daughter Christiane is disfigured in an accident, a plastic surgeon attempts to reconstruct her face using the skin of women lured into his château by his devoted assistant. A film archivist who co-founded the Cinémathèque française with Henri Langlois, Franju was well-versed in expressionist imagery, as evidenced by the indelible image of Christiane’s blank face mask.