In his pioneering work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin (1899) suggested that several basic emotions are characterized by specific facial expressions and that even people who are born blind display them. Eye-tracking studies show that an hour after birth, infants spend more time tracking face-like drawings than drawings containing scrambled versions of the same elements however, like other infant reflexes, this preference goes away in subsequent weeks (Johnson et al.
Even without opening our mouths to speak, our facial expressions communicate volumes about our emotions and our reactions to events around us. The cognitive psychologist and design maven Donald Norman published a book with the title Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (Norman 1993), but the opposite is also true. 2021).īut faces still are very important to infants and adults. The reality of newborn imitation is now in considerable doubt (Davis et al. Unfortunately, as is sometimes the case in science, these studies were eventually replicated, and the results disappeared (Oostenbroek et al. Theories of innate “imitation modules” in the brain were proposed, and pictures of infants pursing their lips and sticking out their tongues were printed in thousands of textbooks. For many years, it was believed that from birth infants could imitate the facial expressions of adults-a remarkable finding if true because the babies were too young to have learned imitation from experience and obviously could not see their own faces (Meltzoff and Moore 1977). WARNING: The video includes some of the more gruesome parts of the movie, so it is not recommended for the faint of heart.įaces are a central feature of our highly social species. A YouTuber has paired the song with scenes from the movie.
#VISAGE HORROR GHOST MOVIE#
Movie poster for Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes without a Face).īilly Idol’s song by the same name was inspired by Franju’s Eyes without a Face. Today, it is considered a classic of the horror genre, but as I watched it for the first time, I was struck by the film’s illustration of several ways that faces can be scary. The film received mixed reviews on its initial release, but it has been rereleased several times and is now part of the Criterion Collection. Franju’s film, which includes a long-at least it seems long-documentary-style scene of the surgical removal of a woman’s face, was so upsetting to audiences at the time that seven people fainted during a 1959 screening at the Edinburg Film Festival (Lowenstein 1998).Įyes without a Face evokes the Nazi atrocities of World War II, but it also has a dream-like quality influenced by the French surrealist films of the 1920s and 1930s (Lowenstein 1998). In an ultimately failed Frankenstein-like quest, he and his assistant, who is also his lover, lure a succession of women to his clinic, chloroform them, and attempt to transplant their faces onto his daughter. In the world of horror and suspense films, the human face is a common locus of fear and anxiety, but why faces? What’s so frightening about faces?Įyes without a Face is about a surgeon whose daughter has been horribly disfigured in a car accident that he caused. In an effort to extend the Halloween season, I recently watched the 1960 French horror film Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes without a Face) directed by Georges Franju, and it got me thinking about scary faces.