Let’s get something out of the way: Jess Franco didn’t give a damn about Oscar nominations. He wasn’t here to sip champagne at Cannes or host Q&A panels in turtle necks and glasses. Franco made movies the way a haunted painter smears oil across canvas in a thunderstorm — erratic, atmospheric, and occasionally brilliant in spite of himself. The Awful Dr. Orlof, his 1962 gothic nightmare, may not be his most outrageous film (that would come later, and with a lot more exposed nipples), but it might be his most haunting. It’s like Eyes Without a Face got drunk on absinthe, put on a cape, and wandered into a fog-drenched alley in Madrid.
And you know what? It’s kind of a masterpiece — if your idea of a masterpiece involves kidnapping women to steal their skin while a blind zombie assistant lumbers around like Lurch’s disowned cousin.
Set in a vaguely 19th-century nowhere-land, The Awful Dr. Orlof introduces us to the titular physician, played with sneering panache by Howard Vernon — a man whose face looks like it was chiseled out of anxiety and cheap port wine. Orlof is the kind of guy who wears a cape indoors, stares at nothing for extended periods, and speaks like he’s narrating his own funeral. The man is obsessed with restoring his daughter’s melted face (courtesy of a lab fire), and he’s not above a little homicide to make it happen. Enter a string of beautiful women, all of whom seem to have no survival instincts and a deep love of moonlit strolls near ominous rivers. Guess what happens next?
But Orlof doesn’t work alone. His Igor stand-in is Morpho — a silent, blind brute with the emotional range of a kitchen appliance and the muscle of an off-brand Frankenstein. Morpho is a revelation in every scene. He emerges from the shadows like a rotting secret, abducts women with the grace of a drunk bear, and disappears back into the night like it’s just another Tuesday. If Frankenstein had been born in a discount wax museum, you’d get Morpho.
And yet, beneath the surface-level absurdity, Franco is playing with real dread. The cinematography is dripping with shadow and style. Cobblestone streets glisten under spectral moonlight. Staircases seem to lead nowhere but madness. Franco’s camera, often handheld and uncomfortably close, turns the world into a decaying painting. You can practically smell the mildew in every corner.
What’s surprising is how restrained the film is. This is pre-sleaze Franco. The gore is minimal, the nudity nonexistent, and the sex — well, you’ll just have to imagine it, you sick little goblin. And yet the movie is deeply unsettling. There’s a dreamlike cruelty to it, as if everyone onscreen is being dragged through someone else’s nightmare. The victims don’t scream so much as sigh. The soundtrack — a blend of funereal organ stabs and ominous lullabies — feels like it was composed by a mortician with a migraine.
Howard Vernon, bless his angular soul, gives Orlof more depth than the script probably deserved. He’s not a mad scientist — he’s a grieving father with a god complex, desperately trying to outrun the decay of time. Of course, he’s also a lunatic who lets his blind henchman perform amateur surgery in a dungeon, so don’t go nominating him for Father of the Year. But there’s something weirdly human about him. When he talks about his daughter, his voice cracks just enough to let the horror feel earned.
The detective subplot — involving Inspector Tanner and his cabaret-singer fiancée Wanda — feels like it wandered in from another movie, probably one with fewer blind necrophiles. It’s a standard procedural element meant to anchor the madness, but it mostly serves as a contrast: while the police bumble around in trench coats and red herrings, Orlof and Morpho are off in some candlelit hell performing DIY dermatology.
And then there’s Franco’s favorite motif: women wandering alone at night, with nothing but their heaving bosoms and zero sense of self-preservation to protect them. Feminism this ain’t. But if you’re watching a 1962 European horror film for empowerment, you’ve already made a wrong turn. These characters exist to be stalked, gassed, kidnapped, and occasionally dissected. And yet, Franco paints them not as fools, but as sacrificial lambs in a gothic tragedy orchestrated by a man who looks like he hasn’t slept since the Franco regime took office.
Now, is The Awful Dr. Orlof perfect? Hell no. The pacing lags like a drunk trying to find his keys in the dark. Dialogue stumbles over itself like a first date with a mouth full of gravel. Some of the plot points feel stapled in by a sleep-deprived monk. But it doesn’t matter. This movie works not because it’s polished, but because it’s committed. Franco, bless his lunatic soul, believed in every frame. This is no parody. This is horror with a straight face and a crooked soul.
It’s also one of the most influential horror films nobody talks about. Without Orlof, you don’t get Faceless. You don’t get Franco’s later, sex-drenched fever dreams. You don’t even get some of the sleazier entries in Euro-horror from directors who saw what Franco was doing and said, “Let’s make that, but with more nipples and less lighting.”
In the end, The Awful Dr. Orlof is what you get when you let a romantic nihilist borrow from Cocteau, slather it in German expressionism, and filter it through a pulp magazine found under a teenager’s bed. It’s beautiful and bleak, sexy and sick, awkward and unforgettable. It’s a black-and-white love letter to death, madness, and the belief that beauty is always worth chasing — even if you have to skin someone alive to get it.
So light a cigarette. Pour a cheap glass of red. And take a walk through the fog with Dr. Orlof. Just don’t look too closely at the face staring back from the shadows. It might be yours next.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stolen faces
