One of our most ironic cultural misperceptions is that dancing, as a sport and a profession, is easy and frivolous, a thing “for girls”. Dancing is for everyone, but that doesn’t mean everyone can excel at it. The world of dance is gatekept by the white and wealthy, and dancing professionally is a grueling endeavor. There’s no shortage of films about dancers, but few that showcase the real horror of a body pushed to the limit in the name of passion and perfectionism like Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

For the European audiences of 1960, Les yeux sans visage went too far. Jean Redon’s original novel, about Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) replacing the ruined face of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob) with those of kidnapped young women, was troubling enough. But in his adaptation, director Georges Franju shows the heterograft process in full, forcing viewers to witness Génessier and his assistant Louise (Alida Valli) remove the face of the captured Edna (Juliette Mayiniel).

It all started with a novella. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde brought the iconic titular characters into our world back in 1886. There’s no way he could have known that his monster would become one of the top twenty-five adapted stories in history. Over two hundred films, shows, comics, songs, and plays would spawn from the original story’s seventy-one pages. Since this is a newsletter for a film streaming service, I can imagine you know which medium we’ll be focusing on today.