The Awful Dr. Orlof

Jess Franco's international breakthrough, and the film every other Franco film is a variation on. A mad surgeon and his blind, disfigured henchman abduct women from the nightclubs of a foggy nineteenth-century city to graft their skin onto his scarred daughter, in a plot borrowed wholesale from Eyes Without a Face and made considerably sleazier. It made real money across Europe and effectively launched the Spanish horror industry along with Franco's two-hundred-film career. This is him at his most disciplined, before the zooms and the fog took over completely, and it still looks handsome. Start here if you want to understand where the man came from.