It is time to visit the beautiful nation of Spain and encounter one of the most terrifying monsters in cinema history, Pyro, the Thing without a Face (1964). Before the film is over, we will have looked upon his face, which is as terrifying, but not as nonexistent, as the title implies.
Some of your universe's revered critics are not big fans of Pyro, the Thing without a Face. For example, reviewer richardtilley-76559 writes, "It's all pretty pointless, takes itself far too seriously and just affirms the saying 'if you play with fire, you'll get burned'." Reviewer leofwine_draca writes, "It's also a derivative work which reminded me of HOUSE OF WAX and HORROR OF THE BLACK MUSEUM in places although it doesn't have much of the impact of either of those two classic horror flicks." And reviewer lee-96696 writes, "The narrative can be disjointed, the pacing uneven, and the "Thing Without a Face" itself might elicit more chuckles than chills for modern audiences."
Read on for the truth about Pyro, the Thing without a Face...
The film begins like many other horror films--dare I say most horror films--with shots of children riding carnival rides. A man in a black pea coat walks toward the seaside fair and we hear his thoughts: “I swore I’d never come back. But there it is again, the carnival. The Ferris wheel that keeps turning around and around, like this crazy world, where the difference between sanity and madness is a split second, where your life stops to meet new travelers on the wheel of life. I’ve learned how that one second can turn a normal life, a fine life, a wonderful human into something monstrous, evil, until it destroys itself.”
The young man (who, incidentally, is not out of place amongst the carnivalgoers, who are all wearing black suits and coats as if dressed for a funeral) looks up at the Ferris wheel grimly. Again, we hear his poetic but somewhat dark thoughts: “Memory is a mirror of pain. It brings back only the things that hurt. The view of the past is as sharp and painful as a dagger penetrating flesh.”
On cue, the film flashes back to an unspecified time in London, where the young man, Julio Quintana, joins middle-aged Vance Pierson, an architect who is showing off the design of his new power plant to investors from Barcelona. He explains the design was inspired by his childhood trips to carnivals, where he became an engineer to find out how Ferris wheels work. “By strange coincidence, the Ferris wheel has become a decisive element in my life.”
Later, Julio and Vance ride in a car through London, where Vance comments how he hates modern architecture. Julio says, “It’s strange that engineers should divorce modern architecture.”
“Grounds for divorce,” Vance quips, “Mental cruelty.”
They ride an elevator to Vance’s apartment in the city (which he apparently hates — both the apartment in its modern “hive” of a building, and the city) where they are greeted, somewhat incongruously by Vance’s daughter Sally holding a hammer. (She disposes of it quickly, uninclined to murder anyone or build a birdhouse). Vance tells his daughter Sally and his wife Verna that when they move to Spain, imminently, they will stay at a hotel instead of quarters for the workers of the power plant. “No more functional architecture, thank you,” he sneers.
The film cuts suddenly to a flamenco dancer, indicating the family has moved to Spain. As is common in films of the 1960s, the audience is treated to an extremely long dance performance. After this highly efficient storytelling device, the film cuts to Vance’s office where the dam and power plant are being constructed. He tells Julio he is still looking for a house for his family, and the last available house is on the road to the village flooded by the dam’s construction.
Vance drives to the house, where he nosily searches the grounds and finds containers of gasoline. He enters the house and finds a woman there, played by Martha Hyer. “Are you the owner of this house?” he asks.
“Yes,” she replies.
“And why are you trying to set it on fire?” he asks her bluntly.
She tries to explain her way out of the situation, but it is clear he correctly identified her as an arsonist. “What do you want of me?” she asks him.
He leers at her. “Many things occur to me.”
As they discuss the rather unusual situation, he grabs her wrist and forces her to tell him how much money the insurance company would give her if she burned the house down. She says one million pesetas. He offers to buy the house and everything in it. “Except for you.”
“I’m not for sale.”
“You’re not?”
“I could be an unexpected present.”
The mixture of Vance’s cruelty and the woman’s flirting continues as she shows him the upstairs. They talk about each other’s situations, and she reveals she is a widow with one daughter. Ms. Hyer attempts to seduce him, for reasons never shared with the audience, in the upstairs bedroom. He tells her he is faithful to his wife…while grabbing her arms. She laughs. “You look so funny when you fight temptation.” They kiss and the camera moves to the bed.
Cleverly, the film transitions to the same bed later on, after Vance has bought the house. Vance wakes up to find his wife Verna preparing breakfast. The film them cuts from morning to evening, as Vance meets with Ms. Hyer at her seaside apartment. She tells him, “If I could ever love anyone, it would be you.”
“Have you ever tried?”
“That did happen. You belong only to me, nobody else.”
“That’s the way it is now.”
She turns off the light, and the film, again cleverly, cuts to an explosion—the dam is still being constructed. Vance, who is casually walking below the explosion, as engineers are wont to do, is surprised by rocks falling toward him. He is rescued by some of the Spanish workers, but he has a small cut on the back of his hand. He and his colleague Julio discuss his affair with Ms. Hyer, an affair that appears to be an open secret at the worksite. Julio reveals he had an affair with Ms. Hyer but broke it off, and Vance wants to do the same, but he is unable to do this.
Back at Ms. Hyer’s house, Vance looks at a picture of her daughter. “You love her very much?” he asks, rudely.
“In my own way,” she replies, ambiguously.
“There’s only one way to love a child,” Vance replies, mysteriously.
“No, Vance. There are many. Too many.” Then she reveals another twist: “Her father…was my father.”
The film cuts to a whistle blowing at the worksite, as if even the workaday world of dam construction is startled by her admission. (An admission that is never mentioned again.)
In a complex turn of events (that has nothing to do with Ms. Hyer’s admission of incest), Julio attempts to spend New Year’s Eve with Ms. Hyer, but Vance throws him out of her house. Then Julio threatens to spend the evening with Verna, which does not seem to bother Vance. Julio goes to Verna’s house to take her to a work party, and at the same time Vance drives Ms. Hyer to a carnival to see the Ferris wheel, which continues to hold a mysterious attraction to Vance. He tells Ms. Hyer, “The man who invented the wheel invented the world. That doesn’t make any sense, does it?” He corrects himself, somewhat confusingly, “The man who invented the wheel copied the world.”
Then he tells her their affair is over. He leaves, but first he steals two kewpie dolls that are nailed to a wall for unknown reasons, giving one to Ms. Hyer for her daughter. He will give the other one to his own daughter. “That’s one way we can say goodbye. At least we’ll be making two children happy.” (The kewpie dolls, much like the incest, are never mentioned again.)
The next night, as Vance and Julio drive to a meeting with engineers at the dam, Martha Hyer takes her revenge. She enters Vance’s house, where Verna and Sally are comforting each other over Vance’s absence, and she not only spreads gasoline through the downstairs and douses towels with flammable liquid, she also connects a gasoline tank to the house’s water supply. Then she starts a fire and runs away. The house goes up in flames as Ms. Hyer watches with an evil smile.
Suspensefully, Vance decides to return home to check on his family. He enters the house as it burns.
Vance searches for his family in vain. Julio, downstairs, watches him jump out of a window, flames engulfing his body.
After surgery, the burned Vance lies in a hospital bed. In a clever transition, the filmmakers show Ms. Hyer lying in her own bed, smoking a cigarette.
A doctor tells Julio, perhaps insensitively, “Physically, he will be a monster. His soul…a brain burns too. It becomes carbonized very easily. I don’t know, but I think we should have a psychiatrist check him.” He concludes his speech by telling Julio, “If he doesn’t die, not even an army of surgeons would be able to make him look human again.”
Surprisingly, Ms. Hyer visits Vance in the hospital, allowing him to tell her to run away because he is only alive to find her and kill her. “An eye for an eye, a fire for a fire,” he tells her poetically. She follows his advice and runs away. Then Vance escapes from the hospital.
At night a few weeks later, Ms. Hyer finds herself followed by a man as she walks the cobblestones of her Spanish village. In a nod to Cat People, she is startled when a car jams its brakes, nearly hitting her. Julio gets out of the car to warn her that Vance escaped from the hospital. She realizes her daughter is in danger, so she rushes to her home, which has been burned down (offscreen), leaving the daughter shaken but alive.
The film returns to Julio wearing an overcoat at the carnival from the opening scene. Julio narrates: “So Vance Pierson and Laura Blanco disappeared. The police continued to search for them, but to no avail. Fifteen months passed without a trace, until…”
Julio discovers another fire, one that the police tell him killed Ms. Hyer’s mother and her maid. Julio helps them track Vance to the carnival, reasoning that he is still interested in Ferris wheels…and he is correct. Vance, who now appears with blond hair and a blond mustache (and not without a face at all), is working for the carnival. The police create a roadblock to investigate everyone leaving the carnival, and they stop Vance to check his passport. An officer asks, “And you, Peter, have always worked as a Ferris wheel repairman, right?”
“Always,” Vance replies.
Julio sees the man known as Peter, but he doesn’t recognize Vance, as the blond hair and blond mustache are simply too good a disguise.
Stumped, the police decide to search for Ms. Hyer, who is now living on a nearby hillside with her pyromaniacal daughter. Ironically, her daughter Isabelle appears to be a budding pyromaniac, as she lights the grass afire in front of their house, alarming Ms. Hyer.
The final act of the film is almost an entirely new film, following the police as they look for Ms. Hyer, and also following Vance, now known as Peter and sporting what can only be described as a face, as he repairs the Ferris wheel of the traveling carnival and romances the 19-year-old daughter of the carnival owner, Liz. When she asks him how old he is and he says he is very old, she replies, perhaps insensitively, “So is Cary Grant, but I wouldn’t mind being his girlfriend.”
“He might mind,” Peter says coldly.
Later, Liz sees Peter’s slightly monstrous hand, uncovered by gloves, but he deceives her by showing her a spare prosthetic hand. “Many disagreeable things happened to men during the war.” Liz also tells Peter a convoluted story about local witches.
Shockingly, the stories come together when the carnival comes to the seaside town where Ms. Hyer and her daughter Isabel are hiding. Isabel runs to the carnival as soon as she sees it, and Peter sees her staring at his Ferris wheel. He allows her to ride the ride, climbing into the car with her. At the top, she points to the island where she and her mother are hiding out.
Coincidentally, the police find out that Ms. Hyer reported her daughter missing, so they speed toward the location of the fugitives. At night, Peter punches Liz to keep her from following him by motorboat to the house. (Somewhat confusingly, he rides a small boat to a larger fishing boat, which he steals and pilots to the island.) Unseen, he douses her house in gasoline while Ms. Hyer takes a bath, but when the electricity goes out, she finds him and confronts him, though she does not appear to recognize him.
In the shocking climax, she asks, “What do you want from me?”
He replies, “Would you love me…like this?” He rips his mask off, revealing his true appearance. (He still has what can only be described as a face.)
In the end, he burns her house down, but he rescues Isabel. Like the famous monsters of old, he carries the young girl to the Ferris wheel with which he is obsessed. He takes her up in one of the cars.
Using a convenient microphone at the bottom of the Ferris wheel, Liz begs for Peter to save the child. He does so, but he himself hurls himself out of the Ferris wheel car, killing himself.
The End
Pyro is a film brought to the United States by Sidney W. Pink, who also reworked the classic Danish film Reptilicus (1962). As the description above makes clear, Pyro is a fine film that brings the best of America (stars Barry Sullivan and Martha Hyer) and Spain (directors Julio Colli and Luis Garcia). Like many classic films, we will ignore the somewhat inaccurate title and focus on the positives: the romance between Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Hyer, the exciting fire sequence where Ms. Hyer murders Mr. Sullivan's entire family, and the horrific climax where Mr. Sullivan burns Ms. Hyer alive and then nearly drops an 8-year-old pyromaniacal girl out of the gondola of a Ferris wheel. What more could one want from a cinema classic? Cinema has little to offer that is not included in the world of Pyro, the Thing without a Face, which cements the film as an all-time classic.