Adaptation Displacement: The movie is actually based on a book of the same name. It goes even further because many people only know of the Billy Idol song and have no idea it's based on this movie.
A 1968 British film Corruption (starring Peter Cushing) has similar premise where a surgeon tries to restore his (much younger) fiancée's beauty by repeatedly treating her with fluids extracted from the pituitary glands of murdered female victims.
A 1988 French film Faceless has a similar plot involving beautiful women who are abducted by Dr. Flamand's female assistant and kept hostage. The doctor uses the skin of the women to perform plastic surgery on his disfigured sister, but the experiments leave the victims mutilated and dead.
The film apparently influenced John Woo for Face/Off. Coincidentally, Woo's trademark use of white doves in his films is similar to Christiane's dove-laden escape in this film's finale.
The film inspired the idea of a featureless mask for Michael Myers in Halloween.
Pedro Almodóvar's 2011 film La piel que habito is also about a plastic surgeon who is working on a revolutionary breakthrough with skin, and there's a hidden patient wearing a mask similar to Christiane's (though the circumstances are much different).
Vindicated by History: Initial critical reception of the film was very negative; one film critic nearly got fired for writing a positive review! Nowadays it is placed along the best that horror genre can offer.
by Maurice Jarre.