The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll

• Naschy (credited as Jacinto Molina) co-wrote the screenplay with director Carlos Aured, building on a story credited solely to Molina, and — as he did with nearly all his own vehicles — shaped the role of Gilles for himself.
• The story is set in a French village, but the film was actually shot on location in the Madrid region of Spain, with Navacerrada, Talamanca del Jarama, and Torrelodones standing in for it.
• It's the third of four films Aured and Naschy made together in a three-year run (1973-1975) — Horror Rises from the Tomb, Curse of the Devil, this film, and The Mummy's Revenge. That last one was their final collaboration for decades; the pair didn't work together again until reuniting for a short film in 2006.
• U.S. distributor Independent-International Pictures gave it a trimmed theatrical release in 1976 as House of Psychotic Women; a further-cut version later aired on American television as House of Doom.
• The three sisters are each saddled with a different affliction — Claude's disfigured hand, Nicole's promiscuity, Yvette's paralysis — a 'house of damaged women' setup that recurs across Naschy's Gothic-giallo hybrids from this stretch of his career.

Gilles's obsessive pull toward the wheelchair-bound sister reads as displaced grief for whatever put him behind bars — the film keeps that past deliberately vague. He's painted as the obvious suspect for most of the runtime, but that's the point: the movie wants you sitting with his quiet, contained menace before the real killer (a grieving doctor hoarding his dead daughter's decaying body) gets unmasked. Gilles isn't the monster — he's the decoy the story needs you to suspect.

The three sisters represent a fractured single consciousness — sexual aggression, religious guilt, and childlike dependency — each one a compartment the killer can target and destroy separately. Gilles isn't the intruder; he's the mechanism the household uses to finish a process of self-annihilation that started long before he arrived.

The wheelchair-bound Yvette isn't a victim at all but the narrative's true architect. Her helplessness is performance, and the household's fixation on her suggests the story's violence is being commissioned rather than committed in passion. The broken doll of the title isn't the women being hunted — it's the one who can't run.

An ex-con drifter lands at a remote country house tending to three sisters, each broken in her own particular way. One of them, wheelchair-bound and wide-eyed, becomes the object of his fixation. Someone starts picking off women in the area and collecting their blue peepers as trophies. Aured shot the whole mess in the hills outside Madrid, all frozen mud and dead light. The killer's identity gets telegraphed early if you're watching hands instead of faces. It's less a whodunit than a slow bleed, with Paul Naschy dialing his brute-charm routine down to something almost feral.