THIS BOOK HAS surveyed a range of horror film masks in order to answer a central driving question: why has the mask been such an enduring generic motif in horror cinema? The answer lies in a combination of the object’s potency as a transhistorical, transnational artefact and the horror genre’s status as a contemporary forum where this power can evolve and adapt to new aesthetic, ideological and national contexts while adhering to the genre’s broader codes and conventions (making them recognisably ‘horror movies’). As outlined throughout, the transformative potential of horror film masks continues the object’s broader complex cross-cultural history and intersects in a multitude of ways with myth-making capacities often inherently aligned with ritual, power and transformation.
By focusing on this intersection of ritual, power and transformation in particular, through the mask we have seen that horror is a durable contemporary space for the symbolic force of the object to endure through its unique adaptability to new contexts and to align its intrinsic power with new meanings. At its core, this relies on what we can now understand as the shamanic imagination, less a reference to orthodox, anthropologically defined shamanism as it is to a much looser cultural sensibility. The shamanic imagination consists of lingering yet often unspoken residual traces of the mask’s importance to long-forgotten rituals and cultural festivals, beginning in tribal communities and continuing across history through a range of masked cultural events, performance traditions and literary movements such as Renaissance Carnival, the commedia dell’arte, Japanese Noh theatre, gothic literature, the Grand Guignol theatre and the Theatre of Cruelty, before manifesting in cinema from its earliest days, codifying as a key iconographic element of the genre from the 1970s onwards. As noted throughout, Neale’s articulation of genre as an evolving process governed by a tension between repetition and difference is demonstrated through the history of horror film masks. While masks have appeared in horror movies from cinema’s earliest days, this process of same-but-different underscores the generic logic that resulted in both its codification and its longevity. Horror film masks are not new, but they have been frequently deployed in new ways that adapt and engage with what are in many cases often urgent and significant ideological concerns specific to certain cultural, social and historical contexts.
As we saw in chapter 1, the materiality of horror film masks is crucial and while communicated visually they often provoke the identification of sympathetic sensory experiences – of suffocating, of occluding vision, etc. This materiality in turn is widely linked to horror film masks as transformative devices and their relationship to ritual and power. Likewise, genre studies itself has previously identified ritual aspects that link horror to the broader myth-making capacities likewise inherent in the object of the mask itself. The shamanic imagination allows us to further elaborate on its significance to horror film masks and their close conceptual proximity to ritual, power and transformation, while also considering the closely related figure of the trickster, whose legacy is frequently aligned particularly with the mask-wearing antagonists of horror film history.
Taking our minds back to Part One, we can recall how we examined the history of the mask in particular relation to performance and literary traditions as it moved towards codification in the horror genre from the 1970s onwards. Beginning with Japanese Noh theatre, chapter 2 explores the role and function of the mask in the Italian commedia dell’arte, gothic literature and French theatre such as the Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Cruelty, identifying a loose continuum where the mask and its intersection with horror is in many ways consistent with Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque. This chapter concluded by looking at the earliest examples of masks deployed in horror and tonally similar contexts in early cinema, a focus continued in chapter 3 as we discussed mask-centric horror films such as the 1925/1930 versions of The Phantom of the Opera, the Old Dark House movies, Universal Studios’ famous monster films of the 1930s and how masks began to show early signs of codification – recalling Neale’s process of same-but-different – from the 1940s and 1950s in particular. In closing, we explored the significance of the rising internationalisation of the horror genre during the 1960s with a focus on France, Mexico, Italy and Japan, and how these culturally specific strands of mask-centric horror cinema would influence the genre more broadly as exhibition and distribution structures garnered them a wider audience beyond their own national borders.
Part Two and Three saw us put our broader theories to work as we examined over thirty individual case studies to demonstrate my central claims about horror film masks and how their relationship to ritual, transformation and power manifest in specific instances. The four chapters that made up Part Two were brought together by dominant horror film mask typologies made after codification from 1970 onwards: skin masks, blank masks, animal masks and repurposed masks, while Part Three looked at technological masks – spanning back to the early 1960s – to examine the contemporary role and function of how technology, temporality and masked transformation and ritual can intersect to tell us more about the future of mask-centred horror films to come. Considering movies made by film-makers from countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, South Korea, Sweden and the United States, across these case studies Neale’s process of repetition and difference is mapped out to illustrate precisely how the deployment of the same object can be re-imagined and re-deployed, adapting to new, culturally specific contexts and creating new meanings by interpreting this familiar iconographic element into something often unique, creative and ideologically significant. While these categories do not account for every single type of mask ever deployed in horror cinema, they certainly demonstrate their scope and amongst them illustrate precisely why and how the mask has been such an enduring aspect of horror’s generic iconography.
Horror film masks are powerful ideological tools, but crucially they do not have a stable political ‘meaning’ – they can be used in different ways. Masks are not in themselves inherently progressive or reactionary, but rather – and more significantly – we can now begin to value the diverse, varied and multiple ways that their meanings can shift and be adapted to suit certain contexts and support specific (and often competing) ideological positions. Yet, for the primary claims of this book to have any effect outside the immediate cultural field addressed herein, it is important in closing to step back from the specific terrain of horror cinema and consider the wider implications of masks as transformative devices with a demonstrable relationship to ritual and power. Despite their ubiquity and associations with the childhood play in forums such as fancy dress parties or Halloween, there is today great political urgency to the conceptual mechanics of masks, their significance as a material object and their cultural potency. From Pussy Riot to the appropriation of the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask by Anonymous, international debates about the so-called ‘Burka ban’ to the current rise of the ‘alt-Right’ and its iconographic association with the hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan, the politics and power of facial coverings are as widespread as they are important. While these much broader debates are clearly beyond the purview of this book, this politics does find its way into horror movies (and has done for a long time), with masks in the many case studies we have explored playing a crucial role in providing the conceptual punch for how that meaning is played out so engagingly on screen. There is now and throughout history a fundamental politics about the human face and the power dynamics of occluding it, and horror film masks – through the intersection of transformation, ritual and power – play a long, fascinating and, until now, broadly unexplored role in continuing enduring traditions that speak to this precise power.