3

Masks in Horror Film before 1970

DIVERSE INFLUENCES played a significant role in establishing masks as a potent recurring motif across many international literary and performance traditions and early cinema. This chapter moves towards the emergence, endurance and codification of masks as a key element of contemporary horror cinema’s iconography. Again, the shamanic imagination plays a fundamental role in how the power of masks is broadly conceived in horror cinema, through their ability to transform. The shamanic imagination underscores why we broadly accept that masks allow movement – literal or metaphorically – often (although not essentially) linked to the supernatural, particularly when associated with religious, spiritual or secular rituals. This chapter provides a preliminary background for the case studies that will make up Part Two and Three’s focus on specific horror film masks. Each chapter provides a clear indication of how Neale’s process of ‘repetition … difference, variation and change’ accounts in part for why and how the mask has endured throughout horror film history.¹ Like the traditions outlined previously, the films explored here maintain the dynamic and symbolic power of the mask, despite their diversity.

Again, films both famous and comparatively unknown are considered in an attempt to demonstrate this diversity, reinforcing the elasticity of the shamanic imagination. Accordingly, many well-known films will be considered in this chapter, including both the 1925 and 1930 releases of Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera and The Iron Mask (Allan Dwan, 1929), alongside lesser known movies like The Phantom of Crestwood (J. Walter Ruben, 1932) and Scared to Death (Christy Cabanne, 1947). Across this period, masks would be employed in different ways, while still governed by the shamanic imagination and its fascination with transformation and movement across symbolic (and sometimes even literal) planes. Horror in the 1930s was dominated by the monster movies of Universal Studios, which often featured ritual acts: rituals of seduction, possession and destruction in the case Dracula (Tod Browning, 1935), rituals of reanimation and mob justice in regard to Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) and more explicitly configured religious rituals in The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932). As these more famous instances demonstrate, however, while often essential costuming elements, masks were not necessarily a diegetic feature. This is not necessarily true of horror films produced by other studios, however, as many movies explored here demonstrate, including Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935), The Face behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941), Arthur Lubin’s 1943 Phantom of the Opera remake, Flesh and Fantasy (Julien Duvivier, 1943), Mr Sardonicus (William Castle, 1961) and a number of films linked to actor Vincent Price during the 1950s. These films share a fundamental understanding of masks and their power that – through the shamanic imagination – grant them often extraordinary abilities to transform their wearers.

In the second part of this chapter we look beyond the United States towards how masks manifested in France, Mexico, Italy and Japan that marked the genre’s internationalisation during the 1960s especially. This continues a consideration of how the mask as a sign – through its increasing repetition across the horror genre – attains a much broader field of signification, which in this last section in particular is closely linked to specific cultural histories. New discourses emerge from masks out of this process of same-but-different, but in a manner still consistent with generic logic, allowing audiences to identify films as still falling under the horror umbrella. Collectively, the horror films in this chapter provide a developing picture of how and why masks have endured as iconographic staple. Across these movies, power, ritual and transformation continue to intersect in significant ways.

The Spectacle of Unmasking: The Phantom of the Opera (1925/1930)

Masks and masquerade manifested in cinema from the outset, but if there is a single film that raised the profile of horror masks as a key component of the genre’s iconography, it was Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925). What remains intriguing about this film is that through the mask, rituals surrounding gender and performance begin to appear in horror even at this early stage of the genre’s history. For Harry H. Long, its release marked the precise moment when audiences and exhibitors began to identify this type of movie as a generic trend.² There are two different versions of this The Phantom of the Opera – the silent original from 1925 and the 1930 re-release with sound – and Chaney himself policed how his image could be replicated in the latter, limiting what Universal could do.³ Of the new material in the widely viewed 1930 version, the key scene where the phantom’s mask is removed was not the same as the original: rather, it was ‘derived from a Technicolor take of the scene that Chaney had vetoed due to makeup flaws made visible by the more intense light necessitated by color stock’.⁴ Although not up to Chaney’s standards, it is arguable that it is the very frailty of the disguise that renders its removal so violent. The flimsy materiality of the mask communicates sensorially the delicacy of constructed identities, the mask constructed as a volatile membrane between the ‘performed’ (controlled) masked phantom and the frightened individual underneath. Rather dehumanising its wearer, this mask recalls Haslam’s a spectrum of ‘humanness denials’⁵ – the Phantom’s mask is slightly less dehumanised than his own disfigured face.

Audience reactions to Christine’s (Mary Philbin) removal of Chaney’s mask were passionate at the time of its original release. A 1925 review in the New York Times noted ‘in the theater last night a woman behind us stifled a scream when this happened’.⁶ But this is more than a mere jump scare: for Mark Jancovich, The Phantom of the Opera offers an early instance of the horror gaze’s sexual politics. Of this unmasking, Jancovich noted that ‘since both he and Christine face the camera in a two-shot (with Christine situated behind him) we again see the Phantom’s face, this time unmasked, before Christine does’. Because of this, ‘the audience thus receives the first shock of the horror even while it can still see the curiosity and desire to see on Christine’s face’.⁷ Jancovich continued: ‘her unmasking of his face reveals the very wounds, the very lack, that the Phantom had hoped her blind love would heal’. This puts the onus on Christine for her experience of horror, as ‘it is as if she has become responsible for the horror that her look reveals and is punished by not being allowed the safe distance that ensures the voyeur’s pleasure of looking’.⁸ Beyond fear, the Phantom’s mask is a device that ideologically stabilises and destabilises; for Jancovich, ‘clearly the monster’s power is one of sexual difference from the normal male’ and that ‘in this difference he is remarkably like the woman in the eyes of the traumatized male: a biological freak with impossible and threatening appetites that suggest a frightening potency precisely where the normal male would perceive a lack’.⁹ This mirrors Sue Ellen Case’s reading of the Phantom, where ‘the queer is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous, the uncanny. Like the Phantom of the Opera, the queer dwells underground, below the operatic overtones of the dominant; frightening to look at, desiring, as it plays its own organ, producing its own music.’¹⁰ The Phantom is a tragic trickster: through identity-play, he subverts and transgresses the status quo of gender norms, his domain the liminal underground Other space beyond the on-stage/off-stage binary.

In some ways, this foreshadows the blurring of gender binaries that Clover identified in Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992). Likewise, the abject nature of what lies beneath the Phantom’s mask and the instability of gender constructed by his status as Other also recalls Creed’s work on monstrous-femininity in horror.¹¹ Creed suggested this image of monstrosity stems from an awareness of sexual difference and she also draws from Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection (itself responding to Sigmund Freud’s 1913 work, Totem and Taboo). Applying Kristeva’s work to horror, Creed stated that abjection ‘disturbs identity, system, order’, and the divide between human and non-human subjects by the rejection of the abject (non-human).¹² Ritual is key to Kristeva’s notion of abjection because it defines the separation between human/non-human and subject/non-subject. Creed contended that horror as a ritual does exactly this: ‘the horror film brings about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous feminine) in order, finally, to eject the abject and re-draw the boundaries between the human and the non-human’.¹³ Through rituals of masking and unmasking, The Phantom of the Opera functions in this way as the Phantom himself is shunned for the transgression of gendered Otherness. With the mask’s removal, the power imbued in it disintegrates. He is defeated and the trickster is exposed.

Masks and Space: The Iron Mask (1929) and Old Dark House Films

As The Phantom of the Opera indicates, remakes, re-releases and adaptions were already popular during this era; cinema rituals in their own right in their habitual revisitation to past stories with proven success, albeit for commercial reasons. For Mircea Eliade, re-enactment more broadly as a concept is as an essential aspect of religious ritual, and as Anat Zanger argues, film remakes contain ritual components as repetition is fundamentally a ritual act.¹⁴ Between the two different versions of Phantom of the Opera, the visual language that marked the development of masks as a key iconographic element of horror cinema evolved in the United States in fundamental ways. Of particular note during this period are a number of films that employ masks to privilege their capacity for horror in regard to particular spaces: prisons in the case of supposedly ‘haunted’ houses in Old Dark House films. The Iron Mask was typical of the romantic adventure film upon which Douglas Fairbanks had built his career and while not horror as such it relied heavily on a gothic sensibility, particularly in its use of the mask. Shadowy aesthetics dominate many scenes that foreshadow imagery which would soon dominate Universal Studios’ horror films of the 1930s, yet the use of the mask is noteworthy: rather than a disguise, it is forced upon the kidnapped king as a form of incarceration. At the film’s conclusion, this symbolic imprisonment is reversed as the king’s evil twin is placed in the mask as punishment. A gothic doppelgänger tale, it demonstrated how gothic and German expressionist aesthetics were becoming mainstream.

Roland West’s The Bat (1926) is again influenced stylistically by German expressionism. The Bat is known primarily as inspiration for Bob Kane’s comic Batman,¹⁵ yet it spawned two more remakes: West’s The Bat Whispers (1930) and the Vincent Price vehicle The Bat (Crane Wilbur, 1959). Despite being made over thirty years apart, they maintain the basic mask style of the eponymous, enigmatic villain, while also continuing Old Dark House traditions. Peaking in popularity during the 1920s and 1930s, S. T. Joshi located the origins of the Old Dark House films in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1908 novel The Circular Staircase, adapted to the screen in the 1926 version of The Bat. Joshi identified the subgenre’s key components in Rinehart’s novel: ‘guests who unwillingly stay overnight because of a broken-down car or nocturnal storm, hidden corridors, sliding panels, spiral staircases and unknown perils’.¹⁶ Alison Peirse noted that they were commonly adapted from plays that focused on families or ‘groups of strangers’ assembling in ‘a creaking and neglected property’.¹⁷ A murder is committed and survivors investigate the crime in the eponymous locale: ‘The vision is of old-fashioned creepiness, of property weighted heavily with secrets, cluttered with memories.’¹⁸

Masks were often deployed in Old Dark House movies to disguise the killer’s identity, essential to their whodunnit structure, but they also indicate that the spaces in which their dramas unfold are volatile and potentially haunted (although usually debunked when more human mischief is revealed). Masks are broadly utilised in Old Dark House films such as Michael Curtiz’s Doctor X (1932) and although lesser known, the use of masks in The Phantom of Crestwood (J. Walter Ruben, 1932) is more complex than many Old Dark House films. The Phantom of Crestwood concerns the murder of Jenny Wren (Karen Morely), who extorts rich, supposedly respectable ex-lovers. She invites them to a party at the Crestwood estate, but before her demands for more cash can be met, she is killed. Suspicion falls on her ex-lovers and a dubious gang of mobsters and it is revealed that Jenny was haunted just before her death by a much older admirer she believed to be Mister Vayne (Ivan Simpson). Vayne’s true identity is Henry T. Herrick, the father of Wren’s naive ex-lover Tom (Tom Douglas), who killed himself after Wren rejected his affections. With Herrick Sr. wearing a black cloak and his son’s death mask, these sequences are disturbing and the wearing of the young man’s death mask by his father – a doppelgänger via genetics as well as the doubling capacity of the death mask itself – prompts power transformations associated with the ability to cross the liminal space between life and death. The mask reanimates the dead, granting extraordinary transformative power to its wearer. Yet the film’s conclusion reveals that the real murderer was Faith (Pauline Frederick), aunt of the wealthy Frank (Matty Kemp): Faith mistook Jenny for her intended victim, Jenny’s sister Esther (Anita Louise) who she deemed unsuitable to marry Frank. That Faith adopts the mask of the dead Tom Herrick amplifies the film’s unspoken fascination with masks as a symbolic vessel for assumed sexual impropriety to be exposed. Masked villains as guardians of puritanical sexuality becomes a staple of the slasher subgenre over forty years later, where Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees garner a reputation for punishing sexually active teenagers. Before this, however, masks and facial transformations appeared during the mainstream spike in the genre’s popularity during the 1930s.

Masks and Horror at Universal Studios and Beyond

Although often not diegetically significant, masks were key aspects of costume during the ‘golden era’ of Universal Studios’ 1930s monster films from 1931 to 1936.¹⁹ Boris Karloff’s iconic performance as Frankenstein’s monster in Whale’s Frankenstein is an obvious instance, and an important figure in horror history. Evoking doppelgänger traditions, in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel upon which it is based, the monster is broadly interpreted as a double for Dr Frankenstein himself, whose obsessiveness collapses into monstrosity: the monster embodies Victor’s own ugliness. As Aija Ozolins argued, ‘this motif of a second self constitutes the chief source of the novel’s latent power’.²⁰ Alternatively, the bandages that conceal Karloff’s mummified face in The Mummy occlude the horrors of what lies underneath: while not ‘masked’ in the way that we are interested in here, there are regardless echoes of how later horror monsters disguise their monstrosity, such as Jason Voorhees’s deformed face under a hockey mask (discussed in chapter 7). But beyond Universal, MGM’s Mad Love is one of German-émigré Peter Lorre’s most enduring cult horror films and reveals its dedication to the genre in its opening moments as a young couple leave a Grand Guignol-style theatre. This is an instance of early ‘meta’ horror as they discuss their experiences of watching horror as spectators. Outside the theatre, a drunken man flirts with a wax figurine of the theatre’s star, Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), chiding Lorre’s Dr Gogol for being jealous. These opening moments foreshadow a reflexive excursion into genre framed by an awareness of horror’s theatrical history, while privileging the visual spectacle of doubles and doppelgängers.

While not a supernatural horror film as such, Gogol’s belief in the power of magic (and his obsession with bringing Yvonne’s wax figure to life) drives him towards the ominous, transformative power of masked disguise. Like tricksters more generally, Gogol is a master of bricolage;²¹ he deploys a neck brace to convince the couple he is the returned killer. Glasses and a hat cover the top half of his face, while this brace covers his bottom jaw and the sides of face, leaving his cheeks, nose and upper mouth visible. While this stands outside the usual way masking manifests in horror (typically a full facial mask) – closer to the aesthetics of pulp fiction – it disguises Gogol and propels the plot, leaving Lorre himself still visible enough to imbue his character with aspects of his broader star persona as a ‘strange murderous individual’.²² While not a traditional mask, in terms of Haslam’s spectrum of humanness denials, we see parts of Gogol’s human face, but it is obscured by these contraptions. As an example of the repurposed masks we will explore in chapter 7, they collectively present a monstrous image that is effectively a dead man returned to life to torment the living. Shaman-trickster Gogol deceives and transgresses to attain sexual power over Yvonne. His ‘mask’ grants him power that he could not attain ‘unmasked’.

Jacques Tourneur’s 1938 short The Man Behind the Mask revisits the same source material as The Iron Mask and while ostensibly an historical re-enactment/melodrama, Tourneur’s flair for the gothic is present with a narrator revelling in the horrors that ‘the unknown man still wearing the mask of iron’ faced, relishing descriptions of the agony he would suffer if the masked was removed. Tourneur opts for a double-masked deception: when the prisoner arrives at the fortress and removes the fabric hood from over his head, underneath is not his face but the iron mask. Tourneur subverts expectations of how masking and unmasking function: the removal of a mask presents only another layer of deception. The narrator asks, ‘who was this man?’ and presents three possibilities, implying that it was Louis XIII’s own son, a possibility the narrator describes as ‘a terrifying answer’. For Tourneur here, masks offer not the capacity for doubling, but for tripling: the person behind the mask could be anyone, which is chilling because it denies individuality, again echoing Haslam’s suggestion that dehumanisation is not a binary opposite to the state of being human, but rather that ‘humanness denials’ occur on a spectrum.²³ Identity is a crucial aspect of Tourneur’s horror work in films like Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and this fascination permeates this earlier short.

Masks and Cross-generic Terror

Masks as objects of horror appear outside the genre itself. For example, Lew Landers’s film noir The Mask of Diijon (1946) starred Erich von Stroheim as a psychotic, abusive husband whose villainy and power were granted a supernatural aspect through his mastery of magic and hypnotism. While the ‘mask’ of the title refers to his deceptive identity, the potency of the word is linked to the film’s dark, mystical content and the object’s broader associations with power and transformation. Likewise, Anthony Mann’s film noir Strange Impersonation (1946) hinged upon a deceptive identity resultant of plastic surgery, its promotional materials relying on the implicit horror of masks themselves. Masks were also used in more explicitly horror contexts during this period. The Woman Who Came Back (Walter Colmes, 1945) concerns Lorna Webster (Nancy Kelly), the descendant of a witch-hunter who believes a witch has possessed her and is causing her to do harm. Early in the film, Lorna is confronted by a group of children wearing Halloween masks; while a mother dismisses this as ‘foolishness’, Lorna is shaken. Masks here recall archaic, transformative powers; their potential is unleashed through supernatural possession.

In 1941, Peter Lorre’s star persona and facial transformation would again be pivotal, this time in Robert Florey’s The Face Behind the Mask. Although ostensibly a crime film, the association of Lorre and masks suggests an attempt to rekindle the power of Mad Love.²⁴ Here, Lorre plays sympathetic immigrant Janos Szabo, burnt beyond recognition and forced into crime to afford a lifelike mask of his previous face. A strong sense of the uncanny dominates scenes where the masked Lorre’s face has an unhuman, waxy sheen under the thin latex. Lorre was typecast as a horror actor by this stage and despite the absence of the horror monsters typical of the Universal films of the previous decade, the combination of Lorre himself with the mask is directly relevant to my interest in horror masks, ritual, power and transformation.

Arthur Lubin’s 1943 horror musical remake of The Phantom of the Opera starred Claude Rains who, despite appearing in romantic dramas Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), had significant horror form with Universal due to appearances in The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941) and The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933). Rains’s performance in Phantom of the Opera unites both these previous generic strands. As Ron Backer noted, ‘a screen adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera can emphasize one of two elements – the phantom or the opera’²⁵ and as such is considered more musical than horror,²⁶ despite sitting in the canon of Universal’s monster films. In converting Gaston Leroux’s story from horror to musical, a distinct softening occurs in how the mask is reconfigured in this new generic context. Backer voiced disappointment in the absence in the 1943 version of the scene in the 1925 film where Mary Philbin removes Chaney’s mask, which suggests that what lay beneath the mask was less a source of horror and more a sympathetically presented Rains.²⁷ The film’s climax takes place at a performance of Mozart’s 1787 opera Don Giovanni, which includes a number of masked characters. This creates dramatic tension when the police realise that one of their men has been killed by the Phantom and that Rains’s Erique is amongst the masked cast of the opera, hidden in plain view. That there are multiple masked characters drains the force from the object: their ubiquity reduces their power. After Erique is killed in an accident, the film ends on an image of his mask and violin: the mask is ultimately decorative, and acts of masking and unmasking no longer denote transformations relating to power or ritual.

Flesh and Fantasy (Julien Duvivier, 1943) develops its interest in the transformative capacity of masks through what are presented explicitly as Carnival rituals. The first story in this horror anthology hinges on masked transformation and power relations regarding gender and the supernatural potential contained within the object itself. Set in New Orleans Mardi Gras, Henrietta (Betty Field) is a bitter young woman, disillusioned by her physical ‘plainness’. Nursing an unrequited affection for handsome Michael (Robert Cummings), her sense that she is out of his league fuels her anger and isolation. Evoking Cinderella, Henrietta discovers a mask shop where the enigmatic owner (Edgar Barrier) gives her a beautiful mask to wear to Carnival, under the proviso that she returns it at midnight. Michael falls instantly in love with the masked Henrietta, but she is resistant to remove the mask despite his insistence as she feels he loves the mask, not her. Returning to the mask shop, the owner has vanished and said never to exist. Removing the mask, Henrietta’s face is transformed to reflect the beautiful face of the mask itself, leaving her and Michael happily embracing. Here the mask transforms not merely in the moment of its wearing; its magic lingers, allowing Henrietta to transition from bitter isolation to normative heterosexual monogamy. The common logic of the horror mask is reversed: the mask resolves transgression, rather than propels it. Regardless, it is a ritual that still grants her power, and of particular interest is how the magical object of the mask triggers a mystical alteration in the wearer. For better or for worse, the relationship between her outer appearance and her inner emotional status is governed by the act of masking.

Masks were by now becoming a staple in horror and horror-tinged cinema, an identifiable visual cue to provoke particular kinds of affective and intellectual responses. While the examples discussed thus far utilise different masks in different ways, they simultaneously recall Neale’s process – driven by a tension between similarity and difference – where this repeated iconographic element continues to move towards codification: an old object is given new life (and, more importantly, new meanings) in what audiences recognise as the generically appropriate context of horror. This is visible in Scared to Death (Christy Cabanne, 1947), where again the mask is privileged in promotional material to highlight the centrality of enigmatic identities. Through flashback, Scared to Death reveals how Laura (Molly Lamont) died, a stubborn racist who refuses to divorce her husband out of spite. The arrival of Professor Leonide (Bela Lugosi) discloses through hypnosis that Laura deliberately informed the Nazis that her husband was a spy, leading to what she believed was his murder. Unbeknownst to her, he survived and planned his revenge with Leonide: the appearance of his floating death mask at the window when she comes out of her confession-inducing hypnosis triggers her being – as the title indicates – ‘scared to death’. The presence of both trickster and doppelgänger traditions are evident here and Laura’s shock at seeing the death mask speaks of the object’s power to transgress the liminal spaces between life and death. The power of masks to shock and disorient in the context of genre cinema would only continue to solidify in the films of Vincent Price.

Vincent Price, William Castle and the ‘Crisis of Identity’

Masks that appear diegetically in horror movies were by now becoming a generic convention that granted an expanded potential for signification to the already much-utilised artefact. While masks as elements of costume were also crucial to horror/sci-fi hybrids like Jack Arnold’s film The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Invasion of the Saucer Men (Edward L. Cahn, 1957) and Invaders from Mars (William Cameron Menzies, 1953), they were also used diegetically during this period. As Mark Jancovich noted, the 1950s are assumed to deviate from horror’s status as a site for ideological subversion and instead was a decade of supposed conservatism.²⁸ A position typified by Robin Wood, for Jancovich this assumption relied on a reductive tendency to dismiss the decade’s genre films as ‘all the same’.²⁹ Arguing against this, he identified a turn from gothic horror ‘towards a preoccupation with the modern world’ where ‘the threats which distinguish 1950s horror do not come from the past or even from the actions of a lone individual, but are associated with the processes of social development and modernisation’.³⁰ During this period, ‘horror texts were at least as concerned with developments within American society as they were with threats from without’.³¹ Arguing for a rethinking of 1950s horror, Jancovich identified three areas that mark the decade’s genre output: invasion narratives, outsider narratives and ‘narratives concerned with “crises of identity”’.³² While the first two are fascinating, the third is of particular interest when considering horror film masks. Examining films that anticipated Hitchcock’s Psycho, Jancovich noted their emphasis on identity crises rather than specific attacks on the American nuclear family. Although locating this crisis of identity active within the science fiction/horror hybrid Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956), he also noted that American horror during this period was marked as a gothic revival, inspired by Britain’s Hammer Horror films and television broadcasts of Universal’s classic monster films of the 1930s.³³ Key to this renaissance was Roger Corman, particularly his Edgar Allan Poe cycle – including The Masque of the Red Death (1964), discussed previously – which Jancovich argued was ‘directly concerned with crises of identity’. For Jancovich, characters (often played by Vincent Price) ‘are not only aware of their vulnerability, but often seem to actually desire their own destruction’.³⁴

The Masque of the Red Death was not Vincent Price’s first venture into mask-based horror, and his horror status was established with films including mask-centric horror films such as House of Wax (1953) and The Mad Magician (1954). These films demonstrate the crisis of identity that Jancovich suggested permeated American horror during this period. House of Wax was a remake of the Michael Curtiz’s 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, loyal to the original in its retelling of a sculptor disfigured in a fire lit by a greedy partner, who later opts for the macabre craft of wax-embalming human victims to maintain the success of his new professional venture, the eponymous House of Wax. The major difference between The Mystery of the Wax Museum and House of Wax was the utilisation of 3D film technology.³⁵ As explored in Part Three, 3D horror films about masks are often highly reflexive, where the placement of an object on the face is essential to perceiving the technological spectacle. Yet masking and associated rituals are significant in House of Wax in purely diegetic terms, as they necessitate a complex process of ‘double’ masking. The plot requires Price’s character Professor Henry Jarrod to wear a mask the audience recognise as the character’s pre-injury face (the face of Vincent Price). As we see throughout the film, however – most spectacularly when his mask is ripped off, echoing the 1925 Phantom of the Opera – underneath that ‘normal’ face lies one disfigured by fire (constructed within the film as ‘monstrous’). In the scene where Price’s ‘normal’ mask is ripped off, he was in practical terms wearing two masks – a plastic one over the top of the disfigured make-up and prosthetics that lay underneath.³⁶ Transgressive and deceptive, Price here (and elsewhere, discussed in chapter 4) is a trickster, his characters dominated by the power of transformation and the unstable, playful identities of his many masks.

Directed by cult horror figure William Castle, The Tingler (1959) includes a brief but memorable inclusion of a mask, essential to its narrative. Following Price’s Dr Warren Chapin and his research into a strange insect-like creature that responds to terror in the human body (‘The Tingler’ of the title), his deaf-mute patient Ollie Higgins (Philip Coolidge) is scared to death (with the help of the ‘terror bug’ triggered by her husband who torments her by wearing a monster mask). A key scene in terms of plot development and spectacle, while not central to the overriding story, The Tingler demonstrates Castle’s and Price’s continuing interest in horror film masks.

While Castle had previously employed masks in both The Tingler and his film noir When Strangers Marry (1944), it is in Mr Sardonicus (1961) that he deployed it most centrally. Here the mask is a symbolic membrane between two identities linked to one man, the tragic, impoverished Marek (Guy Rolfe) who – by digging up his father’s corpse to recover a winning lottery ticket becomes a ghoul, his face instantly petrified into a macabre grin – takes on another identity, the rich Baron Sardonicus. Covering his face with an immovable mask, Sardonicus’s mask typifies its transgressive, uncanny status as a face-that-is-not-a-face, demonstrating Tseëlon’s previous observation that the mask is alluring due to a tension between ‘fascination and avoidance’, standing ‘in an intermediary position between different worlds’ and marked by binaries of concealment/revelation, truth/artifice, natural/supernatural and life/death.³⁷

Through the shamanic imagination – the residual traces of traditional, anthropologically conceived shamanism that resonate throughout the popular consciousness – Sardonicus’s mask allows him to move across these spaces, binaries which physically demarcate the divisions that mark Marek and the baron. Using the object to hide the disfiguring paralysis caused by a moral transgression (grave robbing), the baron’s mask is a transformative device. While superficially disguising his face, it also marks his ethical deterioration, a symbol of his corrupted morals and the total change in his personality from innocent, brow-beaten Marek to violent and cruel Sardonicus. The mask dehumanises Marek: it represents his lack of humanity and his loss of compassion and empathy. The mask in Mr Sardonicus is therefore fundamental to the film’s thematic and narrative trajectory and – through acts of masking and unmasking and the building of tension around the question ‘what lies underneath?’ – provides many of its thrills. Castle’s film is not unique in this way but, through the mask, he mines the historical potency of the object inherent to the shamanic imagination. The horror of Mr Sardonicus is explicitly linked to the baron’s transgressive disconnection between his face, ethics and identity.

Masks and the Internationalisation of Horror

Moving towards the major case studies that comprise the last two parts of this book, we continue to underscore Neale’s identification of a same-but-different process that marks the codification of the mask as an iconographic staple of horror. We now consider the internationalisation of horror during the 1960s to emphasise the further codification that was broadly solidified in films from a diverse range of countries from the 1970s onwards. This repetition creates a productive tension through variation in a process that sees this popular form – like Carnival, commedia dell’arte, the gothic, Grand Guignol theatre and many other cultural forms before it – updated to a new cultural context. The function and meaning of the mask-as-artefact is therefore once again adapted to particular ideological or social functions that are specific to its historical and cultural contexts.

Masks appeared in horror films from around the world since cinema’s earliest days, but a range of films have survived since the 1960s, that are now relatively accessible, demonstrating just how global this scope was.³⁸ In the United States, the expansion of art houses during the 1950s saw the market for foreign films increase, benefitting in both exhibition and distribution terms from rapid industrial changes with the decline of the classical Hollywood production model. The decrease of B-picture production saw many cinemas seeking alternatives, switching to foreign films to keep businesses open.³⁹ Television also challenged the traditional dominance of Hollywood, compounded by the fact that foreign films were generally more cheaply made and considered more risqué than what was made under the strict production code.⁴⁰ Peter Hutchings noted that from the 1950s onwards, a ‘growing internationalization of horror production’ flourished and for Tim Bergfelder, international co-productions increased from the mid-1950s in particular.⁴¹

With the codification of masks from the 1970s onwards, many emerging American horror film-makers surely would have been exposed to foreign cinema, not only in art house cinemas and television but in grindhouses.⁴² We now examine some notable instances of horror film masks from France, Mexico, Italy and Japan during this period of rapid internationalisation to demonstrate the increasing codification of masks as a central element of horror iconography. While masks are deployed in notably diverse ways across these different cultural contexts, collectively they illustrate how pervasively masks were employed as both narrative devices and an element of horror iconography imbued with great symbolic power.

France, masks and Eyes without a Face (1960)

From Grand Guignol theatre to the legend of ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’ to films like Le masque d’horreur (1912) and Les trois masques (1921/1929), masks have a long history in French tales of terror that have proven influential beyond its own national boundaries. The same can be said of Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face. The mask was a logical artefact for Franju to employ his pursuit of ‘anguish’ – a term he himself privileged over ‘horror’⁴³ – due to the production pressures of making a film that would appeal to a number of international markets.⁴⁴ Eyes without a Face extends the mad scientist trope from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), bringing again a kind of double masking into play. Often disguised by surgical masks, goggles or other facial coverings, mad scientists embody mistrust in science, where transformations of power through the surgical mask in particular create a space to harm instead of heal (discussed in chapter 7). The surgical mask transforms the mad doctor through surgical rituals into sadistic tricksters; they are deceptive, believe in their own god-like capacities and invert scenarios where they are meant to heal into ones where they seek actively to harm.⁴⁵ There are echoes of the shaman in the mad scientist: for David J. Skal, ‘The mad scientist … is a restless synthesizer, scuttling around his laboratory, stitching together our central schisms, digging into graves while pulling down the energy of the sky.’⁴⁶

Eyes without a Face also recalls the figure of the doppelgänger. As Kate Ince noted, even the title implies myriad interpretations: it appears to refer to the protagonist Christiane (Édith Scob), forced to wear the blank white mask over the scar tissue caused by an accident as her deranged father Dr Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) attempts to master facial transplants, kidnapping young women with his accomplice Louise (Alida Valli), who is indebted to him for his successful reconstruction of her own face. Yet there are other eyes without faces: not only, notes Ince, ‘the alarming close up on Edna’s (an early victim of Dr Génessier, played by Juliette Mayniel) bandaged face and staring eyes after she has jumped from an upstairs window’, but in the very masked faces of Génessier himself, hidden as it is behind a surgical mask. For Ince, ‘in all these instances, facelessness signifies inhumanity, either imposed and innocently suffered or consciously assumed. Eyes retain their traditional meaning of a window onto the soul: her undamaged eyes glimmering through her mask are a major contributor to the pathos of Christiane’s character.’⁴⁷

As expanded on in chapter 5, it is the very blankness of Christiane’s mask that renders it a neutral canvas upon which a variety of identities (and interpretations of those identities) can be inscribed. Both Joan Hawkins (2000) and Adam Lowenstein (2005) have argued that Franju’s film can be read through post-war France and its involvement in the Second World War. For Hawkins, ‘Doctor Génessier’s painstaking removal of female skin is reminiscent of the horror stories about lampshades made from the bodies of concentration camp victims’.⁴⁸ That it is women who are punished in the film – both Christiane and those murdered in attempts restore her identity – is crucial, and Hawkins notes that ‘French guilt over all French collaboration was initially mapped onto women’s bodies and it was women who bore the brunt of the punishment for most of the quotidian traffic in German commerce’.⁴⁹

For Lowenstein, the construction (and destruction) of identity is also political in Eyes without a Face. For him, the film’s moral ambiguity stems from the fact that ‘the roles of Christiane as victimized and Génessier as victimizer include complex, double-edged connotations’:⁵⁰ while we may feel for Christiane, we simultaneously know that she is aware that young women are murdered for her benefit. Although monstrous, Génessier too ‘is also granted brief but significant moments of humanity’.⁵¹ For Lowenstein, Franju rejects ‘any easy, one-to-one index for his allegories of the Occupation and the Holocaust reflects a commitment to engaging history as a complicated force to be struggled with by the audience, rather than spoon-fed to them’.⁵² Franju’s ambivalence in the ethical construction of his protagonists is important, the blankness of Christiane’s mask providing a metaphorical space for ideological anxieties to be projected onto. This is a strong example of how a variation of traditional mask-wearing rituals (here surgery) can be refashioned through horror to reflect culturally specific ideological debates: it presents old traditions and objects in new contexts to provide social commentary. Identities are destabilised in Eyes without a Face and Christiane’s blank visage is less a cypher for innocence as it is a slate wiped clean: an identity purified of any traces of a horrible and horrifying ‘truth’ that lies hidden underneath. Typifying Lowenstein’s powerful claim that horror cinema is a ‘return to history through the gut’, the mask here ‘speaks’ of what many struggled to articulate about French guilt and complicity during the war.⁵³ Yet even for audiences who watch the film untethered from the film’s historical moment, as a stand-alone horror movie – through the presence and deployment of the mask – its impact is nevertheless still memorable.

Mexico, masks and El Santo

The significance of masks in Mexican culture cannot be understated when considering the El Santo films. For Octavia Paz, masks are the defining metaphor of Mexican identity, arguing that for all Mexicans – regardless of social status or background – ‘his face is a mask and so is his smile’.⁵⁴ From this perspective, masks govern specifically ‘Mexican’ behaviours, framing all interactions through this symbolic distancing device. While Paz acknowledged a spirit of nihilism to these metaphorical masks – resultant in large part to a national identity caught between its pre-Columbian origins and the influx of Spanish cultural influences that came with the colonialisation of the Aztecs in the sixteenth century – an awareness of this masking tendency in the Mexican psyche is essential to Mexican culture. Paz identified the Día de los Muertos carnival or fiesta as a significant moment where the dominant ‘mask’ is exchanged for another, bringing otherwise isolated (‘masked’) participants – stranded as they are, according to Paz, between two powerful cultural/historical influences – together in a communal experience that privileges death as the ultimate symbol of solitude.

Masks played a crucial role in Mesoamerican culture long before Spanish colonialism. As Alexandra Mendoza Covarrubias noted, Día de los Muertos spans back at least 3,000 years, its origins stemming from both pre-Columbian and Spanish-Catholic cultural influences.⁵⁵ Tseëlon traced Mesoamerican masquerade rituals to the pre-classic period during the first millennium bc.⁵⁶ Masks have a lengthy tradition in Mexican folk art and anthropologists have explored how pre-colonial traditions have evolved and endured across a range of cultural practices in different regions.⁵⁷ Walter Sorell acknowledged the artistry of Aztec death masks, whose very materiality contained potent symbolic and religious force in cremation ceremonies.⁵⁸

The El Santo films offer a significant example of how masking traditions have endured throughout Mexican culture. Doyle Greene noted that these movies dominated the market from 1957 to 1977, combining another popular contemporary Mexican masking tradition – lucha libre, or Mexican professional wrestling – with ‘films featuring an array of vampires, Aztec mummies, mad scientists, ape-men and various other macabre menace[s]’.⁵⁹ Alongside these monsters were luchadores, the most famous of which was Santo, El Santo, el Enmascarado de Plata or ‘The Saint, the Silver-Masked Man’.⁶⁰ A more elaborately choreographed adaptation of North American professional wrestling from the 1930s, lucha libre is marked by acrobatics, colourful costumes (including iconic full-face masks) and explicitly moral narratives. For Gabrielle Murray, there are intrinsically ritualistic aspects to lucha libre, as it ‘re-enacts a story – a mythic battle between good and evil’.⁶¹ Lucha libre ‘permits an official transgression whereby members of the audience chant and shout what they cannot voice in “normal” circumstances’.⁶² From this perspective, lucha libre and the Santo films are twentieth-century incarnations of carnivalesque traditions, emphasised through masks which have a distinct historical significance in Mexican cultural history.

The low-budget Santo films were tremendously popular in Mexico, attracting predominantly working-class audiences.⁶³ For Evan Lieberman, when lucha libre was banned on television in 1954, it found an alternative outlet in film.⁶⁴ The success of José Cruz’s El Santo fotonovellas⁶⁵ led to Santo’s film career in 1942, the luchador never credited by his real name, Rodolfo Guzman Huerta.⁶⁶ According to Lieberman, Cruz’s fotonovellas ‘offered the first construction of Santo as the hero of the Mexican people, endowed with superior intelligence, morality and almost superhuman powers’.⁶⁷ His mask echoes Mesoamerican religious beliefs, where Peter T. Markman and Roberta H. Markman noted that ‘the wearer of the ritual mask almost literally becomes the god; he is, for the ritual moment, the animating force within the otherwise lifeless mask’.⁶⁸ Santo’s ‘super powers’ are explicit, and Murray emphasises that he is never seen without his mask: while ‘he is “super” in the eyes of his audience but apart from the traits of a champion wrestler – strength, fitness and agility – he has no magical or science based super-powers’. Murray noted that through the mask ‘he is a transformed persona … capable of creating control, yet due to his human skills, he is also an emphatic figure’.⁶⁹ This allows him to straddle ‘the strange and fantastic world of the films’ and the more traditionally recognisable domain of lucha libre wrestling, ‘a singular persona who lives in dual worlds and never without his mask’.⁷⁰

Santo’s mask historically grounds him as a horror-superhero. For Murray, ‘a profound transformation occurs in which the individual withdraws from the everyday and a new a “super” persona is presented’.⁷¹ While undoubtedly ‘super’ and ‘heroic’, the construction of Santo’s ‘superhero-ness’ is distinct to that of North American counterparts like Bruce Wayne/Batman, Clark Kent/Superman and Peter Parker/Spiderman: there is no binary persona and no distinction between a public and private face. As Greene suggested, ‘Santo, as a real-life luchador and a mythic superhero in a horror film, occupies two thoroughly public roles in Mexican society’.⁷² On this level, El Santo deviates from the Eurocentric doppelgänger traditions often linked to horror film masks.

The popularity of Santo during this period rose during the international rise of superheroes, while still remaining rooted in lucha libra culture and Mexico’s cultural history privileging masks. The Santo films maintain this through an object with long-held associations to Mexico’s past and through genre render their use and meanings fresh and dynamic. While the label ‘luchador film’ emphasises the wrestling aspects of these movies, as their titles indicate, horror was also central:⁷³ Greene identified Santo vs. the Vampire Women (Santo vs. las Mujeres Vampiro, Alfonso Corona Blake, 1962) as typical of ‘Mexploitation’ films that demonstrate a ‘simultaneous reliance on and borrowing from classic Hollywood horror films, as well as its disregard for cinematic convention’.⁷⁴ Likewise, in Santo in the Wax Museum (Santo en el Museo de Cera, Alfonso Corona Blake, 1963), Greene suggested that it did not ‘merely parod[y] generic horror film conventions, but incorporated key elements from a number of specific classic horror films’, such as Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933), Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1933), Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) and Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931).⁷⁵ Lieberman outlined the relationship between horror and wrestling, emphasizing Santo’s background in fotonovellas because ‘the films [are] … comic book fantasies in which wrestling is essentially the day job of the superhero whose true focus is on fighting vampires, mummies and Martians’.⁷⁶ These films have little interest in cohesively suturing the wrestling sequences into their otherwise horror plots and, as Murray indicated, ‘the films literally intercut large sections of recorded and sometimes staged footage of often complete lucha libre matches’.⁷⁷

Like the Santo films themselves, these matches are marked by the presence of mask-wearing heroes and villains. Masks link the Santo films to broader traditions of mask-wearing in Mexican culture and, echoing Paz, Lieberman notes that ‘the mask might well be considered the defining icon of Mexican culture’.⁷⁸ Santo’s luchador mask brings Mexico’s history of masked ritual traditions into its contemporary moment, Murray noting it allows Santo to enter the realm of the mythic, as it ‘not only affects the perception of the wearer but also the audience’s perception of the wearer’.⁷⁹ The iconic lucha libra costume shifts the forum for mask-wearing rituals from the past to the present and the centrality of horror in these films grants a space for the power attained through masked transformation to play out in a continually evolving, slowly codifying generic context. Horror masks adapt to social, national and generic needs.

Italy, masks and Black Sunday (1960)

As noted previously, masks are closely linked to Italian cultural history, from Venetian Carnival to the commedia dell’arte. Masks appear in Italian films as diverse as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s documentary Love Meetings (Comizi d’amore, 1965) to the romance The Mask (La Maschera, Fiorella Infascelli, 1988). Masks were not uncommon in Italian peplum or sword-and-sandal films, as indicated by many of their titles alone.⁸⁰ But in terms of horror, masks are most explicit in giallo cinema, Mikel Koven noting that along with black coats, hats and gloves, masks were ‘the sine qua non of giallo-killer disguises’.⁸¹ Mario Bava’s 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo) is considered ‘the first true Italian giallo’, refined into a more recognisable giallo formula the following year with Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l’assassino, 1964).⁸² Koven has identified the classic gialli period as 1970–5, which would form such a huge influence on the North American slasher cycle of the late 1970s and 1980s that Koven would label the latter ‘North American gialli’.⁸³ These include Happy Birthday to Me, discussed in chapter 4, a film centring on a black-gloved killer and a masked reveal.

Masks in Blood and Black Lace introduce the object as a staple of giallo iconography. While blank masks are discussed further in chapter 5, in Blood and Black Lace the killer’s blank mask does more than simply obscure their identity. As Leon Hunt observed, in gialli, ‘the mask can conceal gender and point as well in a quite reflexive way to the killer as a function within the text’.⁸⁴ In Blood and Black Lace, ‘the white featureless mask … is worn by two different characters and can thus perpetrate a seemingly impossible chain of killings’.⁸⁵ While the killers are revealed to be a man and a woman, Hunt observed that even though the mask that means they look the same – rendering gender more fluid (foreshadowing Carol J. Clover’s notion of gender fluidity in modern horror, as discussed in the introduction) – their killing methods are themselves gendered: ‘the male killer (Cameron Mitchell) scars, burns and disfigures his victims, [while] the female killer (Eva Bartok) suffocates them’.⁸⁶

Blood and Black Lace was not Mario Bava’s first use of masks in horror, as indicated by the original Italian title of his 1960 film Le Maschera del demonio (The Mask of Satan), released internationally as Black Sunday. Peter Bondanella suggested that the placement of the mask onto Asa’s (Barbara Steele) face is crucial: shot from the victim’s perspective, for Bondanella it is ‘one of Bava’s most famous shots’ and while initially ‘Bava shoots the mask and its metal prongs from the executioner’s point of view … he then reverses the perspective in a seamless transition, moving the camera through the apertures and transferring the point of view from that of the executioner to that of the victim’.⁸⁷ Martyn Conterio later also identified a similar association between the mask and gender, foreshadowing the meaning of the mask in Blood and Black Lace. For Conterio, ‘the mask, as well as functioning as a cruel and unusual torture device, also plays a deeply misogynistic role’.⁸⁸ Conterio suggests that, in Black Sunday, Prince Vafja (Ivo Garrani) ‘wants to destroy and deny the woman her own face and substitute it with the mask’, whereby ‘beyond its use as an instrument of torture and wrecker of beauty, the mask is a supernatural talisman imbued with abilities to ward off evil’.⁸⁹ The failure of the mask to do so is emphasised by the film’s most iconic image: Steele’s pierced face. While many of the film’s posters privilege the mask, it is the visible evidence of the mask’s damage to Asa’s face rather than the mask itself that is key. The significance of the mask and its transformative potential is again inextricably linked to ritual, power and transformation.

Japan, masks and Onibaba (1964)

Like France, Mexico and Italy, Japanese horror cinema recalls its own mask heritage while simultaneously using its generic logic to engage with and adhere to international trends. As noted earlier, A Page of Madness suggests a complex historical relationship between masks and Japanese horror cinema (see previous chapter). For Zvika Serper, two Japanese horror films from the 1960s by Kaneto Shindô – Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968) – are both historical supernatural drama films that share a similar premise: a woman and her mother-in-law target and kill samurai.⁹⁰ In the former, the film’s climactic action is centred around a demon mask, providing one of the most enduring images of Japanese horror cinema. Both Kuroneko and Onibaba represent a conscious effort on Shindô’s part to represent the determination of ‘common people for survival’, and to do so he harnessed aspects of traditional Japanese theatre and literature to ‘constitute a very important performative embodiment of the ritualistic demonic pattern, borrowed from the traditional aristocratic Noh and popular kabuki theatre’.⁹¹ This is crucial both in terms of Japanese horror cinema and to histories of horror film masks more generally. This is far more complex than appropriation; rather, it is a dynamic process of evolution where meanings and values ascribed to masks throughout history and across different cultures provide ways of conceiving the power of the object through its transformative potential. The mask in Onibaba and its relationship to Japanese performance traditions demonstrates this potency.

The exact type of mask used in Onibaba is important. In Noh, the two distinct types of demons are understood through a taxonomy outlined by Noh master Zeami Motokiyo as being defined as either powerful (rikidofu) or unstable (saidofu) demons. In the case of the latter, for Serper ‘the extent of the demonic aspect manifested in the human being is varied in the plays through different kinds of demonic masks and through the modes of performance’.⁹² It is through this distinction that both Kuroneko and Onibaba mark a radical departure from Noh because, as Serper notes, these two rarely overlap or intersect. By combining them, Shindô ‘created very original and complex narratives of the quintessential Japanese ritualistic embodiment of vanquishing a demonic threat’.⁹³ Further observing that the mask in Onibaba was a hannya mask – rarely used in Noh plays – it uniquely represents two types of ritualistic embodiment: female jealousy and revealing the true nature of a demon in human disguise.⁹⁴

But the use of the mask – and the disfigurement caused by the act of unmasking – has for Colette Balmain and Adam Lowenstein far greater significance than this connection to Noh traditions. For Balmain, Onibaba was a logical progression from Shindô’s previous films that dealt with the atomic attack on Japan (such as Children of Hiroshima (1952) and 1959’s Lucky Dragon No. 5), noting that ‘Onibaba also makes explicit disfigurement as metonymic signifier of war trauma’.⁹⁵ For Lowenstein, even the make-up on the mother-in-law’s face when the mask was removed was based on wounds of actual nuclear attack survivors (Hibakusha).⁹⁶ Similar to his analysis of Eyes without a Face, for Lowenstein the use of the mask here also pertains to the ethical status of the mask-wearer themselves: the older woman is both villain and victim, the very component ‘that unlocks the film’s ambivalent presentation of victimization and war responsibility, as well as the anchor for the film’s recasting of traditional gender iconography surrounding these issues).⁹⁷ Here lies the difficulty in unequivocally defining the mother-in-law as either human or demon: ‘The film’s conclusion exists between the two terms, both thematically and cinematically’, noted Lowenstein. While the younger woman successfully jumps over the hole, it is unclear what happens to the older woman when she follows, which Lowenstein suggested prompts ‘questions central to rethinking discourses of victimization and war responsibility in relation to Hiroshima’.⁹⁸ Onibaba is therefore less of a continuation of Noh traditions, but rather a conscious rupturing of them. Recalling Barbara Steele in Black Sunday and its corruption of Carnival and commedia dell’arte traditions, for Lowenstein the mask in Onibaba ‘does not celebrate the classical Japanese theatrical tradition; instead, it functions as an affliction’.⁹⁹ Although historical in context, Onibaba speaks of a new Japan faced with a post-war crisis of identity, brought to life through a mask whose transformative power renders it both corrupted and corrupting.

As seen across these different national contexts throughout the 1960s, although masks were used in horror in a range of different ways, together they demonstrate the symbolic force of the mask and how it was becoming codified as a key aspect of horror cinema’s iconography. These films illustrate how combining older histories and traditions linked to masks with the new symbolic possibilities the horror genre afforded them provided a way to allegorically articulate often profound social or ideological commentary. While the previous chapter explored the development of how masks were used in cinema and the various aspects that were incorporated into pre-cinema and early film history, this chapter has more closely considered horror as it became more widely identifiable as a genre, from The Phantom of the Opera onwards, through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, towards the growing internationalisation of horror in the 1960s. In Part Two and Three – across the categories of skin masks, blank masks, animal masks, repurposed masks and technological masks – we can explore precisely how horror film masks rely on Neale’s process of ‘repetition … difference, variation and change’ to largely account for their longevity as a key iconographic element of the genre.¹⁰⁰ Across these case studies, ritual, power and transformation continue to intersect in ways that account for the object’s endurance as a compelling motif in horror cinema.