Ritual, Power and Transformation
PART ONE explored a range of literary and performance traditions, specific films and other cultural phenomena that led to the codification of masks as a key iconographic element of horror cinema from the 1970s onwards. This culminated most visibly in the explosion of slasher films popular during this period with films like John Carpenter’s Halloween and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, both of which privilege masks. While masks are a notable iconographic aspect of the slasher subgenre, they permeated a range of horror films globally, especially from 1970 onwards. Part Two offers case studies that employ masks in diverse ways that simultaneously still maintain a fascination with ritual, power and transformation through horror film masks in some way. The following four chapters are loosely themed under the taxonomical umbrellas skin masks, blank masks, animal masks and repurposed masks accounting for the most typically deployed masks beyond the relatively self-explanatory Halloween style ‘fright’ masks (skulls, monsters, etc.). Part Three will then turn towards what might be easy to conceive as a more contemporary category – technological masks – but this will itself be revealed to have significant history as well as simultaneously giving us an idea of the future territory masked horror films may continue to take. To underscore diversity as well as similarity, we will explore movies made by film-makers from Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Skin masks as they are conceived here refer simply to masks that replicate the human face: regardless of their materiality (flesh-coloured latex, fibreglass, etc.), the wearing of these masks denotes overt performativity, where wearers either attempt to disguise themselves as someone else (Happy Birthday to Me), to present reconstructed versions of the wearer (The Abominable Dr. Phibes), to provide an ominous, synthetic subversion of ‘humanness’ (Alice Sweet Alice and Curtains) or – as in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Smiley – to offer performances that dehumanise their wearers through the corruption of human skin itself, literally detaching and re-stitching the organ in grotesque replication of perceptibly ‘natural’ faces. The performativity associated with skin masks is crucial to the ideological force of these films, selected because each in their own way critique patriarchy, in particular in their often-explicit engagements with class, gender, age and other points of difference. Echoing Neale, they are each driven by a process of similarity and difference, overlapping to maintain their status as recognisably horror films, yet diverging in fresh – and sometimes challenging – ways.
Across both shamanic1 and performance traditions like the commedia dell’arte,2 leather face-like masks were common in transformation rituals. Through the shamanic imagination, traces of this remain in horror film skin masks. Skin masks are also aligned with shaman-as-trickster traditions, the films here offering different instances of transgressive playfulness: in Dr Phibes’s elaborate murders that rely heavily on the predictable behaviour of his victims; in the perverse corruption of First Communion in Alice Sweet Alice; in the logic-defying movement of the killer in Curtains; in the famous dinner table sequence in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that subverts the quotidian act to darkly comic cannibalistic ritual; in the grisly birthday party/murder scene vignette in Happy Birthday to Me; and in the excessive intersection of meme-aligned ‘lulz’ with serial killing in Smiley. If, as Ricki Stefanie Tannen notes, tricksters are defined by ‘a playful energy which has the capacity to produce humor that can trigger transformation’, that ‘playful energy’ in this chapter takes a dark shape, reliant on transformations that, through skin masks, engage with both ritual and power.3
Recalling doppelgänger traditions, implicit in skin masks are notions of authenticity and duplicity: the ‘second face’ of the mask must be distinct from the supposedly ‘real’ face underneath. In mystery horror films with skin masks that narratively hinge on revelation, the function of this doubling is clear: in Tourist Trap (David Schmoeller, 1979) and New Year’s Evil (Emmett Alston, 1980), the mask obscures the identity of the individual underneath, the revelation of which is the dénouement. Yet this is not always the case: in Mr Sardonicus, The Frankenstein Syndrome (Scott Tretta, 2010) and Fuest’s Dr. Phibes films (1971/1972), human face skin masks cover wounds or scars: it is not the wearer’s identity that sparks curiosity, but the severity of their injuries (in these examples, all explicitly framed as monstrous ‘deformations’). Yet even within the category, skin masks that replicate human faces demonstrate notable diversity: for example, the masks in Happy Death Day (Christopher B. Landon, 2017) and The Spearhead Effect (Brandon Moore and Caleb Smith, 2017) are explicitly cartoony (echoing Warner Bros. vintage cartoons and anime respectively) while the masks in Kill Game (Robert Mearns, 2017) and Terror Train (Roger Spottiswoode, 1980) subvert the star images of Marilyn Monroe in the former and Groucho Marx in the latter into something far more malign.
The films explored here use skin masks to critique or subvert patriarchal norms, with varying success. For William Anthony Sheppard, some masked traditions encourage a similar gender fluidity that Carol J. Clover identifies in horror more generally (as discussed earlier), the former noting ‘a mask that is relatively naturalistic in appearance often functions as a device for gender reversal – an additional form of concealment and transformation’.4 Traditionally, masks allowed male performers to adopt female identities through performance rituals and that ‘the prevalent use of masks for gender disguise in exotic – particularly Asian – theater traditions reinforced Euro-American dreams of the East as a sexually open paradise’.5 Some horror films invert shamanic mask traditions by rendering them tools against patriarchy, continuing their subversive, carnivalesque potential. In the films here, skin masks complicate assumptions about the gender, identity and/or the age of the wearer (Alice Sweet Alice, Curtains, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Happy Birthday to Me), or collapse distinctions between the human and monstrous altogether (The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Smiley). Despite their diversity, these films utilise skin masks to critique, mock and interrogate patriarchy through transformation and ritual.
Skin Masks and Religion: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Alice Sweet Alice (1976)
Robert Fuest’s British/American co-production The Abominable Dr. Phibes provides a useful point to begin my case study component for a number of reasons, most notably in its casting of Vincent Price, a key figure in masked horror film as discussed previously. Just as important, however, are the centrality of religious and other rituals in the film and the centrality of masks to them. The ritualistic nature of Phibes’s serial murders as he kills those he holds responsible for the death of his late wife Victoria (Caroline Munro) transcends their explicit reliance on biblical text. Phibes does not seek to reaffirm Christian ritual, but rather – in true trickster fashion – to mock and subvert it. As John E. Parnum noted, at each death scene Phibes ‘ritualistically drapes an amulet around a clay bust of the victim and sprays the statue with a blow torch’.6 In The Abominable Dr. Phibes, it is not only the frog mask murder device in the second killing that privileges masks within the film, but more crucially that worn by Phibes himself. As revealed at the climax, the ‘human’ Vincent Price-faced skin-like mask is worn by Phibes to hide the scarred remains of his face, burnt in a car accident as he rushed towards the hospital where Victoria died. This is itself an inversion of sorts, as Phibes’s actual face of sinew and bone is hidden beneath his ‘true’ mask-face. Facial damage is part of Phibes’s criminal modus operandi: his first victim is disfigured by bats, a nurse’s face has the flesh removed by locusts and an off-screen murder by bee sting is also mentioned in terms of a specifically facial assault. To further emphasise the face, Phibes uses a blow torch to melt wax busts of his victims.
While the biblical references to the Ten Plagues of Egypt that structure Phibes’s murders offer an explicit link to religious ritual, masks themselves are also used ritualistically. As Rick Worland noted, this includes intertextual nods to earlier horror movie masks, including The Phantom of the Opera (1925/1930) and Price’s earlier House of Wax (André de Toth, 1953).7 Like Erik in The Phantom of the Opera, Phibes is both monstrous and sympathetic; Patricia MacCormack observes that his ‘revenge comes from the tender love for his dead wife’.8 The film is also marked by excessive campness, and Steve Chibnall notes that it is ‘saturated … with Gothic excess, self-satire and ironic quotation’.9 Like House of Wax, Price ‘portrays a character whose face has been horribly burned … [who] must wear a “Vincent Price” disguise to cover his disfigurement’.10 Whether the film is understood as a dark love story or a parody of earlier horror movies, Phibes subjectivity is crucial: his status as hero-villain is linked to Price’s broader star persona and as Schechner noted, these personae are themselves ‘masks’ of sorts.11 The ‘Phibes mask’ – understood through the actor’s star persona as a ‘Price mask’ also – is central to both the film’s narrative and spectacle, the complex dynamics of the mask itself replicating doppelgänger-like identities. The mask-wearing Price aligns this film intertextually with his previous horror masked roles: we ‘read’ Phibes and the meaning of his masks alongside movies like House of Wax, The Masque of the Red Death and The Oblong Box. In all these films, masked, transformed Price is deranged and traumatised, leading to abuses of power.
Straddling life and death and empowered through rituals of masked performance, Phibes typifies Larry Ellis’s description of the trickster as a ‘shaman of the liminal’.12 Phibes adheres almost completely to William J. Hynes’s trickster definition checklist: he is ambiguous, deceptive and plays tricks, and his behaviour encompasses the sacred and the profane in his imitation of God.13 Price’s casting as masked trickster Phibes is essential to this subversion of religiosity in particular. For Karen Hollinger, stars ‘serve as totems or gods and goddesses in a pseudoreligion of fandom’, Phibes’s own mask – that of Price’s face – holds additional ‘religious’ significance in the film on top of its biblical references.14 The latter is of course notable: in their comparative analysis of Phibes and Jigsaw from the Saw franchise, Fernando G. Pagnoni Berns and Amy M. Davis identified a God-like aspect in the former as he ‘literally takes on this role when he unleashes the ten plagues of Egypt on his unsuspecting victims’.15 The meticulous execution of his plans implies infallibility and this contains ‘divine aspects’.16 For Pagnoni Berns and Davis, Phibes’s mask is essential because ‘most of the victims of Phibes’ reenactment of divine punishment never have the opportunity to see Phibes’ actual face’.17 The obscuration of Phibes’s real face by a mask suggests therefore that ‘if humans are an imperfect copy of a divine creator, Phibes takes refuge in human skin to hide the ‘true’ face of humanity, the true face of God’.18 The use of skin masks in The Abominable Dr. Phibes is thus connected to religion and ritual in overlapping ways: first, how masks intersect with biblical references and, more significantly, to these theological aspects of Price/Phibes as ‘god-like’ himself. Phibes affirms the link to the divine near the film’s conclusion where he cries: ‘Don’t cry upon God … he is on my side. He led me, showed me the way in my quest for vengeance.’
Phibes’s mask can also be understood as a subversive demasculinisation of the deity. Drawing comparisons between Phibes and Baron Otto von Kleist (played by Phibes co-star Joseph Cotton) in Baron Blood (Mario Bava, 1972), MacCormack notes that the stripping away of their skin removes them from an otherwise assumed gender binary: ‘the perception of their living skull-heads present, like zombies, an ambivalent definition of “life” and particularly because the facialized upright head is the grand symbol of “the human” theirs are inhuman heads’.19 Although biologically male, ‘they appear simultaneously anatomically generic, gender neutral, their heads both raw defleshed wounds and primitive canvasses upon which new faces are worn as masks’.20 When applied to Phibes, masking contributes to the radical and pronounced deconstruction of identity and power. In The Abominable Dr. Phibes, ritual, power and transformation intersect with masks in complex, myriad ways.
The skin-like face mask in Alice Sweet Alice also reconfigures recognisable religious rituals to interrogate gender performativity, here regarding women and age. For Victor Turner, the very difference that marks women’s bodies from men render them subversive, not for their potential capacity for subversion, but simply by not being male:
The danger … is not simply that of female ‘unruliness’. This unruliness itself is the mark of … the perilous realm of possibility of ‘anything may go’ which threatens any social order and seems more threatening, the more that order seems rigorous and secure.
He continued, ‘The subversive potential of the carnivalized feminine principle becomes evident in times of social change when its manifestations move out of the liminal world of Mardi Gras into the political arena itself.’21 Through its evocation of the shamanic imagination – a cultural imaginary spawned from (but distinct to) orthodox, anthropologically defined visions of shamanism – like masked Carnival play, the mask here is granted an unspoken power to not merely disguise the identity of the murderer, but to reductively transform those who wear it (a young girl and an older woman) into a literally synthetic state of idealised womanhood. Turner’s ‘subversive potential of the carnivalized feminine principle’ that these women embody is marked as much by gender as it is their actions. Alice’s transformation in the liminal space of adolescence – between girlhood and womanhood – is configured as an inescapably violent transition. The mask is fundamental to the gender politics of Alice Sweet Alice through its association with ritual, power and transformation, as Alice indulges in a transgressive, trickster-like desire for deception, subversion and play.
While the mask in Alice Sweet Alice appears to simply obscure the killer’s identity, its function is more complex. Initially, the film suggests that Alice herself (Paula E. Sheppard) is the killer because we see her wearing it and the mask belongs to her. But the killer is later revealed to be Mrs Tredoni (Mildred Clinton) – the housekeeper of Alice’s family priest, Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich) – who wears an identical mask and yellow raincoat to Alice to cast suspicion onto the young girl. Like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, religion and ritual are central to Alice Sweet Alice, but while Phibes’s mask subverts gender assumptions about divine power, in Alice Sweet Alice, the mask is a tool to explore feminine identities beyond adult womanhood, exposing the complex and difficult spaces of adolescent girls and older women within the patriarchal constructs of Roman Catholicism.
The opening credits foreshadow this with a subversion of Roman Catholic imagery where assumptions about gender and facial disguise are central. A silhouette of a girl in First Holy Communion garb prays as a veil obscures her face. She holds a large crucifix, revealed at the end of the sequence to also be a knife. Symbolic religious innocence is subverted through the corruption of sacred religious ritual, reconfiguring the symbol of girlhood purity as violent and deceptive (a contradiction echoed in the film’s title: although not a killer, Alice is far from ‘sweet’). From the outset, relationships between women are privileged – not only between Alice, her mother Catherine (Linda Miller) and spoilt younger sister Karen (Brooke Shields), but also between Alice and Mrs Tredoni. The latter is established as Alice – jealous of Karen – wears a cheap plastic Halloween mask to frighten Mrs Tredoni. Returning home, disgraced Alice seeks refuge in the basement where she performs a strange ritual with Karen’s favourite doll, the plastic mask looking down on her from the wall where she has reverently placed it.
When Karen is murdered at her First Holy Communion ceremony by a figure wearing this mask, Alice is the implied perpetrator: through ritual, the mask is central to her violent transformation. Despite the killer being Mrs Tredoni – driven by a repressed sexual jealousy of Catherine’s relationship with Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich) – the two women representing early and later womanhood (the younger Alice, the older Mrs Tredoni) remain symbolically connected through the mask. At the film’s conclusion, despite her innocence, Alice is neither vindicated, nor configured as innocent. Having witnessed Mrs Tredoni kill Father Tom at the church altar in a ritualistic embrace blurring the maternal and sexual, Alice picks up her knife and leaves the church, looking directly at the camera as the film freezes on an image of her face. This look is important: accusatory in nature, there is an unspoken suggestion that the audience who has just enjoyed the film’s perverse spectacle are themselves partially culpable for maintaining cultural assumptions about gender and age that have driven both Alice and Mrs Tredoni over the edge. While the utility of the mask blurred Mrs Tredoni and Alice’s identities to create suspense surrounding the killer’s identity, despite Mrs Tredoni being the guilty party, the film implies that Alice may continue Mrs Tredoni’s violent legacy. The patriarchal hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church is fundamental to the film’s exploration of gender identity and violence associated with the mask. As Tony Williams noted, ‘although Alice ends with community realization of Alice’s innocence she, too, becomes polluted by the social system’.22 For Claire Sisco King, the ‘sacrificial masculinity’ of Father Tom is central to Alice Sweet Alice, placing particular emphasis upon ‘the cinematic performance of ritual sacrifice and gender performativity’ as ‘a key regulatory practice within the performative matrix of hegemonic masculinity’.23
But there are non-religious rituals where the mask is central in the film also. The type of mask is important because it deliberately obscures the age of its wearer: its cheap plastic surface creates smooth skin and blue eye shadow and red lipstick imply excessive femininity. This mask represents the forced neutralisation and eradication of female difference regarding age. The style of make-up would be inappropriate for either 12-year-old Alice or the older Mrs Tredoni: it is the make-up of idealised femininity, that of an adult woman in her twenties, thirties or forties and not deemed culturally ‘appropriate’ for an older woman or a child. Gender performativity is thus flagged through this mask, whose very materiality denotes an overtly staged ‘plastic’ or synthetic transformation. Recalling Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, the film demonstrates that ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender … identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.’24 In Alice Sweet Alice, through the idealised adult woman mask and the subsequent implied demonisation of the non-idealised women who wear it – Alice in the liminal space between birth and womanhood and Mrs Tredoni in the liminal space between menopause and death – these characters subvert rituals of gender performance through trickster-like play with representations of womanhood culturally out of synch with their own ages. Through the mask, ‘corrupted’ performances of femininity by both Alice and Mrs Tredoni are rendered insane and violent. For Alice, this tension stems from her transitional status as not-girl and not-woman: in the film’s opening scene, Catherine reprimands her for frightening Mrs Tredoni with the mask by saying ‘try to act like a lady’, pressuring Alice to ‘perform’ womanhood. More troubling is the scene where Alice is questioned by police, male officers asking each other ‘did you see her tits?’ – offensive to a woman of any age, but particularly uncomfortable with a female character just beginning puberty. This is complicated further by the fact that actor Paula E. Sheppard who played Alice was 19-years-old, significantly more ‘womanly’ than the character herself.25
Alice Sweet Alice reflexively manipulates mask-wearing traditions, employing this now-codified iconographic element of horror cinema to subvert and critique patriarchy. Alice Sweet Alice reveals how patriarchal power endures through Roman Catholic ritual in particular. Through the mask, both Mrs Tredoni and Alice use the tools of traditional religious ritual to undermine masculine power: recalling the carnivalesque, they invert rules and rupture the dominant order. The passing on of the mask at the end of the film is a symbolic ellipsis suggesting that this rupturing will continue, this seriality as much a codified aspect of contemporary horror as the use of masks themselves.26 Mrs Tredoni and Alice ultimately represent what Ricki Stefanie Tannen identified as the postmodern female trickster because their embodied playfulness has a concrete mission to thwart patriarchal dominance. The sadism of both characters are extreme manifestations of the ‘social work’ Tannen considered central to this figure, ‘part of the transformed ethical orientation … which results in the construction of an identity which refuses to be a victim’.27 As now revealed in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Curtains, the intersection of masks, ritual, power, transformation and gender performativity are not specific to Alice Sweet Alice and The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
Skin Masks and Feminine Identity: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Curtains (1983)
Gender performativity also provides insight into the role of masks in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. While often cited as a key film in the history of the slasher subgenre,28 for Christopher Sharrett this undermines its broader importance as it ‘represents a crucial moment in the history of the horror genre, when the form develops a specific relationship to the historical and cultural tendencies of America … and to a distinct period of discontent in American society’.29 While The Texas Chain Saw Massacre engages with ritual in a number of ways, we here focus primarily on that related to masks. So essential are skin masks in the film that its central antagonist is famously credited as Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen). Leatherface has been a durable figure for adaptation, his legacy spanning from the formal (in the many remakes and sequels) to imitators whose films hinge around similar (sometimes identical) masks, such as Mask Maker (Griff Furst, 2010), XII (Michael A. Nickles, 2008) and Two: Thirteen (Charles Adelman, 2009).
Leatherface’s mask is linked to ritual in ways that fluctuate between the sacred and secular. The film playfully acknowledges – even mocks – these ritualistic elements: astrology is introduced early as a continuing motif, inverting Pagnoni Berns and Davis’s observation that Phibes – who, through the wearing of a face mask and his role as a controlling force in the bulk of the film’s action, can be considered ‘the “King Sun”, the center of the cosmic system’30 – represents order. But in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the evocation of astrology implies collapse. As Robin Wood suggests, ‘we infer near the opening of Massacre that the Age of Aquarius … has already passed, giving way to the Age of Saturn and universal malevolence’.31 While astrology suggests cosmic order, within the film it is mocked, undermined and maligned. Even before arriving at the house where the film’s horrific action is set, ritual is linked to violence and chaos, such as when the hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) cuts his hand to curse the young travellers. Ritual is further emphasised through the vast numbers of corpses and bones used to decorate Leatherface and his family’s home, implying that they have gone more successfully through the grizzly routine we witness many times beforehand. Even John Laroquette’s documentary-style voice-over at the beginning claiming it is a ‘true story’ infers a conscious restaging of past events; however tenuous, this claim of authenticity again recalls Eliade’s privileging of re-enactment as an essential aspect of religious ritual.32 As Sharrett noted of the socio-political turmoil in the United States at the time of production, the film’s ‘ritual violence … has important implications when considered against the backdrop of repetition on a broad social level, as a form of collective experience denying the foundations of crisis’.33 Here ritual implies a desperate clinging to the fragmented remains of traditional order that once marked patriarchal control, now reduced to chaos.
Of the numerous rituals in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, cannibalism may have received the most critical attention.34 While not explicit, it is strongly implied and as Rose noted it is critically often linked to economic themes: ‘consumer has turned upon consumer and, quite literally, consumed them. Cannibalism has become not just a breaking of a taboo but simply the basest and most extreme form of consumerism.’35 For Sharrett, ‘Leatherface and his family are products of oppression by industrial capitalism’, and cannibalism is central to his reading of the film, citing it as key to its primal-mythic focus.36 Leatherface and his family excessively evoke ‘primitivism’, from the connection between mask-wearing and shamanism to their dedication to anachronistic rituals and the film’s allusions to cannibalism. As critics have noted, associations between cannibalism and shamanism are not uncommon, despite the lack of evidence to suggest such claims.37
Ritual also relates to Leatherface’s masks themselves. He has three masks, each given a different name by the cast and crew relating to how they understood the character had transformed when a different mask was worn: the ‘Pretty Woman’, the ‘Old Lady’ and the ‘Killing Mask’.38 As Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen noted, in the dinner scene he wore ‘the pretty woman … because we had company and he was getting all dressed up for dinner, so he put on the pretty face’.39 In the presence of the now-feminised Leatherface, a crude nuclear family takes shape with abusive husband (Jim Siedow), hitchhiker son and the barely human grandfather (John Dugan). ‘Pretty woman’ Leatherface is abused by the family’s patriarch, transforming Leatherface into a gendered victim of male violence through the ritualistic wearing of this mask, underscoring the family’s perception of what ‘woman’ means. Marked by the absence of biologically defined women, so complete is their commitment to a ritualistic performance of excessive patriarchal domesticity that Leatherface is forced to fill the gaps in their ‘cast’. That this ‘performance’ is staged for Sally (Marilyn Burns) – the embodiment of the modern woman in the film – and that she survives suggests a strengthening of progressive, civilised order: the film suggests that patriarchy has cannibalised itself. On an unconscious level, the construction of the masks themselves supports this: shamanic traditions of east Greenland required that ‘skin masks were sewn by women, whereas the wooden masks were carved by men’,40 and sewing is understood traditionally in the West at least as ‘woman’s work’.41 The materiality and production of Leatherface’s masks link him to gendered craft traditions.
Leatherface’s masked transformations continue after Sally’s escape. While the hitchhiker immediately pursues her after she leaps through a window, Leatherface stops long enough at least to change out of feminised clothing and back into his (male) killer outfit. As evidence of the film’s critique of capitalism, Johan Höglund notes here that he is dressed ‘in the uniform of the middle-class: the suit, the white shirt and the tie’,42 which stands in contrast to Leatherface’s re-gendering and feminisation during masked and costumed transformation in the ritualistic reconstruction of the dinner scene, subverting idealised domesticity. Rather than consolidating a single, traditional gendered identity, this symbolic rejection of stable gender identities in a fictional world seemingly dominated by binaries of ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles fracture Leatherface to the point where, as Rose notes, Leatherface is marked if anything by a significant nothingness.43 This echoes Hansen’s own observation that ‘the mask reflected who he was now – my feeling was that under the mask there was nothing – if you take the mask away there’s no face there’.44
Sally’s survival thus exposes the monstrous family’s performance for what it is: a perverse simulation rather than an actual example of functional domesticity. Leatherface’s failure to control Sally undermines the historicised rituals linked to patriarchal power, rituals that are depicted in excessive, darkly comic ways as anachronistic. Masked transformations and rituals are therefore unstable, and Sharrett notes that ‘Leatherface’s mask does not have the social function of some ritual acts; it merely serves to cover up and terrorise by reminding the spectator of corruption, the degradation of the flesh, disease, insanity. Death.’45 This renders The Texas Chainsaw Massacre so profoundly emblematic of the despair synonymous with independent American horror cinema during this period.46
The Canadian slasher film Curtains also utilises masks in a manner that speaks to gendered performance, transformation, ritual and power. Like Alice Sweet Alice, Curtains focuses on gender performativity in specific regard to women and age. The film begins as actor Samantha Sherwood (Samantha Eggar) feigns a psychological collapse so her director and partner Jonathan Stryker (John Vernon) can have her committed to a psychiatric institution for her to research her starring role as a mentally unstable woman called Audra in Stryker’s upcoming film of the same name. While incarcerated, Samantha discovers Stryker has cast the role without her, leaving her institutionalised while he ‘auditions’ a series of younger women on the casting couch. Outraged, she escapes and joins Stryker and the young women at an isolated house and as a series of murders begins it is implied that Sherwood has genuine mental health issues that culminate in extreme violence.
Samantha’s assumed guilt is linked to the implication within the film that she is too old to play Audra, reflected by the extreme, caricature-like representation of older women depicted in the killer’s mask. In one scene, this – and Stryker’s awareness of Samantha’s sensitivity to her age and fears of professional and sexual redundancy – is made explicit.47 In a group performance workshop, Stryker tells Samantha ‘make yourself ugly for us’ and throws her the same mask that the killer has worn, a grotesque parody of an older woman’s face. Removing the mask, he forces her look at her own distorted reflection in a broken mirror as he squeezes her face, saying ‘This is a mask, too.’ At the film’s conclusion, Samantha confesses to young comedian and aspiring actor Patti (Lynne Griffin) that she shot Stryker and one of the girls, Brooke (Linda Thorson) after discovering them post-coitus and explains her fury at Stryker abandoning her. Importantly, Rose Butler links Patti’s occupation as a comic to the ‘clown trope of horror cinema’, which in turn allows an association with broader trickster traditions and their relationship to masks and the shamanic imagination as outlined previously.48 Patti admits that she killed everyone else so as to attain the role of Audra and then stabs Samantha. The film concludes with the institutionalised Patti performing Audra on stage in a psychiatric hospital to a room of disinterested fellow patients.
The skin mask in Curtains not only obscures the killers’ identities, but is also deployed explicitly within the diegesis as a performance tool. Recalling Judith Butler’s observation that ‘gender is always a doing’, the overt theatricality of the mask highlights the professional imbalances that exist for women over certain ages.49 This mask exemplifies Barbara Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine, typical of the witch who is configured as ‘an old, ugly crone who is capable of monstrous acts’.50 In her analysis of late medieval literature, Sarah Allison Miller noted that in France, England and Italy there is evidence of ‘clear concerns about female destructive powers’ in women of a certain age – of the 60,000 women executed for witchcraft from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, the bulk were women in the later stages of life.51
Because of her age, Samantha is Othered by her younger colleagues, who Stryker considers more desirable because of their youth. This drives the aforementioned scene where Stryker uses a mask to sexually and professionally humiliate Samantha, forcing upon her through the mask the ‘performance’ of monstrous older womanhood. Stryker and the broader patriarchy he represents are therefore by the film’s own logic responsible for her violent tendencies via his active process of dehumanisation (she is ‘old’, therefore monstrous, therefore explicitly denied humanness). Unable to escape the socially assumed role of ‘killer crone’ because of her gender and age, like Alice and Mrs Tredoni in Alice Sweet Alice, through the mask Samantha struggles with preconceived performance templates of what and how the category of ‘woman’ means for women at different ages, resulting in a mental health collapse.
At play are pressures that circulate around what Miriam Bernard, Pat Chambers and Gillian Granville have identified as the symbolic invisibility of women ‘in mid-life and beyond’, not just culturally but even as subjects of academic research.52 Samantha seeks professional visibility, but her forced monstrosity typifies Deborah Jermyn and Su Holmes’s observation that ‘in a youth-obsessed culture the everyday lives and appearances of older people remain “Other”’, reliant upon assumptions ‘of ageing being scary, the stuff of horror films and frightening folklore’.53 The mask in Curtains renders Samantha’s difference excessive, therefore continuing ‘historical, reflexive accounts of the damaging machinery of fame and its particularly punishing ramifications for older women’ alongside films like Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (Robert Aldrich, 1962).54
As Patti demonstrates in Curtains, however, even for women who adhere to what Stryker and the masculine authority he represents consider desirable, the human life cycle render it a necessarily fleeting stage. For Jermyn and Holmes, the question ‘When does a woman become an “old woman?”’ is challenging because ‘we are all, by the simple virtue of living and breathing, becoming “older” all the time’.55 Patti understands this when Stryker tells mask-wearing Samantha in the improvisation scene, ‘What if your face were different? It could be one day, you know. Hideous, repulsive.’ Stryker’s cruelty articulates patriarchal assumptions that age determines feminine ‘redundancy’. Knowing that she cannot escape her own propensity to age, Patti – through the mask – adopts the role of ‘old woman’ as a weapon, embracing what Stryker configured as Othered monstrosity in a transformative act of transgression and aggression.
Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Curtains interrogates gender performativity, patriarchal dominance and ritual practices related to capitalism through human face skin masks. With a narrative that relies on the so-called ‘casting couch’ phenomenon that has plagued film industries around the world, as noted by figures including Roger Ebert, Ann Hornaday and Deborah Martinson it contains fundamentally ritual aspects.56 For Jim Rutenberg, Rachel Abrams and Melena Ryzikoct, the casting couch is ‘the symbol of ritualized abuse that studio chiefs meted out in trading roles for sexual favors’.57 In Curtains, casting couch rituals of workplace harassment intersect spectacularly through the mask via rituals of masked performance and the familiar structures of the slasher film to reveal institutionalised discrimination.58
While the transformative blurring of gender skin masks is central to The Abominable Dr. Phibes and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in Alice Sweet Alice and Curtains the pressure of maintaining unsustainable performances of idealised womanhood drive its women trapped in hegemonic systems of harassment and abuse to psychological collapse. As we now explore in Happy Birthday to Me and Smiley, class is also a point of difference that marks power inequalities worthy of critical examination when considering ritual in relation to the transformative capacity of skin masks in horror cinema.
Skin Masks and Class: Happy Birthday to Me (1981) and Smiley (2012)
While the emphasis here is on class difference in Happy Birthday to Me and Smiley, again – like the previous four examples – these films simultaneously address differences relating to gender and power. As a transformative device, skin masks here once more transcend simple disguise/revelation functions and their power dynamics are closely aligned with a range of cultural rituals linked to masks or mask-wearing. Class difference has been a subject of horror at least since Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Reynold Humphries noting that in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 screen adaptation, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hyde functions ‘as a signifier of class conflict’.59 Class is central in horror films as diverse as King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, 1933), Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979) and My Bloody Valentine, the latter discussed in chapter 7, and for Humphries the genre’s ubiquitous town/country binary is analogous with discourse surrounding class.60
Consumer rituals dominate slasher films in particular across secular festivals where participation is linked to wealth: buying dresses, hosting parties, driving cars. As noted in the introduction, film titles alone are often linked to social festivals and rituals – Graduation Day, Happy Birthday to Me, Halloween, Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980) – who in name at least flag associations with consumer rituals understood as ‘performative events that are often planned, repeated over time within a social group or culture and characterized by intensive use of goods and services’.61 Happy Birthday to Me follows Ginny (Melissa Sue Anderson) – a member of the popular, wealthy ‘Top Ten’ seniors clique at the Crawford Academy – whose members are being executed. Over the course of the film, it is revealed that at some point in the past Ginny had brain surgery and requires ongoing care by psychiatrist Dr David Faraday (Glenn Ford). As noted by Hendershot and Midelfort, excessive representations of mental health disorders broadly categorised as ‘madness’ have historically been gendered female and, like Samantha in Curtains, Ginny’s mental health history actively undermines the audience’s faith in her ability to distinguish right from wrong.62 Although the film shows Ginny killing one of her peers, it is revealed that the killer is her friend Ann (Tracey E. Bregman), who wore a convincing mask of Ginny’s face to shift the blame onto her. Ann’s hatred of Ginny is class-based: as a lower-class girl who became upwardly mobile, Ann felt Ginny was an interloper, her anger complicated by the revelation that Ginny’s deceased mother had an affair with Ann’s father. Linked through both the mask itself (they both look like Ginny) and that both have mental health issues concretely locates the violent activity that propels the film’s action as explicitly feminised. Regressively, there is a consistent implication that it is the ‘madness’ of women that forces them to reconcile difference in this way, manifesting in both women as gendered ‘hysteria’.
While Happy Birthday to Me is typical of the ritualistic countdown execution structure of the slasher film reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel And Then There Were None, it also deviates from the standard slasher in crucial ways.63 In her analysis of slasher films, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn concluded that ‘in this period of excess, overindulgence and increasing greed among the middle and upper classes, the victims of the slasher in these violent, visceral films are construed as the intended inheritors of Reaganomics’.64 Typically, said Fhlainn, the slasher killer ‘is usually depicted as sidelined due to issues of social class and Reagan’s abandonment of necessarily social policies’.65 In the slasher film, being scared or targeted by the killer
recognises both the victims’ class and the victims’ security within their class prior to their onscreen destruction and allows them the position of being both secure in their assured politics while perpetually afraid of its loss at the hands of the ‘other’.66
With both Ginny and Ann, these tendencies are explored explicitly through the film’s diegetic focus on privilege, class and wealth. Ginny’s instability actively fosters doubt in the spectator and through the mask we see a person we believe is Ginny commit murder. For Ann, Ginny is a fraudulent poor girl who became rich, rather than being ‘naturally’ dispossessed to wealth and privilege. Her past exclusion and invisibility to her new best friends in the Top Ten is a constant source of anxiety for both Ginny and, more urgently, to Ann, who considers Ginny a disruptive outsider and punishes her accordingly.
Vera Dika therefore considered the film ‘ambitious’ in terms of its intersection of class, privilege and violence.67 ‘The children of the upper class are mean-spirited, cruel and immoral,’ Dika observed, ‘apparently like their capitalist parents, they are out only for themselves.’68 It is their privilege that ‘cut[s them] off from the rest of the elite school and the suburban community’.69 While not unusual for slasher films to focus on unlikable teens, protagonists at least – especially the typical Final Girl – are generally required to be a point of some sympathetic identification, as previously noted in regard to Clover’s examination of cross-gender identification in horror. Ginny does not fit this description: as Dika noted, she is ‘untrustworthy, selfish and unkind’, and the film ‘uses … these qualities and Ginny’s nasty disposition and psychiatric history to raise the viewer’s suspicions against her’.70 We not only see Ginny revel in her superiority as part of the Top Ten, but also watch her seduce her friend’s boyfriends and – most memorably – appear to murder fellow clique member Steve (Matt Craven) mid-seduction as she spectacularly impales him with a shish-kebab skewer.
Importantly, the murderer is not Ginny, but Ann disguised as Ginny, who peels off her Ginny-like skin mask in a cartoonish reveal. This transformation occurs in gruesome tableaux where the corpses of her friends have been placed around a festively decorated birthday party table, recalling the film’s title. This consciously disrupts ubiquitous Western birthday party rituals – commonly involving cake, candles and a specific song71 – and the very words ‘Happy Birthday to Me’ subverts the traditional ‘Happy Birthday to You’ song lyrics, implying loneliness and isolation rather than communal goodwill. But its pronoun subversion collapses Ann and Ginny’s identities: through the mask, their identities have merged. ‘In the final confrontational moment we are presented with two identical but antagonistic images of Ginny’, said Dika. ‘With the use of editing and optical effects, the image of the double is created … In Birthday, then, the close connection between the killer and the heroine is literalized by means of this visual image.’72 For Dika, this underscores ‘the tension between two opposing aspects of a symbolic single self’:73 again, as in many movies that incorporate horror film masks, doppelgängers and tricksters, ritual, power and transformation are central.
Implicit in the film’s final thematic punch, however, when Ginny kills Ann in a struggle as the police arrive, the film ends with the implication that Ginny will be assumed guilty of all the murders. This renders Ginny herself a victim, despite surviving Ann’s attempts to kill her. Ann is a bourgeois trickster-shaman who transforms through mask-wearing at its extreme: through her macabre sense of play, she employs a masked disguise to gain power and manipulate and destroy Ginny. But rather than seeking to subvert order she desires to return it to an archaic, regressive norm that maintains class distinctions and reinforces her privilege. The film’s conclusion is a powerful critique of social order: that formal institutional forces like the police support Ann’s mission implies that there remain deeply embedded social factors equally determined to maintain the status quo.
Michael Gallagher’s 2012 film Smiley also centres around rituals involving human face skin masks, class difference and notions of dehumanisation taken to extremes with its total reconstruction of human head flesh to replicate a crude smiling face emoticon. The film seeks to profit on the moral panic surrounding Anonymous at the time, the relationship between Anonymous and its emblematic Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, 2005) already briefly addressed in the introduction. When released in 2012, Anonymous were at the forefront of public discourse, evidenced by their being awarded one of Time magazine’s People of the Year.74 Jason L. Jarvis noted that the nature of the group render it difficult to define: as its name suggests, Anonymous is unstable and ambiguous and its meanings are variable.75 Regardless, its origins are part of popular Internet mythology as a ‘hacktivist’ movement originating on 4chan, ‘a place where thousands of people gather for cheap thrills: porn, gore and spontaneous collaborative pranks that range from the harmlessly goofy to insidiously dangerous’.76 For Cole Stryker, this activity is linked to informality and leisure: ‘for the most part, 4chan’s users just want to kill time shooting the shit with other geeks’.77 The online rituals of 4chan activity – such as meme creation and trolling – stand in contrast to Anonymous’s high-profile activism.78 Anonymous’s intersection of trolling and mask-wearing again recall shaman-trickster traditions: like many of the mask-wearing horror antagonists in this book, subversive masked play seeks to disrupt and Internet trolling itself, for E. Gabriella Coleman, is a noteworthy contemporary manifestation of the trickster tradition.79
Explicitly casting Anonymous as the villain, Smiley presents them as a bratty college clique, spoilt by privilege and too much leisure time (recalling the Crawford Top Ten in Happy Birthday to Me). But trolling in the film is presented as ritualistic, an act identified as such by Bettina Kluge.80 By aligning Anonymous with drug- and alcohol-fuelled house parties rather than virtual spaces, the film’s representation of the movement is more closely aligned with Whitney Phillips’s identification of 4chan and Anonymous as having triggered a ‘moral panic’, mining public anxieties about Anonymous’s post-2006 ‘ominous refrain that “none of us is as cruel as all of us”’.81 In privileging ritualised trolling, Smiley necessarily ignores that the victim-selection of this trolling is often politically motivated: ‘religious cults, white supremacists, scam artists, pedophiles and animal abusers’.82
In terms of its use of masks, the most striking factor in Smiley is that the characters representing Anonymous are not anonymous at all: they have names, such as their leader Zane (Andrew James Allen). The film denies Anonymous any broader social or ideological motivation beyond cyberbullying – another moral panic at the time of its production83 – as they attempt to drive protagonist Ashley (Caitlin Gerard) to her death ‘for the lulz’. Online communication as a site of horror is configured as an explicit threat to young people, as demonstrated in a range of horror movies including Megan is Missing (Michael Goi, 2011), Unfriended (Leo Gabriadze, 2014) and The Den (discussed in chapter 8): central to all these films is an assumption that ‘online communication is a daily ritual for just about everyone’.84
Yet, despite reducing real-world Anonymous networks to a gang of bored killer rich kids, the use of skin masks in Smiley in many ways is just as complex as the other examples in this chapter. In its climax – again like Happy Birthday to Me – what is assumed to be a ‘real’ face is revealed to be a mask. Throughout the film, Smiley is understood to be the physical manifestation of the eponymous urban legend, a murderous online stalker who sewed his eyes and mouth closed, his facial tissue, sinew and muscle swelling grotesquely. This uncanny turning of flesh into a grim parody of the eponymous emoticon is part of the disturbing materiality of the Smiley face itself. By restricting his ability to both see and speak, the visual iconography implies that he attained alternate, less human powers, granting him unspoken powers to move across the Internet’s liminal virtuality.
The film’s ‘twist’ reveals that Ashley has been taunted by Zane and his Anonymous friends wearing Smiley masks. Instead of stalked and driven to her death by an online bogeyman, she has been cyberbullied by her peers. Like Happy Birthday to Me, Smiley highlights its protagonist’s mental health issues (like Ginny, Ashley is traumatised by the death of her mother): there is an implication that Ashley is a suitable victim precisely because she is unstable to begin with, recalling Lizbeth Goodman’s observation that in literature ‘at the most basic level, it is often females who are called mad and males who make them so’.85 After her death, the masks are removed, making literal the notion of ‘two-facedness’ (especially in the case of Ashley’s seemingly sympathetic housemate). Yet the film’s conclusion reveals the ‘real’ Smiley just before the end credits as Ashley’s killers discuss online the ethics of what they have done. Although a pedestrian twist, conceptually the existence of a ‘real’ Smiley invites a rethinking of the doubling process integral to the film’s reveal: what remains is the knowledge that underneath the ‘real’ Smiley’s face, a similar kind of doubling remains. Masked transformation and online communication rituals intersect in Smiley to render monstrous its representation of Anonymous: because of their class privilege, they represent a murderous moral bankruptcy constructed to profit directly from moral panics surrounding cyberbullying, Anonymous and 4chan.
This chapter has explored six horror films that employ skin masks as transformative devices, intersecting with a range of rituals to explore (however ambivalently) power dynamics relating to religion, class and gender in particular. As evidenced by The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Alice Sweet Alice, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Happy Birthday to Me, Curtains and Smiley, these rituals deviate and intersect in significant ways: instead of arguing for a singular, unified way that skin masks are deployed in contemporary horror, these films illustrate pluralism regarding how they explore broader social, cultural and ideological questions. Whether the emphasis is (like Dr. Phibes and Alice Sweet Alice) on explicitly religious rituals or – as in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Happy Birthday to Me, Curtains and Smiley – more informal or secular ones, the privileging of skin masks allows an exploration of patriarchal dominance in particular. Like Dr Phibes, Alice, Mrs Tredoni and Ann, these trickster-shamans subvert dominant structures through masked transformation. Like Leatherface, they can evoke supposedly ‘primitive’ masked ritual traditions in order to return to a regressive past, or – like the masks in Smiley and Curtains – they can replicate grotesque extremes where monstrosity results from a denial of humanness altogether. Masked transformations and rituals converge in these films to explore power imbalances, the shamanic imagination underscoring the immense symbolic potency of masks themselves is granted. We shift now to the intersection of ritual, power and transformation in horror films that feature blank masks.