Ritual, Power and Transformation
LIKE SKIN MASKS, blank masks in horror cinema have their own often complex histories, particularly in relation to the intersection of ritual, power and transformation. This chapter explores blank masks in horror cinema after 1970, particularly those similar to the iconic white blank mask prominent throughout the Halloween franchise (1978–2018) that simultaneously recalls older performance traditions such as Japanese Noh theatre. This mask typology is distinguished by the various ways these films use ‘blankness’ to explore not only notions of identity, but also as a symbolic canvas upon which viewers can inscribe meaning. Masks in horror demand a level of cultural work on the part of their audiences who must negotiate the multiple identities and meanings often at play in the transformative acts of masking and unmasking visible within the genre. In thinking about the potential for transformation and movement across either symbolically or literal transitional spaces, the shamanic imagination – a residual cultural memory of orthodox, anthropologically defined shamanism that underscores an unspoken yet widespread belief in the power of masked ritual – reveals that horror film masks often require this precise kind of labour. This is arguably nowhere more explicit than in the blank mask, as its defining absence of information demands the audience work to locate meaning in a space defined by its very lack of visual information. Blank masks simultaneously erase identity and create spaces to project new meanings onto, prompting another dimension to the visual iconography of horror film masks.
While this chapter focuses on the blank white face mask, there are other methods of deleting or ‘blanking’ faces through masks in horror cinema. The stocking mask often deployed in home invasion films and robbery-based thriller or crime films is a ubiquitous alternative, contorting the wearer’s face, obscuring their features and impeding identification. Beyond cinema, Elizabeth Tonkin found images of the stocking-masked terrorist ‘the most frightening’ and ‘inhuman because they are faceless’.1 Stocking masks are both blank masks and repurposed masks (the latter explored in chapter 7), as are similarly ubiquitous ski masks, other staples of both horror and crime thrillers that grant their wearers a transformative blankness.2 Blank masks deny the humanness of their wearer by deleting the features that render them identifiable as individual humans, and there are similar mechanics at play in horror films that employ sack masks like The Town that Dreaded Sundown (Charles B. Pierce, 1976/Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, 2015), Nightbreed (Clive Barker, 1990), The Orphanage (J. A. Bayona, 2007) and Trick R’ Treat (Michael Dougherty, 2007). As well as deleting identifying facial features, the placing of the head in a bag also implies an association with waste, refuse and abjection: trash films about literal human rubbish.
The blank white face has a long history in performance traditions which continue throughout contemporary horror cinema. Through the success of John Carpenter’s original Halloween in 1978 in particular, the blank mask has played an important role in the codification of horror film masks from that decade onwards, again supporting Neale’s notion of repetition and difference as a process that accounts for the endurance of the genre more broadly.
Echoing Neale, the blank mask in Eyes without a Face has been adopted and adapted throughout the horror genre (in films by Jesús Franco and Pedro Almodóvar, for example3), increasingly codified through its repetition as it is reimagined and redeployed in diverse ways. This chapter explores a number of blank horror film masks to demonstrate this process of same-but-different, illustrating how the codification of these masks is underscored by important deviations that often thwart or subvert expectations. Again, of central interest is the transformative capacity of masks themselves and how they intersect with ritual and power. In the first section, we explore masks, ritual and repetition across the Halloween franchise, from John Carpenter’s original to Rob Zombie’s 2007/2009 re-imaginings to the official franchise reboot in 2018. This section positions the repetition of the blank mask motif throughout Halloween alongside the very rituals of similarity and difference that dominate film sequels and remakes more broadly. This section concludes by exploring vital tensions not only in the differences but also the similarities that govern the use and aesthetics of masks across the Halloween films and how they reflect a broader tendency across horror for reflexivity. This reflexivity is particularly important in the films explored in this chapter: film-makers often rely on audiences to have a preconceived understanding of how masks gain their power when worn in association with a broad range of what can be loosely conceived as ‘ritual’ acts. This power is understood through the shamanic imagination as granting masks and their wearers abilities that they would not have access to otherwise. However, while this knowledge recalls beliefs about masks that transcend film history, as the mask became codified in horror it could be reconfigured in a range of new contexts that – while still recognisable as ‘horror’ – simultaneously spoke to new ideological and social contexts and concerns.
Following this, we turn to Japan and Australia with two films that privilege Noh masks in different ways. While not as well known as J-horror peers like Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998), Gurozuka too evokes traditional Japanese theatrical traditions (here the Noh mask instead of Ringu’s contemporising of the onryō figure from Kabuki theatre). Like Ringu, Gurozuka explores tensions surrounding then contemporary ubiquitous media technologies, but like A Page of Madness it strategically deploys the blankness of the mask as a space to project new meanings. In contrast, Ann Turner’s Australian film Celia does not mention Noh or even Japan, but through its story of the psychological collapse of its eponymous traumatised young protagonist as she attempts to navigate the fraught world of adulthood, the mask represents a broader symbolic transformation accessible through the child’s simplistic embrace of homogenised cultural Otherness.
Finally, the relationship between masks, ritual, power and transformation is explored in George A. Romero’s Bruiser (2000) and Mike Flanagan’s Hush (2016). In surrendering to capitalist ideals and ambitions, Romero’s protagonist loses his identity by literally becoming faceless, the director using this metaphor in his critique of the dehumanising nature of Western corporate culture. Hush too addresses the intersection of male violence and anonymity, but through an early unmasking it complicates notions of identity by rejecting the mythology of the enigmatic masked killer. Erasing some identities while complicating others, in a variety of different ways – confirming and diverging, same and yet different – blank masks in this chapter demonstrate how ritual, power and transformation intersect with the empty facial canvases these films offer.
Blank Masks and Repetition: The Halloween Franchise
Rituals of repetition take various forms in horror, such as the widespread use of horror film masks and the sequel-heavy nature of its most well-known franchises, from Friday the 13th to Saw (2003–17), Ring (Ringu, 1998–2017) to A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984–2010). The Halloween franchise is a poignant subject on both fronts, as it not only has been made and remade with ritualistic frequency, but the films diegetically deploy Michael Myers’s iconic mask in a repetitive, ritualistic way. Film sequels and remakes contain ritual aspects, Catherine Russell noting of action franchises such as Death Wish (1974–94) and Lethal Weapon (1987–2016) that ‘the endless regeneration of sequels of these movies indicates their ritualistic impetus and also the failure of the ritual to stem the tide of violence’.4 As discussed in the introduction, Thomas Schatz’s work on intersection of ritual and genre film is significant, where he observes that ‘as we repeatedly undergo the same type of experience we develop expectations which, as they are continually reinforced, tend to harden into “rules”’.5 The Halloween franchise illustrates that as ‘expectations’ about horror film sequels ‘are continually reinforced’ and thus ‘harden into “rules”’, so too the codification of masks themselves in terms of both how they are narratively deployed and their affective impact on the audience, themselves engaging in what we noted previously can be understood as acts of ritualised spectatorship.
In sequels and remakes, the relationship between ritual, repetition and pleasure is fragile. Andrew Scahill noted that while in horror, ‘a sequel may provide the pleasure of recognition by echoing a familiar narrative event’, there is the risk – as Charles Derry claimed of the Saw franchise – that horror sequels can become ‘more mercenary than visionary, offering repetition and not elaboration’.6 This is not specific to film genre, and Christina Pratt notes that even shamanic rituals traditionally have a tendency to ‘lose their efficacy when simply repeated or imitated’.7 Mircea Eliade was a key figure in articulating the role of repetition in shamanic ritual, arguing for its importance as ‘a fundamental conception in archaic religions – the repetition of a ritual founded by Divine Beings implies the re-actualization of the original Time when the rite was first performed’.8 The sacred aspects of repetition manifested in a shaman’s ability to recall through ritual their community’s cultural and spiritual history. There is a tension, therefore, between what Eliade identified as sacred rituals of repetition and what Pratt and Derry argued is hollow repetition-for-repetition’s sake.
Repetition has also been considered in terms of secularist aesthetics, and for Umberto Eco postmodern aesthetics are perpetually rejuvenated through repetition.9 Citing Eco in her work on repetition and ritual in horror film, Zanger suggested that ‘any remake of a film is … the retelling of a previously successful story’ and that ‘since repetition and difference function in mutual interdependence, the economy of cinematic versions is that of difference in repetition’.10 Echoing Neale, this tension between repetition and difference is central to the Halloween franchise, but the iconic Myers mask has historical precedence. Argentine horror director Emilio Vieyra’s Feast of Flesh (Placer sangriento, 1967) follows a masked serial killer who injects young women with heroin, luring them to his beach house where he hypnotises them with his organ-playing prowess. His mask is privileged in the opening credit sequence, where it is shown next to silhouettes of syringes. The mask itself is disturbing: while in close-up appearing to be that of an older man, when shot in high contrast black-and-white and from below in one of the film’s most climactic scenes it is rendered blank and flat. From a contemporary perspective, this mask immediately recalls Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise, the first entry of which would appear over ten years later.
While unclear if Carpenter saw this film or was indirectly influenced by it, this mask in Feast of Flesh regardless suggests a process of same-but-different, recalling Neale’s identification of how repetition and variation intersect to assure the endurance of film genres. Looking at the Halloween franchise, this is brought vividly to life through the dynamic centrality of masks themselves: while adult Myers’s blank mask has been the film’s most enduring visual icon from the first film onwards, the clown mask worn by the young Myers in its opening scene also returns in Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers, where it is worn by his niece Jamie (Danielle Harris). While the use of masks in Halloween III: Season of the Witch will be discussed in chapter 9, that film’s broad commercial and critical failure has been understood as a too severed divergence from the earlier films.
As noted in chapter 1, in the first Halloween film Dr Loomis (Donald Pleasance) at one point reflects upon his time as Michael’s psychiatrist during the killer’s time at the Smith’s Grove sanatorium where he was incarcerated after killing his older sister. Loomis describes Myers as having mystical visions, these shamanic qualities ascribed to Myers echoed in Kendall R. Phillips’s description of not merely as a crazed killer but ‘a kind of cosmic force’.11 Adopting the famous blank mask on his escape from Smith’s Grove, it would become synonymous with the genre more broadly and its iconographic impact saw it endure across the sequels and their remakes. As Reynold Humphries noted, this mask is therefore not so much a means for disguise – his sister Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), for instance, recognises Michael specifically by his mask – but rather functions as an Othering device to separate him from his human prey as it ‘symbolizes Michael’s refusal to be looked at, to become the object of the other’s look, to recognize the other as having the same rights and desires as himself’.12 For J. P. Telotte, ‘the almost luminous white mask’ itself ‘is neither grotesquely distorted nor natural, but more resembling the face of a dead man’. Consequently, it ‘functions not only to cloak his human features, but also to effectively divorce him from the world of the living, his victims’.13 For Murray Leeder, ‘the mask, which both resembles but is clearly not a human face, works to winnow away the human factor from Michael Myers. Like an actor in a Greek drama, Michael wears his villainy plainly on his face.’14 The mask suggests both an erasure of identity while simultaneously allowing the audience to ‘read’ their own experience of Myers’s presence ‘into’ the blankness itself, encouraged to imagine the horrors he is capable of because more usual communication systems – language, facial expression, emotion – are simply not there.
The creation of Myers’s blank mask has itself attained an aspect of cult film legend. As told by Leeder, while the screenplay requested a mask that depicted the ‘pale, neutral features of a man weirdly distorted by the rubber’, production designer Tommy Lee Wallace (director of Halloween III) modified and painted white a mask of William Shatner’s Star Trek character to give Myers his disturbing look.15 David Roche compared Michael’s mask to the commedia dell’arte’s Pierrot, which, when combined with its Star Trek origins, ‘literally distorts and defamiliarises the reassuring face of an iconic hero’.16 Across the Halloween sequels and its remakes, rituals of repetition manifest not only in the numerous reiterations simultaneously aligned with and deviating from each other, but through the repeated, ritualistic act of masking itself. Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake and its 2009 sequel take significant liberties, expanding the narrative and symbolic functionality of the mask. While in the original film Myers is catatonic in hospital for fifteen years, in Zombie’s 2007 version he busies himself with mask making. Expanding the five-minute introduction of the original, child Myers (Daeg Faerch) is obsessed with masks and – in a crucial deviation from the original’s opening – he picks up the mask when his sister Judith’s (Hannah R. Hall) boyfriend drops it on the floor after pulling it out of a bag and putting it on while they are making out as a joke. Here the mask has a distinctly adult look and on Michael’s body it suggests that he is a child capable of committing ‘adult’ crimes. There is, like Carpenter’s original (and other films in the franchise), the capacity for transformation: he puts on the mask and becomes a killer. Yet, in contrast with the original, Zombie’s adult Myers’s (Tyler Mane) crude papier mâché masks are shown to decorate his cell.
Masks and masked transformations are how Myers negotiates his own identity as both a child and adult: child Myers wears an adult mask and becomes a killer, while adult Myers – obsessed with masks – uses them in his return to violence. The transformative capacity of the mask is linked to his fundamental moral and social mis-wiring: it is only after returning to his childhood home in search of his now teenage sister Laurie (Scout Taylor Compton) that he finds the original mask that marks the beginning of his murderous rampage as he seeks a reunion. The blankness of the mask does not function in the same way that it had previously – rather, through the franchise’s ritualised process of repetition, the significance of the mask is not reliant on its blankness as such, but in its intertextual echoes of the ‘adult’ crimes Zombie knows that the audience are aware of, their knowledge of the preceding films informing their experience and understanding of the events in his remake. As discussed in the introduction, this reflexivity in horror spectatorship itself has a ritualistic aspect, and this conscious game-playing feature of slasher film in particular will be expanded on in chapter 7.
While the earlier films included rare moments of Michael’s exposed face, in Zombie’s 2007 remake, his unmasked face as a child is privileged throughout, emphasising his humanity. In Halloween II – the 2009 sequel to his 2007 remake – Zombie continues to refer to earlier moments in the franchise’s history (again same-but-different) by the important final turn to mask-wearing by Compton’s Laurie, the film’s Final Girl. This explicitly references the ending of Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers where the child-Final Girl Jamie puts on Michael’s clown mask and (apparently) murders her aunt off-screen. Most recently, David Gordon Green’s 2018 reboot of the series rejects the broader mythology from Halloween II (Rick Rosenthal, 1981) onwards (notably rejecting any family connection between Michael and Laurie) but still maintains the centrality of the mask; when Michael is revealed in high-security medical care at the beginning of the film he is shown from behind, maskless. After his escape he has the capacity to kill but his first goal is to retrieve his iconic mask, an act which – when he places it back on his face – appears in many senses to formalise his return as the legendary killer. Across the Halloween franchise, ritual and repetition intersect through the constant reconfiguration of the mask, especially the blank mask of the adult Myers. Key here is the tension between difference and repetition: the blank mask is not only a disguise or an empty canvas for a range of new (and often conflicting) meanings to be projected upon, but a tangible forum for a critical, reflexive consideration of the role of ritual and repetition in horror more broadly. As indicated in the next two case studies, even the use of near identical masks in different cultural contexts allows space for notable diversity.
Blank Masks and Place: Celia (1988) and Gurozuka (2005)
Although both featuring Noh masks, Celia and Gurozuka appear to have little in common beyond their surface affiliation with the horror genre. Celia is a hybrid drama that employs horror iconography to replicate the intense Manichean imaginary of its titular child protagonist, who (seemingly suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder) must find her place in an increasingly ugly adult world during 1950s Melbourne. With its jump frights and fascination with the intersection of technology, vengeance and the supernatural, Gurozuka is typical of contemporary J-horror. But through their shared use of Noh masks, both films in different ways are tied to a sense of place (or, just as importantly, placeless-ness). While Onibaba and A Page of Madness demonstrated that mask-wearing traditions in Japanese horror cinema are not rare, they continue in contemporary J-horror, sparked by the phenomenal success of Ringu.17
While the onryō is synonymous with J-horror through Ringu’s antagonist Sadako, other contemporary Japanese horror films have engaged with Japanese theatrical traditions in different ways. Yoichi Noshiyama’s 2005 Gurozuka continues mask-wearing practices closely associated with Noh as it follows a group of young women who visit the isolated lodge Yuai House. They plan to make a movie under the guidance of Ai (Chisato Morishita) and Maki (Yôko Mitsuya) to revive a film society that was shut down seven years previously when a member went missing. Their project is a remake of the final film made by the society before it was disbanded, a short horror film called Gurozuka. As Maki explains, the film was based on a Noh play called Kurozuka about a demonic woman who lived isolated, deep in the mountains. Visited by travelling monks, she gave them orders to not look in a certain room in her house. They disobeyed and discovered the remains of previous travellers that she had devoured.
Translated as ‘Black Mound’, Kurozuka was written by Noh playwright and actor Zeami Motokiyo (discussed in chapter 3). As Lowenstein noted, it is a famous example of a play centring around the Hannya mask, denoting a female demon driven by jealousy.18 Watching the original film on a videotape they discovered before they arrived at the lodge, the girls see in the diegetic short Gurozuka a masked woman beat another character to death before walking towards the screen – covered in blood – her hand reaching out towards the camera (this is an image curiously repeated almost exactly in the found footage central to another film we discuss in chapter 8, Månguden). Here, the girls identify the Noh mask as that of a Deigan, identifiable via her plain blank face and the whites of the eyes painted gold to denote the supernatural.19 Reviving the figure of the Deigan and its connection to feminine monstrosity, one of the girls begins to kill her peers, eventually revealed to be Maki who is ‘possessed’ by the videotape and driven by obsessive, murderous desire for Ai. Again, the mask is not merely a disguise, but a blank slate upon which new identities may be written. Like Halloween, the blankness renders its wearer’s actions unknowable, symbolised by the absence of facial expression – one fame-hungry character is even reluctant to wear the mask because it will obscure her face and reduce her potential visibility.
Yet, despite the use of this Noh mask in the film, Gurozuka seems less concerned with Noh theatre itself than with the convention established by Ringu that requires J-horror films to reference Japanese performance traditions in some way. There is a strong aspect of reflexivity at play as we watch a horror film about characters who watch a horror film: like Ringu, Gurozuka consciously constructs the act of watching scary movies from within its own diegesis as a ritual closely associated with horror spectatorship. With its film-within-a-film structure, much is made in Gurozuka of the internal diegetic short and its capacity to ‘infect’ the present: influenced by Ringu’s haunted technology plot, as Colette Balmain noted, this is a general tendency in contemporary J-horror.20 The utilisation of Noh traditions – particularly the blank mask – may be an attempt to follow the conventions established by Ringu to garner the same international success for Gurozuka. While the past is consciously echoed through the deliberate deployment of this Noh mask, Gurozuka is in fact influenced to a greater extent by more recently established generic traditions. The Noh mask here re-writes on its blank space a new Japanese horror narrative of masked transformations, responding to trends active within its contemporary moment. The blank mask allows for a play of identity across a range of texts associated with Japanese cultural history – traditional Noh theatre, experimental analogue film21 and J-horror films about haunted videotapes – that exist both within the diegesis and intertextually beyond it. The blank Noh mask is therefore the perfect symbol for Gurozuka: like A Page of Madness and – in a very different way and a very different cultural and historical context – Celia, it uses the object as a blank canvas upon which new meanings can be inscribed.
Although conceived as a drama, Celia was released outside Australia with horror-style artwork as Celia: Child of Darkness, underplaying the film’s genre hybridity.22 Celia aligns with horror most explicitly through its employment of the Scottish folktale The Hobyahs, but this relationship is consolidated through the unspoken importance of masks in the film as a transformative device that Celia believes grant her ancient powers when used in ritual. The Hobyahs are central to both Celia’s nightmares and her moral vision: through these folkloric monsters and the threat that they embody, she understands order and disorder being maintained through varying degrees of violence and displays of body horror. Celia’s obsession with The Hobyahs indoctrinates her with the belief that ritual violence is essential to establishing and maintaining order in what she sees as a corrupt adult world.
In Celia, the ‘Japanese-ness’ of the mask itself is never mentioned and its Noh origins are not acknowledged. But the instability of faces and the identities associated with them are rendered visually in Celia’s opening credits, where images of her face distort and blur on top of each other until they solidify into a single image of actor Rebecca Smart looking directly at the camera – an act that challenges the viewer to consciously identify a ‘true’, singular Celia. The fragility of Celia’s face – and her entire identity – continues through her use of the mask. The role of ritual is most explicit in the ‘primitive’ masked ceremonies she and her neighbouring friends, the Tanner children, undertake in a deserted quarry, a carnivalesque space where the logic of play dominates the otherwise banal oppression of their everyday lives. But social rituals are also ubiquitous, manifesting from the very outset in schoolyard rituals like passing notes or writing repeated lines on a blackboard as punishment. The parental gifting of an iconic Australian Malvern Star brand bicycle is a localised rite of passage and in an anti-Communist church sermon, religious ritual is explicitly granted a political dimension. The film even includes a book-burning sequence – a ritual typically associated with extreme ideological sentiment – where Celia’s father burns her deceased grandmother’s Lenin and Marx books, Celia rescuing the Noh mask from the flames and hiding it in a waterproof box in a local creek.
The Noh mask is a sacred object for Celia, yet she indicates no knowledge of its cultural heritage beyond its association with her grandmother. Its unspecified Otherness for her is representative of a world beyond her stifling suburban existence. As she and the Tanner children sit in a deserted shed in the quarry, she passes it to each child who places it on their face, Celia explaining reverently that ‘it has secret powers’. Bully Stephanie (Amelia Frid) uses the mask to torment Celia, stealing it and mocking her with it. Bonding with the Tanner children through a ritualistic blood exchange through their pricked thumbs, this is another ritual that mobilises Celia and her gang against Stephanie to rescue the sacred mask. Their pursuit leads them to a cinema, where Stephanie continues to taunt Celia with the mask: for her, its power stems only from the importance Celia has invested in it, granting Stephanie control over Celia. The mask ritualistically represents a way to negotiate life and death to the latter, with its link to her deceased grandmother and the unspoken role it plays in Celia’s increasing proximity to death (of both her pet rabbit and her ultimate killing of Stephanie’s father, Inspector Burke, played by William Zappa).
When Celia regains the mask, tensions escalate: Celia is forbidden to play with the Tanner children and together they enact mock-primitive rituals cobbled together from their collective knowledge of what such ceremonies might necessitate to seek revenge. With her mask, Celia and the Tanner children return to the quarry where the masked Celia chants and dances around a fire, making voodoo dolls of her father, Stephanie and Inspector Burke. When the Tanners are forced to move to Sydney because Inspector Burke and Celia’s father reported Mr Tanner’s political status to his employer, the children throw a voodoo doll of Inspector Burke onto a fire, chanting ‘Death! Death! Death!’ In both ceremonies, mask-wearing Celia is the central controlling power, performing mock-tribal dances in childlike imitation of shamanic ritual wholly dependent on what she believes the transformative potential of her sacred mask affords. Although not seen again, the mask mobilises Celia’s destructive power and grants her the power to fulfil her wish for Inspector Burke’s death: at the film’s climax, she and friend Heather (Clair Couttie) shoot him when Celia – now unable to distinguish reality from fantasy – mistakes him for a Hobyah.
Crucially, the film’s coda employs another blank facial covering: playing at the quarry with Stephanie and other children, Celia convenes a mock trial against Inspector Burke’s killer, stringing Heather up in a white cloth sack mask reminiscent of a lynching. As Celia jokingly screams ‘guilty!’, the frightened Heather falls to the ground unharmed and the children run away, laughing. The Noh mask and its strongly ritualised yet unattributed Otherness is replaced with a blank mask of more ominous cultural origins: echoing images of the Ku Klux Klan lynching African Americans in the United States, the Noh mask is superseded by a more menacing blank mask whose iconography evokes associations with horrendous real-world atrocities. If Celia is about a traumatised child negotiating the corrupt adult logic of 1950s suburban Australia, that her interest in masks evolves from Noh to this speaks powerfully of the symbolic potency of masks and how meaning is inscribed upon them.
Celia’s use of the Noh mask – wholly untethered from its specificity to Japanese cultural history – exemplifies the shamanic imagination and the often subconsciously perceived power imbued within masks, especially when deployed in association with behaviours configured and performed as consciously ‘ritualistic’, as impromptu and informal as they may be. Celia’s DIY approach to masked ritual shows how ‘old’ things can be reimagined to attain fresh meanings and power in ‘new’ contexts. The very blankness of the mask grants it the quality of a floating signifier: Celia creates new meaning to suit her needs, indifferent or at least unaware of any possible alternate (traditional) meanings. While the potency of masks in Celia and Gurozuka are ultimately tied to specific cultural and historical moments, as the final two case studies explore, blank masks can also relate to tensions between subjective experiences of individuality, masculinity and anonymity.
Blank Masks and Masculine Identity: Bruiser (2000) and Hush (2016)
Although released sixteen years apart, the masks in George A. Romero’s Bruiser and Mike Flanagan’s Hush are notably similar. Recalling Michael Myers’s emotionless expression across the Halloween franchise, these masks mimic its blankness but experiment in different ways with the expressive facial nuances that reflect their wearers’ identities. Inspired by Franju’s Eyes without a Face,23 in Bruiser Romero employs the mask in his story of Henry Creedlow (Jason Flemyng) whose face suddenly adopts a solid white covering at the revelation that his demanding wife Janine (Nina Garbiras) and bullying boss Milo (Peter Stormare) are having an affair. Masked Henry is liberated and transformed, empowered to enact the violent fantasies that filled his internal life in an increasingly vicious killing spree.
Utilising this blank mask to examine the vulnerability of identity in the context of contemporary capitalism, Romero depicts the dehumanising nature of the corporate environment. This culture is embodied by Milo, his racism and misogyny implied to be representative of the entire corporate demographic. That this is a culture Henry aspired to succeed in and – at the discovery of Janine and Milo’s affair – is revealed as morally toxic, Henry descends into violence. With its focus on white-collar masculinity, Bruiser superficially adheres to Barry Keith Grant’s identification of the ‘yuppie horror film’, which ‘specifically addresses the anxieties of an affluent culture in an era of prolonged recession’.24 For Grant, ‘in yuppie horror films, it would seem that to be underfunded is more frightening than being undead’, defining the subgenre as one where late capitalism itself is deemed the ultimate monster.25
Yet, while Grant identified the yuppie horror film cycle with a series of films predominantly produced in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s, made in 2000, Bruiser is potentially a retrospective deconstruction of this cycle.26 Through the blank mask, Henry’s monstrosity does not denote an eradication of his identity as such, but a transformation of it. Romero renders Henry’s previous invisibility explicit before the mask appears: ignored and demeaned at work and home, the only person who ‘saw’ Henry was Milo’s unhappy wife Rosemary (Leslie Hope). That Rosemary is a mask-maker positions her as a representative of a world beyond corporate life and a literal creator of new identities through her creative practice. Rosemary grants Henry a method of building a new identity – through the ritual of mask-making. Henry, however, awakens with a more fantastic kind of mask: his mask does not delete his identity as much as it grants a fresh slate upon which he can construct a new one. Henry’s face becomes a battleground between different aspects of his own personality – the ‘real’ face that is effectively invisible, or the ‘blank’ face that he can use to allow new emotions and desires to flourish. As Kendall R. Phillips suggested, Bruiser ‘explicitly employs the body as a site of struggle and it is ultimately these bodily urges that the protagonists must resist’.27
Henry’s mask does not conceal his identity from the police for any great length of time and it does not take them – or Rosemary – long to connect Henry’s disappearance to the spate of crimes linked to the ‘faceless’ man. For Phillips,
it is noteworthy that Henry’s blank face does not actually equate to any real sense of invisibility or stealth. He can be seen by others and leaves fingerprints and other evidence at the crime scenes so that his blank visage actually does little to facilitate his crimes.
What is crucial is ‘that Henry’s blank face releases something murderous within him’.28 Again, the power of the mask – one that endures through the shamanic imagination – continues, but it is reshaped to create new meanings in this specific cultural context, again recalling Neale’s process of ‘repetition … difference, variation and change’.29 Henry’s mask is a mystical trigger that sets in motion a vital transformation, granting him power that he did not have previously. In the construction of his new identity there is a shift to what the film frames as violent ‘primitivism’ that consciously rejects the yuppie ethos embodied by Milo. Henry’s ‘normal’ face returns only after he has killed Milo. This underscores the de/re-humanising dynamics that underlie Romero’s politics of identity, corporate masculinity and the transformative power of the mask.30 Here masks undermine the social capacity of identity, replacing it with something altogether inhuman.
Like Bruiser, the blank white mask in home invasion film Hush (2016) represents the absence of emotions within a man capable of committing extreme, violent crime. Played by John Gallagher Jr., the assailant in Hush is credited simply as ‘Man’, suggesting that he is representative of a ubiquitous brand of white male violence, representing a capacity for violence against women within many men, not just one fictional character. Following deaf-mute author Maddy (Kate Siegel), who is recovering from a heartbreak in her rural home, Man murders her neighbour on Maddy’s doorstep and is fascinated with terrorising Maddy when he realises that she has not heard her neighbour’s scream. Influenced by Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark (1967)31 – a home-invasion movie about a blind woman – Hush’s tension builds around audience assumptions regarding ability and disability: in both films, the women are marked by a perceived lack and the drama of each film is driven by their ability to survive.
In Hush, Man’s mask complicates this relationship. Although an iconographic aspect used heavily to promote the film, he only wears the mask for the first twenty-three minutes of the film when he is stationed almost solely outside the house. With the threat he represents to Maddy’s safety clear, she writes a message in lipstick on her living room window telling him that she will not reveal his identity because she does not know it: she has not seen his face. Accepting this as a challenge, he removes the mask, revealing his face and voiding her argument. The film’s action escalates into a heavily ritualised repetition of a familiar cat-and-mouse-style pursuit typical of home invasion horror narratives. Although the mask is not seen again, its centrality in this opening quarter offers a complex reimagining of the role and function of horror film masks in terms of its potency as an almost mystical object bestowed with certain powers.
The most striking feature of Man when he wears the mask is that – like Maddy – he too does not speak. The acts that instigate the film’s action all occur with no spoken communication between them, recalling Peter Brooks’s definition of melodrama as a ‘text of muteness’.32 This puts the onus for communication and meaning on other aspects because ‘words … appear to be not wholly adequate to the representation of meanings and the melodramatic message must be formulated through other registers of the sign’.33 While Hush obviously does not fit the generic definition of melodrama per se, in its confrontation between clearly delineated personifications of good and evil and a combination of what Linda Williams has identified as melodrama’s defining factors of ‘action and pathos’, it supports Christine Gledhill’s claim that melodrama is less a genre than ‘a genre-producing machine’.34 What renders Hush’s utilisation of muteness so complex in this opening is how diversely it configures muteness in relation to power: while for Maddy this renders her vulnerable (especially when combined with deafness), for Man – when combined with the mask – it intensifies his power and enigmatic force.35 Largely this is due to his mythic appearance, not only by wearing the uncanny mask (human yet not human), but by his weapon of choice: bow and arrows.
When his mask is removed, this mythic aspect vanishes – not merely because it reveals his face, but other elements that collapse the vaguely supernatural, mythic aspects of his appearance. He has neck-tattoos, emblematic of certain class and subcultural affiliations specific to the time and place of the film’s production. The effectiveness of his mask as a tool to create fear – in Maddy and the audience – is its tangible fluctuation between blankness (manifesting in the mask itself) and its slight smile, indicating a degree of emotionality the blank mask seeks to otherwise deny. This tension comes to the fore at moments where the smile can be understood as sadistic: when killing Maddy’s neighbour, he sexually thrusts a knife into her stomach long after she is dead, his mask’s facial expression implying a perverse degree of pleasure. Similarly, when masked Man plays with Maddy’s deafness and muteness, his smile adds a further degree of cruelty than would an expressionless mask. Masked man is a trickster: his is a disruptive playfulness and his adoption of the mask aligns this behaviour with the shamanic imagination via the power the object grants him.
But only to begin with. That Man voluntarily removes his mask early on recalls how the deployment of the horror film mask practically executes Neale’s process of same-but-different, the tension between expectation and surprise propelling the genre and stopping it from becoming stagnant. Generic conventions dictate that Man’s mask would not be removed until the end of the film (if even then) and certainly not casually by the wearer himself: this is the antithesis of the climactic reveals of Halloween, The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Happy Birthday to Me. That he does so – consciously expunging not just myth but the ritualistic wearing of masks in horror and the rejection of the enigmatic power that comes with it – speaks of ambivalence here towards what masks actually do. Fascinatingly, the revelation of the unmasked face means nothing in terms of the killer’s identity. He is, ultimately, still ‘no one’: he is, quite literally, just a Man. But Hush simultaneously maintains assumptions about the power of the mask as a transformative device, because when Man is masked, he is silent, mythic and undefeatable. His ‘no-one-ness’ renders him vaguely supernatural, unlike the mortal, maskless and ultimately defeatable man. When the mask is removed, he is granted the ability to speak and – combined by the revelation of his still identity-less face – is rendered more human and thus able to be conquered.
A similar ambivalence regarding masking and unmasking can be found in another recent home invasion horror film explored in the next chapter, Adam Wingard’s You’re Next (2011). In Hush, the blank mask recalls a long horror tradition where the denial of identity rendered in the mask’s very blankness offers the viewer a canvas upon which they can project their own meanings. In Hush and Bruiser, issues of masculinity, power and identity drive this process, while in Celia and Gurozuka, Noh masks speak through ritual in different ways to culturally specific notions of place, placeless-ness, power and identity. The Halloween franchise is one of the most immediately recognisable instances of masks in horror cinema and, as such, the repetition of the mask across the sequels and remakes reflects the process of replication and deviation that Neale contends is so vital to the longevity of genre cinema more broadly. These examples demand a degree of labour on the part of the spectator as their frequent reflexivity suggests that film-makers themselves are aware (however subconsciously) of how deeply embedded the shamanic imagination is: these films assume that we identify masks as objects with enormous potential to unleash great power, be it literally or symbolically. This allows the meaning of masks to evolve, adapt and transform according to new contexts, addressing a range of social and ideological issues yet remaining recognisable to audiences as a now codified, familiar horror convention. The blankness of these masks encourages us to fill in the space through the shamanic imagination that dominates how we comprehend and value the intersection of ritual, power and transformation. Just as blank masks erase identities and demand new ones, animal masks in horror also share the belief that masking and unmasking in horror cinema are acts imbued with extraordinary transformative power.