Ritual, Power and Transformation
IF THERE IS a single mask typology that appears throughout horror cinema that indicates its long history, it is animal masks. As Walter Sorell noted, outside body painting, animal masks ‘were among the first and most logical images and disguises for man, whose major and immediate experiences were with the animal world’.1 Since the dog masks of Dionysian festivals, for Sorell ‘the animal mask has never lost its imaginative hold’ and animal masks in horror cinema support this claim.2 This chapter examines six films that demonstrate how this ‘imaginative hold’ is maintained in contemporary horror: the South Korean film Bloody Reunion, the Italian neo-giallo Stagefright, French art-horror auteur Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire, the Canadian found-footage horror film The Conspiracy and the US movies Motel Hell and You’re Next.
In horror films whose spectacle includes the iconography of the animal mask there is sometimes an implied ‘primitivism’, a return to a state beyond that of assumed contemporary civility. In these examples, animal masks symbolically transform their wearers into something less-than-human: they dehumanise through the mask into an animalised state. From an anthropological perspective, this transformation can have positive practical utility: as Nunley and McCarty noted, in ‘earlier times the Cherokee made animal masks for use in prehunting rituals to bring success to the hunters’ – masked ceremonies and rituals aligning the hunter with the animal they seek.3 Animal masks do not suggest a blanket primal reversion, as there are well-documented spiritual aspects crucial to their longevity and cross-cultural ubiquity: for Tonkin, animal masks have a broader spiritual function as ‘very often … are spirits in a community’s cosmology, mythical beasts or monsters’.4 This echoes Bataille’s observation that ‘the mask in truth divinizes rather than humanizes the world’ as ‘the presence that it introduces is no longer the reassuring presence of the sage: a divine force issues from the depths of natural animality and is evident when it suddenly erupts’.5 This again recalls shamanism’s traditionally conceived ties to animism and totemism; as Schechner noted, it is ‘clear that people identify themselves with animals, dress in animal skins and heads and develop specific ceremonies and observations to keep intact links connecting animal species to humans’, a tendency he identifies in both European Palaeolithic and Asiatic Palaeo-Siberian shamanism.6
The granting of human qualities onto animals is not rare in screen culture, from Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995) to the television series Mr Ed (1958–66). In horror, parallels can be drawn between the unrelenting drive to kill between the shark in Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and slasher killers like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees,7 a correlation that simultaneously constructs the monstrosity of the latter as somehow animal-like and the former as almost monstrously human in its determination and cognitive skill. Anthropomorphism – what Michel Weemans and Bertrand Prévost defined as ‘the projection of the human form onto aspects of the world’8 – is historically linked to pre-modern and primitive religious belief and practices, falling out of vogue with the rise of rationalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant and René Descartes, resulting in anthropomorphic religious beliefs becoming ‘stigmatized’.9 And yet in the obvious case of children’s literature, anthropomorphism has endured as what William Wynn Yarbrough identified as a ‘mainstay … exciting the child’s mind with magic and uncertainty that animals bring to a human-centred consciousness while simultaneously portraying human foibles and characteristics’.10
From werewolves to vampires, horror tends more readily towards the opposite: it beastilises and renders humans beast-like. Filippo Menozzi referred to this as a ‘reverse anthropomorphism in which it is not animals who behave like humans or take human form but rather humans who are perceived through the looking glass of a … “bestiary”’.11 When cross-species representation works in this direction – animal qualities applied to humans – in horror at least similar critical concerns come to the fore: just as Weemans and Prévost identify a fundamental set of tensions inherent to anthropomorphic representation ‘between the magical and the rational, the speculative and the practical, the literal and the metaphorical’, so too this chapter demonstrates similar binaries underscoring mask-centric human-to-beast transformations in the films discussed here.12
These case studies are not the only examples of animal masks in horror cinema – one need only think of brief yet memorable images from movies like The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) or The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). Animal masks of different ‘species’ appear in horror films including The Mephisto Waltz (Paul Wendkos, 1971), Phantom of the Paradise (Brian De Palma, 1974), Screams of a Winter Night (James L. Wilson, 1979), Terror Train (Roger Spottiswoode, 1980), Berserker: The Nordic Curse (Jefferson Richard, 1987), Hideous! (Charles Band, 1997), Death Stop Holocaust (Justin Russell, 2009), Necromentia (Pearry Reginald Teo, 2009), Santeria: The Soul Possessed (Benny Mathews, 2012), Torment (Jordan Barker, 2013), Creep and its sequel Creep 2 (Patrick Brice, 2014/2017) and Jackals (Kevin Greutert, 2017). Animal masks are not specific to North American cinema and appear in the Japanese films Black Rat (Kenta Fukasaku, 2010) and Museum (Keishi Ohtomo, 2016), the Australian horror-thriller Fortress (Arch Nicholson, 1985) and British horror films Satan’s Slave (David McGillivray, 1976), White Settlers (Simeon Halligan, 2014), Curse of the Crimson Altar (Vernon Sewell, 1968) and The Abominable Dr. Phibes, discussed in chapter 4.
The films in this chapter reveal many dimensions of animal masks in horror cinema, particularly in regard to ritual, power and transformation. Motel Hell and Bloody Reunion utilise pigs and rabbits respectively to draw direct associations between their fictional contexts and the broader culturally specific meaning of these animals. Stagefright and The Conspiracy – implicitly in the former and explicitly in the latter – deploy animal masks in reference to ancient mythology, reconfiguring their meanings in contemporary horror scenarios. Finally, both The Nude Vampire and You’re Next present a number of different animal masks, deliberately neutralising the specificity of each animal away and relying instead on a transformative process that broadly dehumanises their wearers, with specific thematic motivations. These case studies illustrate the diversity of animal masks in horror, particularly in relation to ritual, power and transformation.
Animal Masks and Totemism: Motel Hell (1980) and Bloody Reunion (2006)
Pigs have long been rendered symbolically across a range of cultures as objects of disgust and transgression. Islam and Judaism explicitly forbid the eating of pork in accordance with the Quran and Hebrew scripture respectively, the latter stating that ‘because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew the cud, [the pig] is unclean’.13 In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White highlight the pig’s historical association with abjection, noting its role in Carnival: along with the rat, the pig is ‘symbolically base and abject’.14 Films like Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) and Daddy’s Deadly Darling (Marc Lawrence, 1972) connect pigs and abjection in the centrepieces of their respective narratives and spectacles and pig masks in horror are not rare: Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1929) includes pig masks and they are worn by a range of horror antagonists in films including The People Who Own the Dark (León Klimovsky, 1976), The Butcher (Kim Jin-won, 2007), Death Stop Holocaust (Justin Russell, 2009), Porkchop (Eamon Hardiman, 2010), Torment (Jordan Barker, 2013), White Settlers (Simeon Halligan, 2015) and throughout the Saw franchise (2004–17). The pig mask as a visual signifier of transgression transcends horror, from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile (1969) to Nelson Lyon’s adult art film The Telephone Book (1971).
The pig mask in Motel Hell is limited in terms of actual screen time, but its impact surpasses temporal duration, evidenced by its ubiquity in the film’s promotional materials. For Clover, Motel Hell is ‘a send-up of modern horror with special reference to Psycho and [Texas] Chain Saw [Massacre] II’, noting its pig mask-wearing villain Farmer Vincent (Rory Calhoun) is typical of the ‘sexually disturbed’ killer of the slasher film.15 For John Kenneth Muir, it is ‘a black comedy about hypocrisy, about the way in which every person, even serial killers like Farmer Vincent, tell themselves little lies to get through the day’.16 Wearing his pig-head mask and wielding a chainsaw, Vincent’s pig mask appears mostly in the film’s climax, when his brother – Sheriff Bruce Smith (Paul Linke) – confronts him in the meat-processing shed as he seeks to rescue Vincent’s victim/fiancé Terry (Nina Axelrod). Vincent’s wears the pig mask to punctuate moments where he has the greatest levels of power and control – frightening children who visit the eponymous motel, or menacing the innocent Terry. Notably, he does not wear it when tending the human ‘crop’ that he farms in his garden to produce his highly sought after small goods: these for him at least are not him flexing his dominance, but rather he speaks explicitly of ‘humane’ farming practices. He wants their deaths to be spiritually fulfilling, as ‘they’re good animals, they’re not like chickens or hogs’, bragging about his refusal to use preservatives. Capturing his victims with bear traps, he turns them into meat-producing stock, but in his mind the wearing of the pig mask reduces himself to an ‘animal’ too, the mask constructing Motel Hell as a film about ‘animals’ farming humans. As such, it typifies Shaun Kimber’s ‘food horror’ category, ‘texts within which food and eating are its central focus’.17 Because of his ‘humane’ farming practices, Vincent considers himself an environmentalist, noting that ‘there’s too many people in the world and not enough food. I’m just trying to help out.’ When Vincent is killed in his final showdown, normative eating regimes are reinstated: the ‘animal’ is slaughtered, people are no longer turned into jerky and human dominance of the food chain returns. But not just any ‘animal’: as Vincent notes earlier, ‘hogs’ are not ‘good animals’, recalling Islamic and Hebrew food laws that consider the animal ‘unclean’. This implies a degree of self-awareness on his part that belies his stated belief that he is an ethical farmer (underscored by the hypocrisy of his dying confession: ‘I used preservatives’). Vincent’s adoption of the pig mask subconsciously aligns him with a ‘bad’ animal; deep down, he considers himself abject.
Farming itself has been considered a ritual practice across a range of cultures and histories, reflected in the heavily regimented practices governing Vincent’s cultivation of his human crop.18 More broadly, Vincent’s pig mask recalls Sigmund Freud’s work on totemism: while Freud’s associating it with ‘savage’ people from Australian First Nations make its origins ideologically biased from a contemporary perspective,19 it is undeniably applicable to Motel Hell: ‘The totem is first of all the tribal ancestor of the clan, as well as its tutelary spirit and protector.’20 While Freud spoke of First Nations Australians, Christina Pratt identified broader global traditions of totem animal spirits (including clans on the Pacific coast of North America), stating that ‘the connection of a clan or family to a totem animal is based on the recognition of a common nature (qualities, skills, talents)’. The ways these connections are made through ritual, however, are diverse:
in some cultures eating the animal in ordinary reality is a way to directly assimilate the animal’s power and teaching (while) in other cultures a shaman must observing [sic] a strict taboo against eating the flesh of the animal to maintain a relationship with the animal.21
In relation to Vincent’s pig mask, Pratt’s writing on totem animals is particularly poignant:
In most cultures the relationship with the totem animal is honored through animal-like dancing that occurs when the individual merges with the spirit of the animal and allows that animal to dance through his or her body during ritual or ceremony.22
In Motel Hell, slaughter itself is ritualistic and Vincent’s totem animal – the pig – is privileged through that most traditional of shamanic practices: the wearing of a mask. Vincent’s transformation from friendly yokel to malign human-farming psychopath is marked explicitly by transformations and rituals associated with his pig mask.
Animal masks are also used in Dae-wung Lim’s 2006 South Korean slasher film Bloody Reunion. Again, rabbit masks are not unique in horror, famously associated with Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001) and films including Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! (Chad Ferrin, 2006), Rabitto horâ (Takashi Shimizu, 2011) and Dhogs (Andrés Goteira, 2017). In these films, the supposedly cute, harmless nature of rabbits is manipulated to subversive (and sometimes comic) effect. Like Motel Hell, this particular animal is adopted as a totem by the film’s killer, revealing as much about the wearer’s self-image as the animal’s broader cultural meaning. Through the rituals of the slasher film scenario – the sequential murder vignettes that structure the film and mark the killer’s modus operandi – the deployment of the rabbit mask in the movie’s final revelation of the killer’s identity suggests a softer side that contrasts with the brutality of the crimes depicted. Rather than an inhuman monster, the killer is a psychologically damaged individual irreversibly harmed by childhood trauma. The vulnerability of the rabbit is not ironic, but tragically appropriate.
Daniel Martin identified Bloody Reunion as a ‘slasher-melodrama’, which is useful as it privileges Linda Williams’s previously noted defining intersection of action and pathos as much as slashers’ more spectacular codes and conventions.23 The film tracks a group of young adults visiting their dying, wheelchair-bound school teacher Mrs Park (Oh Mi-hee) at the invitation of their former schoolmate, Mi-Ja (Seo Young-hee). But a range of abuses they experienced at Mrs Park’s hands are revealed as they are each killed off by a killer in a crude rabbit mask. The film implies that the mask is worn by Mrs Park’s intellectually disabled son, who she has locked in her basement, away from broader community. The film’s final twist reveals this entire narrative was a fabrication by its unreliable, guilty narrator, Mi-Ja herself (really named Jung-Won). The traumas she falsely ascribed to her school peers instead happened to her: mocked by Mrs Park for her poverty, she is humiliated when she accidentally defecated in class with the onset of menarche. The death of her mother triggered a mental health collapse and she massacred those who humiliated her, leaving only her teacher to hear her confession.
Bloody Reunion provokes a disturbing contrast between the cute, child-like bunny mask with the extreme acts of violence committed by its wearer. An early, portentous shot of a decaying rabbit near Mrs Park’s home begins a conscious strategy of flagging the literal and symbolic decay of ‘softness’ itself. In Jung-Won’s fabricated story, the killer wears both a rabbit mask and teams it with a jumper embossed with a cute bunny motif. Told through flashback to an investigating detective, even though made up, from Jung-Won’s perspective the emphasis on rabbit symbolism is revealing. This is confirmed when investigators raid Jung-Won’s home and discover a wall covered in her hand-made rabbit masks, similar to Michael Myers’s cell in Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween remake, discussed previously.
While Martin emphasised the film’s generic hybridisation and its significance in the global reach of contemporary South Korean horror, he ignored the rabbit mask itself. As he noted, ‘the film’s “Final Girl” is thus actually its killer and she represents the ultimate outcast’, but her tragic story makes her highly sympathetic, despite the violence that preceded her confession.24 Typifying the film’s melodramatic aspects, Mi-Ja/Jung-Won’s soliloquy at the film’s conclusion adheres to Ben Singer’s definition of pathos as ‘the elicitation of a powerful feeling of pity’, aligning her with Williams’s ‘victim-hero’ of action melodramas.25 For Williams, ‘the suffering of the victim-hero is important for the establishing of moral legitimacy’26 yet, rather than excusing her for the massacre, Bloody Reunion instead seeks to position her victimhood as a result of broader social injustices linked to class: the mistreatment of those living in poverty by those in privileged positions of power.
The cuteness of the rabbit and Mi-Ja/Jung-Won’s adoption of it as her totem animal is vital. One need only look at the popularity of Dutch illustrator Dick Bruna’s ‘Miffy’ character in Korea27 to identify the iconographic origins of the mask design in Bloody Reunion, its overt associations with a broader childhood imaginary underscoring Mi-Ja/Jung-Won’s tragically stunted emotional development that resulted from childhood trauma. Like Vincent in Motel Hell, the executions that make up the visceral spectacles of Mi-Ja/Jung-Won’s diegetically fictional account of the story are ritualised, the careful placement of the bodies in the basement where Mrs Park’s son was supposedly imprisoned echoing the final tableaux in Happy Birthday to Me, discussed in chapter 4. Mi-Ja/Jung-Won’s identification with the rabbit and its placement in murder scenes were foreshadowed by the early shot of the rotting rabbit: Mi-Ja/Jung-Won sees her own story as one of innocence corrupted. Cuteness is rendered abject and the symbolic potency of the rabbit mask reflects what she sees as her own transformation from softness into a monstrous, abjected Other.
As we move towards the next section, however, the folkloric status of the rabbit in South Korea specifically is worth of note. The folktale ‘Tale of Rabbit and Tortoise’ is described as a Korean version of ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’, which reflects the deceptive power dynamics between assumed positions of strength and weakness in Bloody Reunion.28 Likewise, the folktale ‘Tiger Gets its Tail Cut Off’ – where a rabbit uses a tiger’s greed against it to trick it into getting its tail frozen off in icy water – has two possible interpretations: ‘it can be read as a fool’s tale from the tiger’s point of view, but from the perspective of the rabbit, who is the weaker party, the focus is on the scheme that eventually leads to triumph’.29 Neither wholly weak nor ineffectual, rabbits in Korea from a folkloric perspective have a traditionally violent streak, seen elsewhere in the self-explanatory ‘Rabbit Throws Baby in Cauldron Before Running Away’.30 While this section has focused on the adoption of totem animals by mask-wearing killers, we now consider the intersection of ritual, power, transformation and mythology in horror film animal masks, examining owls in Michel Soavi’s Stagefright and bulls in Christopher MacBride’s The Conspiracy.
Animal Masks and Mythology: Stagefright (1987) and The Conspiracy (2012)
While the symbolic potency of specific animals is key to Motel Hell and Bloody Reunion regarding how they symbolically represent particular characters, this section explores the mythological deployment of animals through masks in Stagefright and The Conspiracy respectively. While Bloody Reunion’s rabbit evokes connections to Korean folklore, although they intersect it is worth emphasising that folklore and mythology are distinct categories: as Danielle Kirby noted, while ‘notoriously difficult to articulate’ the difference hinges on issues of temporality: ‘Myth … tends to occur outside of linear time, in sacred time’, while ‘folklore can be situated in any time, either mundane or sacred’.31 The films in this section engage with diegetic urban legends and the use of masks also contain mythological aspects regarding owls and bulls respectively. Human transformation through masked rituals here intersect with ancient mythologies.
In Stagefright, masked performance is central to its diegetically staged theatrical performance that provides the film’s primary setting. An opening scene where a woman is chased by an owl-masked killer is revealed to be a dress rehearsal for a play as the participants begin dancing. The lines between this performance and the film’s ‘real’ action surrounds escaped serial killer and ex-actor Irving Wallace (Clain Parker) who adopts the owl mask and kills off the cast and crew, leaving only Final Girl Alicia (Barbra Cupisti) and caretaker Willy (James Sampson) alive. With its theatrical setting and the professional aspirations of its villain André Loiselle considered Stagefright typical of the ‘actor as psycho-without-psychology’ trope, as it makes no attempt to provide a motive: ‘there is no explanation whatsoever as to why this fugitive from an insane asylum chooses to slaughter actors’.32 Wallace seems driven only by a desire to ‘appear centre stage and indulge in a performance of sadistic carnage’, manifesting in the climactic tableaux where he sits on stage in a throne-like armchair, surrounded by the carefully positioned bodies he has systematically butchered throughout the film (similar to ritualised spectacles at the end of both Happy Birthday to Me and Bloody Reunion).33 It is, for Loiselle, a hollow victory: ‘the psycho-killer is but a poor player who slashes and slaughters his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more’.34
Yet, like Motel Hell and Bloody Reunion, the specific animal central to the masked performance is significant. Stagefright’s play-within-a-film is called The Night Owl, uniting the bird’s nocturnal alertness with horror’s generic tendency to present night as a period for sinister activity. Stagefright’s use of an owl mask also has mythological connotations: in Italy, there is a widespread superstition that owls are harbingers of bad luck.35 In ancient Rome, Desmond Morris noted that ‘some Romans were so convinced that the cry of an owl heralded an imminent death that they would do their utmost to capture the bird and kill it, hoping this would neutralize the prophecy’.36 Yet even after death, the owl still held unique power, for ‘there were fears that it would have supernatural powers that would enable it to come to life again, so its body was cremated and its ashes thrown into the River Tiber’.37 As a slasher killer, Wallace’s utilisation of an owl mask specifically contains profound mythological significance in the context of Italian cultural history. While his ritualistic slaughter recalls broader traditions of slasher and neo-giallo cinema, the symbolic potency of the owl itself in ancient Roman mythology is just as important. Through the owl mask, Wallace is transformed into something symbolically far grander than his character’s reality suggests, aligned with ancient Roman myths about the ominous, immortal power of the bird itself. Stagefright plays out performance rituals that straddle both the codes and conventions of neo-gialli, while simultaneously framing them in the broader framework of ancient Roman mythology that underscores the owl’s symbolic potency.
The intersection between ritual, power, transformation and mythology is more explicit in the mockumentary The Conspiracy. Following film-makers Aaron (Aaron Poole) and Jim (James Gilbert), the movie tracks their descent into conspiracy theory subculture, their investigations leading to the Tarsus Club, a secret society of the global power elite based on the ancient religion of Mithraism. The film privileges Mithraic ritual practice and the word ‘Tarsus’ strategically links it to actual mythological origins. In the film’s climax when Aaron and Jim successfully sneak into a Tarsus Club meeting as initiates, the forced placement of a bull mask on Aaron offers the film’s central horror spectacle, marking him as the victim of the club’s ancient ritualistic ‘bull’, targeting him as the victim of ritualistic human sacrifice.
The Conspiracy deliberately manipulates this myth to provide ideological commentary on its contemporary moment. Like its use of masks and the power they bring with them through the force of the shamanic imagination, it is another example of a horror film that reconfigures the ‘old’ to speak to ‘new’ cultural contexts, and The Conspiracy explicitly defines the mythological mechanics governing the Tarsus Club’s human sacrifice ritual. Discussing Mithraic religious beliefs and practices central to The Conspiracy, Michael Rice notes that it reached its popular peak during the Roman Empire and that the ‘central myth’ upon which Mithraism was based concerns a young god (originally the Persian god Mithra or Mitra): ‘The journey is symbolic, for the god suffers almost as much as the bull as he is dragged over the rough ground by the bull’s furious flight to his cave shelter.’38 Practised from Scotland to India during its peak, as a ‘mystery cult’, Mithraic rituals were secret. In terms of its initiation rites, a number of known elements are directly referenced in The Conspiracy: like the real cult, followers in the film refer to each other as ‘brothers’39 and identify each other on an animal hierarchy, including ‘ravens’ and ‘dogs’.40
While Mithraic rites conclude with the eating of the bull in a ‘ritual feast’,41 the explicit reference to Tarsian Mithraism in the name the Tarsus Club indicates an engagement with a specific historical variation of Mithraicism. While dominant Mithraism originated in Iran, Tarsian Mithraism – as the name suggests – originated in the Anatolian city of Tarsus. This variant was also specific to a power elite and the conquest of the bull was executed by Perseus, a mythological figure with long historical associations with Tarsus itself.42 This informs how Mithraic rituals are reconfigured in The Conspiracy. For Rice, the most visible remaining traces of Mithraism and religious rituals of their bull-sacrifice manifest in contemporary bull-fighting; but in The Conspiracy, its legacy is more literal.43 By emphasising the historical intersection of Tarsian Mithraism with the power elite, it provides the mythological foundations for a fictional secret society with great global power. The Conspiracy therefore engages broadly with the post-9/11 conspiratorial imagination of people like Alex Jones and David Icke, and one of the most striking features of the film is its ambivalence to this: it is often difficult to decipher if the film is a critique of conspiracy theory culture or a vindication of it.
From this perspective, this ‘fictional’ aspect is itself unstable as writer/director Christopher MacBride positioned his eponymous ‘conspiracy’ as not wholly limited by purely fictional constraints. This is accomplished through the inclusion of the Zapruder film, arguably one of the most privileged documents for conspiracy theorists. MacBride also included interviews with real conspiracy theorists to highlight that this is ‘what it’s like when you’re looking into a conspiracy theory: It’s so hard to discern fact from fiction’.44 MacBride himself seemed convinced of the veracity of some conspiracy theories, such as that of the Bohemian Club and their ‘pagan ritual[s]’: ‘People would be shocked if they knew the types of ultra-powerful people that are a part of this organization … Whether they are up to anything nefarious or are just a secretive and exclusive club is up for debate.’45 Identifying the Bohemian Club as an inspiration for the film,46 MacBride’s Tarsus Club reimagines this real-life group of whom many US presidents were members, haunted by rumours of ‘pseudo-Druidic rituals’47 and even claims that Ronald Reagan sacrificed a goat to protect him from assassination.48
This conspiracy theory that members of the Bohemian Club participated in human sacrifice during ‘Cremation of Care’ ceremonies in a ‘lavish pyrotechnic display by men dressed in priests in front of a large owl sculpture, which is the symbol of the Grove’ is reconstructed in the climax of The Conspiracy where Aaron is forced to wear a bull mask.49 With their paranoid belief that the Tarsus Club is behind a ‘new world order’ driven by the power elite, Aaron and Jim infiltrate the initiation ritual. As revealed on hidden camera footage, while Jim is welcomed into the Tarsus Club as a new member (with implied threats to his family if he does not pledge), Aaron is unknowingly transformed into the symbolic bull figure, which he only discovers when he looks in a mirror. Re-enacting Mithraic ritual, the members of the Tarsus Club pursue ‘bull’ Aaron through the woods, until he is captured and his camera stops recording. While his fate remains unclear, the final moments of the ‘documentary’ reveal Aaron’s footage has been recrafted into a pro-Tarsus Club propaganda film: his footage is retrospectively framed as a warning to other interlopers. While accepted into the club, it is implied Jim and his wife are under pressure to appear happy about this. The film finishes with the indication that Aaron’s wearing of the bull mask rendered him the human victim of the ritualistic Tarsus Club ‘bull’ hunt. He is effectively erased as a human player in the film, and reduced to sacrificial animal.
Through the bull mask, The Conspiracy renders Aaron the (probable) victim of ritualistic human sacrifice in an explicitly Mithraic context, configured through the film’s evocation of contemporary conspiracy theories as implicitly linked to the real-world Bohemian Club and the dominant ideological ‘new world order’. Ritualised mask-wearing transformed Aaron into an animal to be hunted and he is punished for his willingness to interfere or question the dominant order. The bull mask is a ritual tool that allows the re-enactment of key Mithraic initiation rites and the bull is slaughtered, allowing young (and old) gods to retain their power. Masked transformation enacted through ancient ritual is necessary for the maintaining of hegemonic, patriarchal control: The Conspiracy renders the endurance of this system emphatically horrific.
Animal Masks and Ambivalence: The Nude Vampire (1970) and You’re Next (2011)
The final case studies in this chapter shift towards masked menageries in horror cinema: a horse, bull, reindeer, frog, rabbit and pig in Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire and a lamb, tiger and fox in Adam Wingard’s You’re Next. While collectively the imagery of these masked groups is visually striking, in terms of narrative function and screen time they are effectively negligible. It would be impossible, for instance, to draw parallels between the specific kinds of animal masks worn in these films as has been done with the pig in Motel Hell, the rabbit in Bloody Reunion, the owl in Stagefright or the bull in The Conspiracy. Yet it is precisely the sparsity of their symbolic specificity that renders them significant: both films are ambivalent regarding these animals beyond their status as uncanny and inhuman for different thematic reasons.
The uncanny is a key concept when considering Jean Rollin in particular. In 2011, Tim Lucas christened Rollin the ‘screen’s most important surrealist of the past quarter century’,50 while Marcelline Block – a contributor to the 2017 all-woman written collection Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin – has also emphasised the centrality of surrealism to Rollins’s practice, noting that ‘he was personally influenced by painters such as Magritte and the Surrealism movement’, and that he has ‘often been called a poet of the cinema whose fantastique films express a melancholy, romantic aesthetic imbued with Surrealism and/or Dadaism.’51
For Hal Foster, surrealism was marked by its association with the uncanny through its fascination with how ‘repressed material returns in ways that disrupt unitary identity, aesthetic norms and social order’.52 Defined by Freud as ‘that class of the frightening which leads us back to what is known of old and long familiar’, his use of the term is linked to the German word heimlich that simultaneously refers both to ‘what is familiar and agreeable’ and ‘what is concealed and kept out of sight’.53 This tension evokes the unheimlich, which for Freud ‘is what was once heimlich, familiar; the prefix “un” is the token of repression’.54 The uncanny hinges on this merger of familiar and unfamiliar, the perception of something familiar as emphatically strange. For David Bate, ‘the uncanny is something repressed which recurs’, which was ‘a habit already noted in surrealism’.55
Writing of his relationship to cinema in 2004, Rollin championed ‘an illogical and nonsensical European cinema’.56 For Rollin, ‘the images and dialogues of my films, like the images and texts of my books, attach themselves to the idea that they can become, or are, a cinema of the imaginary’.57 Recalling earlier masked horror performance traditions, Rollin was not just aware of the heritage of the Grand Guignol theatre but shot scenes from both his first and last feature films there: 1968’s Rape of the Vampire and 2009’s The Mask of Medusa respectively.58 Championing Franju’s Judex (1963), for Rollin the ‘cinema which permits these meanderings is the only real cinema. It is the European cinema I want to make and write about.’59 The use of animal masks in The Nude Vampire was clearly influenced by the animal masks in Judex and while peripheral to the film’s central action, Rollin deploys both animal masks and masks more generally at the beginning of the film to uncanny effect. The opening shot shows an unidentified figure in a lab coat with a black leather horned hood. A door opens and reveals other figures in lab coats wearing red fabric hoods with eye holes cut out and a woman in a blue fabric hood. The red masked figures strip the woman, apply a tourniquet and draw a blood sample that is placed into a contraption that splits the blood into distinct, rainbow-coloured liquids. Even before the opening credits, Rollin presents a familiar scenario – a blood test in the clinical context of a scientific laboratory – yet defamiliarises it through an unintelligible, unfamiliar ritual. After the credits, a young woman in an orange gown ethereally prowls city streets, pursued by black-clad figures in leather animal masks: a horse, a bull, a reindeer, a rabbit, a pig and a frog. Encountering the film’s protagonist Pierre Radamante (Olivier Martin), he helps her elude her pursuers, but she is shot by the reindeer masked figure and carried to a property Pierre recognises as a private club run by his father. What follows focuses on Rollin’s defining erotic spectacle over coherent plot and while masks are no longer central, they certainly fulfil Rollin’s attempt to move towards a ‘meandering’ cinema, where potent images leave lasting impressions over character and plot development.
The masks – be they fabric or animal-shaped – protect their wearers from the (possibly) dangerous gaze of the (possibly) vampire-like woman in orange, yet at no point is the specificity of the animals brought into play. But the masks both transform their wearers from human to uncanny, animalised Others and protect those who look at them from (possibly) vampiric transformation. These animal masks are uncanny in their rendering of something strangely familiar, disturbing in their status as animals and non-animals, humans and non-humans. The masks are privileged in ritual contexts, such as a staged performance where the woman in orange is first implied to be a vampire. In an opulent room, an audience of expensively dressed onlookers watch as a woman walks before them and smilingly shoots herself in the head, falling to her death. Blue fabric masks are placed on both the corpse and the audience as the woman in the orange gown appears from behind theatre curtains and walks towards the body, placed on a bed-like altar by two animal-masked figures. She approaches the corpse, is drawn to the blood and begins to lick it. The role of these animal masks is again vague, yet clearly central to a ritual whose meaning is beyond our comprehension. This is in keeping with Rollin’s broader aesthetics and tone: of the opening scene where Pierre first meets the woman, Rollin called it ‘Nothing special, only elements of everyday … but the bizarre atmosphere is there. Why? Which? What? I don’t know but the mystery is there.’60 The Nude Vampire is ambivalent to the specific transformations occurring to the wearers of these animal masks, but their involvement in the rituals that are privileged spectacles in the film are clearly crucial ceremonial aspects, part of the Othering strategies that marks the community as existing beyond what the film implies is mainstream society. Rollin’s fascination is with the power of cinema itself as a forum for ritual and myth-creation, and masks play an intrinsic part in how this is constructed.
If the menagerie of animal masks were deployed here according to Jean Rollin’s surrealist practice, then mumblegore home invasion film You’re Next’s three masked villains – a tiger, fox and lamb – are deployed even more ambivalently. What in the traditional horror film might be a key enigma linked to masked villains – who is underneath the mask? – in You’re Next is consciously undermined, similar to the previously discussed Hush five years later. While The Nude Vampire evokes the shamanic imagination to imply something ritually powerful – albeit vague and undefined – about its animal masks, both Hush and You’re Next in fact effectively subvert and undermine the power that the shamanic imagination has historically imbued in the object: in these films, we assume masks are powerful, but they are not. In Hush, while associations with the trickster spirit continue even after Man’s mask is removed, this is not the case in You’re Next. As discussed here, capitalist greed destroys everything, not just families but even powerful, enduring legacies like the shamanic imagination. Masks here are revealed to be hollow signifiers.
You’re Next’s real villains are indifferent to the human wearers of the animal masks and rather consider them Othered subordinates hired to execute their family with the systematic, ritualistic violence of the slasher film. The often-privileged unmasking moment is consciously downplayed, the wearers revealed – like Hush – to be ‘nobodies’: even when their humanness (and, briefly, humanity) is revealed, they are animals to the slaughter. Yet it is precisely this which grants them an ethical and ideological aspect in terms of the film’s broader politics. By considering them disposable and less-than-human, the culpability of those truly responsible for the film’s atrocities is exposed. You’re Next is a home-invasion slasher film framed around a family reunion – itself a bourgeois social ritual – as the adult children of Aubrey (Barbara Crampton) and Paul (Rob Moran) join them at their isolated holiday home in rural Missouri. Family members and their partners are killed in increasingly elaborate ways and it is revealed that Felix (Nicholas Tucci), Zee (Wendy Glenn) and Crispian (A. J. Bowen) hired animal-masked assassins to gain the large inheritance remaining after everyone else’s deaths. Their plans are thwarted when it is revealed that Crispian’s girlfriend Erin (Sharni Vinson) was raised in an Australian survivalist compound, dispatching both the animal-masked assassins and those who hired them.
The processes that Other the three animal intruders – fox-masked Tom (Lane Hughes), lamb-masked Craig (L. C. Holt) and tiger-masked Dave (Simon Barrett, also the screenwriter) – are visible from the outset. The film forbids any attempt to ascribe meaning to the specific masks, unlike the masks in the first four films discussed in this chapter: while traditional readings would suggest the lamb mask represents meekness or innocence, the tiger mask strength or wildness, or the fox cunningness and ferocity, the film denies any evidence to support such interpretations. Like Rollin’s The Nude Vampire, these animal masks represent only non-human Otherness as they do not seek associations with specific animals and their traditional meanings. Rather, their broader non-humanness indicates a symbolic fracture that is defined in relation to class differences. On screen, the light-coloured animal masks worn by black-clothed characters in dark rooms create the impression of abstracted heads floating in space, implying a supernatural aspect to their crimes: these actions are executed with a precision deemed well beyond the standard capabilities of most people. Formally constructed in this way, they are disembodied presences rather than characters as such and while not spiritual or divine, their (initial) indestructibility aligns them with forces not wholly of the natural realm. The absence of character that can be attributed to their blank, unmasked faces (and – like Hush – the lack of fanfare accompanying the removal of these masks) recalls Coates’s observation that ‘the face becomes a mask that fails, a surface haunted by intimations of concealment, interiority and exteriority’.61 As Jeanne Dubino noted, that animals were once ‘closely intertwined’ with humans shifted with the rise of modernity, ‘marked by the increasing disappearance of animals’.62 You’re Next makes this explicit: the traditional relationship between animals and animal masks (as seen in the earlier examples in this chapter) is severed.
This assumed ‘primal’ Otherness is central to how those who hired the masked assailants view the assassins. To them, these paid killers are amoral animals and they show genuine surprise when one masked character expresses emotion at the death of another: the man in the lamb mask screams and flips a table when he learns the man in the fox mask has been killed. He mentions his brother is the man in the tiger mask, which shocks Felix: that these men could have their own familial relationships bewilders him. This is a rare moment where we gain insight into the men behind the masks: ‘unlike you, I liked my brother’, the unnamed man tells Felix. Felix’s response offers further backstory: while unaware that they were related, he knew that they ‘served together’. The animal masked intruders are therefore implied to be returned military veterans of some type and Felix’s offer of more cash if they kill Erin suggests that they have turned to this line of work out of financial necessity, their experience with death stemming from their experience as ‘legitimate’ servicemen.
Felix’s grievances voiced to the masked killers when their plan unravels are consumer complaints: from his and Crispian’s perspective, some can kill and some cannot and despite masterminding the scheme, they consider themselves above such ‘animal’ actions. You’re Next critiques the hypocrisy of ‘soft’ liberal masculinity, typified when Felix kills his brother Drake (Joe Swanberg) with his own hands and saying without irony ‘could you just die already, this is hard enough for me’. From the brothers’ perspective, their wealth and privilege make it impossible for them to commit violence, while the comparative poverty of their hired assassins renders them in their mind – literally, through the deployment of the tiger, fox and lamb masks – simply animals. Notably, the lamb-masked man has a southern accent: he is a poor outsider and as such Felix and Crispian have no issue seeing him as a guilty party, despite his only being there at the request of more affluent brothers. Although Felix and Zee are revealed early in the film as being responsible for driving the murder conspiracy, Crispian’s involvement is the plot twist. That Crispian came up with the plan, yet still identifies as a pacifist reveals the liberal hypocrisy the film attacks: through their social privilege, Crispian and Felix believe that they are effectively innocent of murders which they themselves commissioned.
Zee and Erin stand in contrast to the ‘soft’ liberal masculinity Crispian represents and reveal its failures. Although a minor character, Zee’s calm perversion exposes the murderous Felix’s hypocrisy especially: sitting on a bed next to Aubrey’s dead body, Felix is horrified when Zee asks him to ‘fuck me next to your dead mom’. While perverse, Zee is self-aware: her involvement with the murder was undertaken with full knowledge of her culpability, knowledge she finds sexually titillating. Final Girl Erin too exhibits a frankness that the men lack and she counteracts Zee, Felix and Crispian’s conspiracy through what is configured in the film as a distinctly feminist act of mobilisation. While the tiger-, lamb- and fox-masked men are driven by a need for money, Erin is driven by a need to survive. Yet Erin and the masked intruders are united in their Otherness – the former as monstrous ‘animals’, the latter (as is mentioned throughout the film) by her status as a non-American Outsider (her ‘abrasive’ accent is mentioned earlier in passing). That the film ends so ambivalently in regard to Erin’s future as the police arrive and mistakenly believe she is responsible for the massacre (echoing the conclusion of Happy Birthday to Me), suggests a pessimistic view of how the violent, hypocritical and privileged masculinity the film documents will be punished. The ambivalence with which the film deploys its animal masks permeates the entire movie with forceful ideological intent.
This chapter has explored the intersection of ritual, power and transformation with animal horror masks. While these masks broadly imply transformations from human to an often ‘primitive’ state of animality, these six films underscore the diversity with which animal masks have been deployed in the genre. In Motel Hell and Bloody Reunion, masks are used in ritualised contexts to provoke associations with the symbolic meaning of specific animals to engage with the central themes of each film. In Stagefright and The Conspiracy, animal masks are (implicitly in the former and explicitly in the latter) utilised with an eye towards each animal’s mythological histories. But in The Nude Vampire and You’re Next, groups of mixed animal mask-wearing characters undermine this exact specificity, presented collectively as an uncanny collective of non-human Others, deployed with different yet potent thematic intent. Animal masks in post-1970 horror underscore yet again the dynamic, evolving ways that horror film masks have endured as a central iconographic element of the genre. As explored in the next chapter, the same is true of horror films that feature repurposed masks, where masks intended for a specific use are redeployed in a new, different way.