Ritual, Power and Transformation
HAVING EXPLORED horror film masks with distant historical origins in the previous three chapters, we now turn to horror mask typologies with more contemporary roots. Here we examine repurposed masks, understood as objects whose initial, intended functions are redeployed in horror to create new cultural meanings. In My Bloody Valentine, Evidence, Friday the 13th Part III, Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman, Dead Ringers and Anatomy, different masked transformations intersect with ritual and power in a range of ways to demonstrate the durability and dynamism of repurposed horror masks. These films reveal that even if the original intended function of certain masks is benign or even helpful (such as, for instance, safety masks), the heft of their symbolic presences is broadly transferable, even if their specific meanings are not. For John Mack, ‘it is precisely because … masks have an authority and power in one context that they are meaningful in another’.1 For instance, as explored shortly, gas masks have rich historical significance and while that specific history may not be immediately relevant to My Bloody Valentine, its symbolic presence is underscored by the force of its broader iconographic power. Even in their original contexts, masks can serve a number of functions: the executioner’s mask, for instance, shields its wearer from blood splatter, but as Laura Makarius noted, it also fulfils a moral and psychological function as it ‘allows him to disappear, as it were and cease to be the specific person he is’.2
The masks examined in this chapter – gas masks, welding masks, surgical masks and hockey masks – all likewise conceal and protect. On a narrative level, repurposed masks hide the identity of the wearer, but at the same time still loosely fulfil their original purpose as protective garb. While therefore relatively contemporary when compared to mask typologies explored in previous chapters, again the broader shamanic imagination is at work here through parallels between repurposed masks in horror films and those worn traditionally by shamans. ‘Shamans use masks and costumes as a kind of armor that helps protect them while negotiating with evil forces of the spirit world’, noted Nunley and McCarty.3 In horror cinema, when worn by villains, this is frequently subverted: rather than seeking protection from evil forces, it predominantly aligns the wearer with those powers. Like the executioner’s mask, in some instances they both disguise the wearer and protect them from the visceral spray of their violent acts. For Nunley and McCarty, the shaman’s mask is part of their ‘armour’ to ‘do battle with the spiritual forces, influencing them through ritual’.4 This can be seen in contemporary industrial cultures, where we ‘wear protective masks to negotiate with competitors or forces that threaten our survival’.5 In horror film, these masks are repurposed to create fear in the audience, reliant on the endurance of the mask as a key aspect of horror cinema’s iconographic palette. These six films do not represent all horror films that use repurposed masks;6 however they collectively present an overview of the different ways that repurposed masks can be employed in horror and how they intersect with ritual, power and transformation.
Repurposed Masks and Untrained Labour: My Bloody Valentine (1981) and Evidence (2013)
While broadly dismissed at the time as a weak Halloween imitator,7 unlike Patrick Lussier’s US-made 2009 remake, George Mihalka’s My Bloody Valentine was a distinctly Canadian film. Caelum Vatnsdal emphasised this point, calling it ‘almost without rival … the most Canadian horror movie ever made’.8 Set in the fictitious mining town of Valentine’s Bluff on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, for Vatnsdal ‘the film gives us at least as enlightening and realistic a portrait of Maritime economic depression as Goin’ Down the Road [Donald Shebib, 1970], making it perhaps the single most successful synthesis of the Canadian documentary tradition with pure genre cinema’.9 This socio-economic context is crucial to any reading of the mask in the film: as Rose Butler argues, ‘My Bloody Valentine’s masked killer is representative of sociocultural concerns related to deindustrialization and the demise of working-class communities in Canada.’10
Loosely structured around a love triangle between TJ (Paul Kelman), Axel (Neil Affleck) and Sarah (Lori Hallier), My Bloody Valentine follows a series of murders assumed to be committed by a miner called Harry Warden. As the only survivor of a work accident where excitement about the annual St Valentine’s Day dance led to negligence, Harry sought vengeance against the town. Memories of Warden’s murders were rekindled twenty years later when a new generation attempted to revive the long-banned social ritual of the dance. The killings begin again, but the culprit is revealed not to be Warden, but Axel, who adopted the former’s persona after seeing his father murdered in the original massacre. Unlike many North American teen slashers from this period, My Bloody Valentine is distinguished by its focus on a rural working-class community rather than suburban middle-class high schools or universities.11 The Otherness of the killer therefore does not stem from his working-class status: everyone here is roughly from the same social strata. Importantly, the killer is not the only character who wears a gas mask and helmet, another deviation from traditional slasher films: set in a mining town, the enigma of the killer’s identity stems from the fact that many characters wear the same masks.
While not all mask-wearing characters in My Bloody Valentine are monstrous, when deployed to commit murders, the mask – frequently shown in close-up from the perspective of his victims – is essential to what makes this figure so terrifying. This pertains to the cultural history of gas masks themselves, adding to the symbolic force of his monstrosity. As Nunley and McCarty noted, through their association with modern warfare, gas masks ‘are devastating affirmations of our aggressive nature and are a very real and terrifying reminder of our society’s worst fears’ and ‘the modern icon associated with some of the most horrific acts of the 20th century’.12 Finis Dunaway traced the rise of the gas mask from the late 1960s as ‘a suggestive emblem of the environmental crisis … [and] ubiquitous in the visual discourse of pollution’.13 Its symbolic power stems from prior association with the First World War, where – although protective – became ‘a symbol of the dehumanizing effects of modern warfare’.14 In horror, although these specific meanings of the gas mask are often unstable, the intensity of its dehumanising power remains.
These aspects of gas masks are not actively at play in My Bloody Valentine, but it demonstrates Mack’s previously cited observation that it is ‘precisely because the masks have an authority and power in one context that they are meaningful in another’.15 My Bloody Valentine jettisons this specificity of the masks’ broader history and instead fuses its symbolic potency with these ambient associations to dehumanisation and threat, supporting Dunaway’s claim that ‘the gas mask would often circulate as a symbol detached from place, removed from the particularities of local conditions to represent the notion of universal vulnerability’.16 In My Bloody Valentine, it is the victim of the gas-masked figure who is vulnerable, the mask indicating from the wearer’s subjective perspective that they require ‘protection’ from what its wearer perceives as their abjection. This is explicit in the film’s opening moments, where two gas-masked androgynous figures enter a deserted mine. What at first appears to be professional activity is a sexual rendezvous, as one removes her mask and overalls. Suggestively stroking the other’s phallic breathing tube, she is murdered and the credits begin. The mask not only transforms the wearer from a young, troubled man into an enigmatic serial killer, but in the context of a horror film transforms the object itself from part of a miner’s standard protective gear to an unknown killer’s disguise.
This mask therefore has a dual function in terms of what can loosely be conceived as labour rituals in terms of the industrial necessity of wearing certain items and in its repetition and maintaining of slasher cinema’s affinity for masked killers. But other social and work-place rituals also permeate the film: initiation rites for trainees, the singing of familiar folk songs, masculinity rituals like stabscotch and the reintroduction of the Valentine’s Day dance itself, a return to a lost cultural festival. By disrupting these rituals, the gas-masked figure represents a physical threat to the community and, by repurposing the symbol of the very industry that forms the town’s foundations, exposes the vulnerability of their social, economic and cultural infrastructure, like that of the real towns that suffered from the decline of mining as a viable industry after the Second World War.17 In My Bloody Valentine, untrained labour, economic and social instability, ritual and masked transformation intersect to reveal a more sophisticated thematic core than this film is often credited with.
Nigerian director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s US production Evidence also features a repurposed mask commonly linked to working-class labour. Its underlying manipulation of gender, class and monstrosity – and how they are linked to the welding mask – make it a useful film to consider in relation to ritual, power and transformation. Just as the youth and mainstream prettiness of LeAnn (Torrey DeVitto) and Rachel (Caitlin Stasey) imply their innocence, so too the welding mask frames its wearer’s violence as a product of working-class masculinity. The film’s ‘twist’ collapses these assumptions with the revelation that the entirety of the video footage police discover at the site of a massacre the girls survive was a conscious, carefully executed plan by the girls to attain fame and notoriety. LeAnn and Rachel – like Mrs Tredoni and Alice in Alice Sweet Alice – again adhere to Ricki Stefanie Tannen’s postmodern female trickster category because they consciously play with assumptions about working-class masculinity in order to mock and destroy broader patriarchal structures and logic.18 The use of the welding mask here is governed by the shamanic imagination – the residual traces of orthodox, anthropologically defined shamanism that, while jettisoning its historical specificity, maintains its historical associations between masks, ritual, power and transformation.
The welding mask in Evidence is heavily mediated: we never see the mask in the diegetic ‘real’ world of the film’s narrative, but only in what is framed from within the film itself as amateur video footage. The first shot of the killer wearing the mask appears as investigators watch a recording of a woman murdered with a blow torch, and, when replaying it, they reverse an image and see a reflection of the masked face. ‘That’s the mask we found at the scene’, one investigator notes. Subsequent shots of the mask-wearing killer are similarly indirect: they appear on videotapes that the investigators watch, often shown as reflections. A ‘hall of mirrors’ process of identity distortion permeate Evidence, with the mask playing a central role. That the entirety of the video evidence upon which the police attempt to investigate the case is revealed as a constructed performance by LeAnn and Rachel is foreshadowed by the former’s early recognition of the performative nature of what they are watching. When the mask is shown reflected in a mirror with the words ‘fear me as you fear god’ written in blood on it, Detective Burquez (Rahda Mitchell) explicitly articulates that the mask plays a role in ‘some sort of fantasy, a ritual’. With the revelation of LeAnn and Rachel’s guilt, the film is on one hand little more than a flimsy critique of contemporary celebrity culture and a misogynist attack on the perceived vanity of fame-hungry young women. But what renders Evidence so curious is how clearly it articulates the performative potency of masks as gendered objects in horror, in this case – like My Bloody Valentine – through its association with an occupation linked broadly to working-class masculinity.
Like the gas mask in My Bloody Valentine, the welding mask both hides its wearer’s identity and protects them from the blood splatter caused during their violent murders. Yet, as Nunley and McCarty noted, ‘in addition to their protective function, modern industrial masks have the same psychological impact as their predecessors: they intimidate, mystify and can transform the wearer’s behaviour’.19 Assumptions about gender performativity further complicate the use of this particular mask in Evidence. For Anne Balay, associations between welding and masculinity are made explicit in her interview with Isabel, a steel worker’s daughter, who says ‘it’d be really weird if someone took off their welding mask and it was a girl, they’d be like “unh unh, that’s not right”’.20 Yet in one of the most iconic moments of 1980s cinema, this is precisely what happens when Alex (Jennifer Beals) removes her welding mask in Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance (1983). The symbolic presence of the masculinised welding mask and the hyper-feminine performance ambitions that drive the women protagonists in both Evidence and Flashdance is a notable overlap. Kimberly Monteyne provided a rare interrogation of the importance of the welding mask in the latter, suggesting that it granted Alex masculine power: ‘Alex is … physically strong enough to perform a man’s job: welding in the gritty mills of the Pittsburgh steel industry’.21 Alex is therefore not a ‘normal’ woman, but an ‘extraordinary’ one, physically strong and symbolically powerful enough to move fluidly across identities and qualities aligned with otherwise immobile definitions of masculine and feminine.
Performed gender identities, masks and disguises also recall Mary Ann Doane’s notion of feminine masquerade. Expanding on Joan Riviere’s ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ (1929) mentioned briefly in the introduction, for Doane masquerade ‘constitutes an acknowledgement that it is femininity itself which is constructed as a mask – as the decorative layer which conceals a non-identity’.22 As Doane later noted, ‘masquerade suggests a “glitch” in the system’, allowing space to ‘read … femininity differently’.23 Evidence complicates the relationship between femininity and masquerade with the addition of class difference. LeAnn and Rachel’s assumed innocence is knowingly prompted through a genteel masquerade of femininity: they are young, beautiful aspiring artists. The vision of violent masculinity that they deploy through their use of the welding mask as a red herring is hardened, grizzled and dehumanised, a construction reliant on a mask with strong associations to working-class men and masculinity.
As violent, ambitious women, Rachel and LeAnn utilise masks and masquerade on two levels: literally in the deceptive deployment of the masculinised welding mask (successfully triggering assumptions that the killer is a man) and also through feminine masquerade. LeAnn and Rachel are exposed as vicious killers who knowingly utilise assumptions about gender and class to get away with murder and, alongside films Hilary Neroni explored like Terminator (James Cameron, 1985), Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1991), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) and The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994) – while not horror but still about violent women – ‘each of these cases reveals feminine identity as something that can be removed because it is not intrinsic to the characters’.24 What is so important to Rachel and LeAnn’s masking strategies is how detached and unknown their true identities remain: they take feminine masquerade to violent, identity-obliterating extremes. Evidence thus presents a significant instance where repurposed masks, transformation, performance rituals and ideological assumptions about gender and untrained labour intersect to result in a fascinating conclusion.
Repurposed Masks and Social Play: Friday the 13th Part III (1982) and Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007)
While masks can denote specific occupations, they are also associated with many social activities, behaviours and rituals. This section considers two horror films that, despite employing masks in different ways, unite through their repurposing of each with the specific intent of disturbing their audiences. In the Friday the 13th franchise, Jason Voorhees’s hockey mask is one of the most iconic symbols of 1980s horror, yet at no time is it implied that Jason was a hockey enthusiast. Modern sport is, for Kath Woodward, ‘organized structured play’ and as such has been understood as a ritual practice:25 Susan Birrell noted ‘the significance of sport as a ritual is based on the status of the athlete as exemplary role incumbent with power to mediate between the individuals who compromise the audience and the moral order of the community’.26 For Kendall Blanchard, ‘sport often assumes a ritual-like character’ and ‘has its roots in ritual performance’,27 while Jason’s quasi-supernatural indestructibility28 links sport and ritual through Anne Bolin and Jane Granskog’s observation that ‘sport, as well as play in its broader manifestations, can be viewed as ritual: an enactment of myths that serve to validate or justify cultural beliefs and practices; a symbolic validation of a group of norms by individuals whose very participation in ritual acts may constitute, under some circumstances, a transcendental sacred experience’.29 The iconographic potency of Jason’s hockey mask stems in part from its macabre subversion of the complex relationship between sport, culture and ritual.30
The Friday the 13th series was not the first exploitation film to employ a villain in a hockey mask, with Bob Kelljan’s rape-revenge movie Act of Vengeance (1974) centred around the ‘Jingle Bells Rapist’ who wore the disguise during his assaults.31 But Friday the 13th made the object synonymous with horror, referenced and appropriated for sinister effect in movies like Asylum of Terror (George Demick, 1998), Bloody Murder (2000) and The Unravelling (Thomas Jakobsen, 2015). Although the hockey mask does not appear in the franchise until Friday the 13th Part III, masks do appear in earlier films, rendering its later mask-centricism a somewhat logical progression. In Sean S. Cunningham’s original Friday the 13th (1980), the first half hour includes a comic ‘fake scare’ sequence where one character puts on a mask with an old, grizzled non-white face and – with clearly racist overtones – wields a spear to frighten another character (this same mask appears later on the steps to a cabin flagging an impending murder vignette). In Friday the 13th Part II (Steve Miner, 1981), Jason wears a sack mask: a pillow-slip with eyes cut out and a rope tied around his neck. Worn with a plaid shirt and overalls, there is an emphasis on class difference between the urban teens who work at Camp Crystal Lake and ‘hillbilly’ Jason. This difference is established in the first film through Jason’s physical and intellectual Otherness, crucial to the film’s final revelation: that it is not Jason but his mother Pamela (Betsy Palmer) who committed the murders, seeking revenge for what she believed to be the drowning death of her son in 1957. Rising from the lake in that film’s final moments, Jason continues his mother’s killing spree in the sequel. There, in the climactic confrontation between Jason and Final Girl Ginny (Amy Steel), costume-centric transformation is central: wearing Jason’s mother’s jumper, Ginny confuses Jason, who imagines that Ginny has morphed into Pamela. Ginny accidentally reveals Jason’s makeshift altar to his dead mother (replete with mummified head). Upon seeing this, Ginny’s true identity is revealed and Jason attacks her.
With the introduction of the hockey mask in Friday the 13th Part III, however, masks become more central. For audiences who experienced the film on its original release, the notion of masking had dual meaning: seeking to profit on the rebooted trend of 3D films during this period,32 the viewing experience required 3D glasses to fully experience the special effects (horror film masks and 3D are discussed further in the next chapter). The introduction of the hockey mask ‘was an innocent thing, just something that looked really good’, director Miner told David Grove. ‘The script called for a mask and obviously, we had to have Jason wear something.’33 The film’s technical advisor Terry Ballard brought an old 1950s leather hockey mask to the set and it caught the attention of Miner and SFX artist Douglas J. White.34 After some adjustments, this mask became a key symbol for Jason and the franchise more broadly.
The introduction of the hockey mask is a transitional moment in constructing what makes Jason a monster. Opening with a repetition of the final scene from the previous film, Jason is revealed to have survived Ginny’s machete attack and in the first stages of the third film he appears maskless and shadowy. But masks are foreshadowed: when a group of frisky teens gather to travel to Camp Crystal Lake, nerdy Shelley (Larry Zerner) fails to amuse his peers in a tasteless gag where he wears a mask, mock-stabbing them. Notably, Jason first adopts the hockey mask after killing mask-wearing prankster Shelley: while sporting a different mask to that worn by Shelley earlier, something of a trickster spirit lies within Jason with his malign playfulness (particularly his flair for cat-and-mouse-like encounters) and broader mission of disrupting the status quo. Combined with his signature penchant for mask-wearing, Jason’s strength relies again emphatically on a broader shamanic imagination that governs assumptions that these masks hold specific kinds of transformative power when combined with ritual.
The appearance of the hockey mask at this stage of the franchise as Jason evolves from a disturbed man-child with mother issues to a less human force of chaos and destruction is significant. As a dual symbol of threat and protection, this mask is worn in a sport where – in regard to the rules of the game – the wearer is simultaneously defensive and on the attack. As Nunley and McCarty noted without referencing this franchise, even the basic design of the hockey mask is unnerving, ‘resemble[ing] … the battle scars one is apt to incur in the physically intense and often very violent game’.35 As a sport, hockey therefore further complicates Jason’s motives. By Friday the 13th Part III, he appears to kill now not for revenge, but for sport: it is for him now – to reference the title of Vera Dika’s book on films like Halloween and Friday the 13th – a ‘game of terror’.36
This spirit of play lies at the heart of Kōji Shiraishi’s Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman, based on the Japanese urban legend Kuchisake-onna. This tale triggered a notorious moral panic in Japan in the late 1970s and Shiraishi offers the first explicit feature film exploration of the phenomenon to interrogate the intersection of motherhood and domestic violence. The urban legend upon which Carved is based follows a ritualised ‘game’ structure and while Michael Dylan Foster37 and Yoki Inagi noted regional nuances, the latter outlined it as follows:
A tall woman with long black hair in a trench coat wearing a large white mask would walk up and ask a person, ‘Am I Pretty?’… If the person replied ‘Yes’, the woman would take off her mask and reveal her mouth widely slit all the way up to her ears, asking, ‘even with this?’ And she would slit the person’s mouth and/or stab the person to death with a sickle.38
Like horror film masks themselves, for Foster ‘the story of the Kuchi-sake-onna is characterised by variation over time and space; it is reinvented with each telling’,39 and regional variations altered the type of weapon Kuchisake-onna would carry, her wardrobe, the cause of her injury and strategies to survive the encounter.40 Peaking in 1979 with the widespread yet unproven belief that there was a hidden coroner’s report about a woman resembling Kuchisake-onna who died when hit by a car as she chased potential victims,41 children in Ibaraki Prefecture were warned to keep their distance from anyone wearing a mask.42 Foster notes that ‘the rumor had a profound effect on Japanese life’ resulting from anxieties linking it to ‘rapid urbanization and the breakdown of traditional village communities’.43 For Western viewers, Kuchisake-onna recalls Bloody Mary or Mary Worth rituals, which – although again demonstrating regional and generational variations44 – ‘involve the ritual summoning of a witch in a mirror’.45 Just as the Bloody Mary ‘game’ is defined as a ritual practice,46 parallels between Kuchisake-onna and Bloody Mary can – despite their cultural difference – allow the former to also be considered ritualistic.
In Carved, Shiraishi reconfigures the urban legend and rituals surrounding Kuchisake-onna to explore the phenomenon of abusive mothers. The film begins with the game outlined above: a group of young girls tell each other that if the slit-mouthed woman catches them she will cut them with scissors. Shifting to a scene of domestic abuse, Mayumi Sasaki (Chiharu Kawai) torments her traumatised daughter Mika (Rie Kuwana), threatening her with a visit from the ‘slit-mouthed woman’. Two children in the area soon disappear and an informal investigation is undertaken by two teachers at Mika’s school: Kyôko Yamashita (Eriko Sato), an abusive mother of a young daughter herself and Noboru Matsuzaki (Haruhiko Kato), who was the victim of physical and emotional violence as a child, his mother revealed to be Kuchisake-onna. This intersection of the supernatural Kuchisake-onna urban legend with the reality of family violence grants Shiraishi’s film its impact: as Inagi noted, ‘perhaps the storyline suggests that just as the tale of the Kuchisake Onna is horrifying, it can be equally horrifying in real life when a person who is supposed to be a guardian turns abusive and harmful’.47 Shocking audiences with its scenes of child abuse and provoking censors internationally, these scenes are arguably far more disturbing than its supernatural components.48
Kuchisake-onna’s surgical mask in Carved is significant here. With community panic rising about the missing children, when Kazuko Toshida (Ryoko Takizawa) – the mother of one of Mika’s schoolmates – wears a surgical mask due to a cold, her children grow suspicious that she is hiding Kuchisake-onna’s identifying slashed mouth underneath and Kazuko is soon revealed to be involved in the disappearances. Suggesting that the desire to abuse children is spread virally amongst mothers as the Kuchisake-onna seeks new hosts, a flashback reveals that the surgical mask is not only to disguise her facial disfigurement, but to protect other women from being ‘infected’. While the next section will explore the use of surgical masks in explicitly professional contexts (worn by surgeons in both Dead Ringers and Anatomy respectively), in relation to Carved’s production context, the mask has a distinct cultural and social meaning. Across Asia during this period, so ubiquitous were surgical masks that for Thy Phu they became ‘the most prominent feature of the etiquette of hygiene during the SARS crisis’ and ‘one of the most recognizable symbols of contagion in the twenty-first century’.49 Adam Burgess and Mitsutoshi Horii argued that surgical mask-wearing in Japan had become common, originating in a public health response to the Spanish flu in 1919 and ‘reson[ating] … with folk assumptions as making a barrier between purity and pollution’.50 The wearing of surgical masks in Japan became ‘socially embedded as a general protective practice during the 1990s through a combination of commercial, corporate and political pressures that responsibilised individual health protection’.51
In Carved, Kuchisake-onna recalls all of these aspects of the Japanese social ritual of surgical mask-wearing. Issues of risk, danger and public health come to the fore and parallels can be made between the dual function of the surgical mask in Carved that both hides Kuchisake-onna’s mutilated face and simultaneously protects others from being ‘infected’. There is in the mask a tragic aspect of self-awareness: Kuchisake-onna and women ‘like’ her know what they are doing and what they have become, and the film suggests that some of its abusive mothers are themselves survivors of domestic violence. The mask therefore acts not only as an iconographic marker of horror, but also renders tangible the tragedy upon which the film concludes with its emphasis on Kyôko’s relationship with her estranged daughter and husband, their family destroyed by Kyôko’s struggle to control her own violence. Underscoring the subjective experience of abused children, issues of violent transformation lie at the heart of Carved: Shiraishi employs the fantastic parameters of horror and the transformative potency of the mask as an enduring element of the genre’s iconography (and its specific meaning in this cultural and historical context) to provide an explicit commentary on a very real social issue.
Repurposed Masks and Professional Labour: Dead Ringers (1988) and Anatomy (2000)
While Carved utilises the symbolic power of the surgical mask in the ritual context of social play, Dead Ringers and Anatomy demonstrate the potent – although distinct – force of masks when utilised in horror films about their professional usage in medicine. If Burgess and Horii’s research emphasises the cultural aspects of surgical masks in Japan, in the medical profession others have raised issues about their own specific symbolic meanings. In a letter to the editor in the British Journal of Anaesthesia in 2007, Dr Azriel Perel recalled a colleague who told him that ‘there is no evidence that wearing a mask decreases the incidence of infection’, rendering them optional for anaesthetists in the United Kingdom. Criticising the rule, he argued that the absence of the surgical mask risked undermining ‘the anaesthetist’s public image’, as many patients would not consider anaesthetists to be qualified medical professionals without them.52 The editor confirmed that professional culture had changed ‘so that now few, other than the operating surgeon, wear them’, emphasising that ‘there has been no increase in the incidence of wound infection’.53 Yet Perel’s concerns about the ‘public image’ of the anaesthetists reveals much about the real-world power of the mask as a symbol of professionalism and superior knowledge.
This is a useful starting place to think through surgical masks as symbols, crucial to both Dead Ringers and Anatomy. Dead Ringers is an addiction horror film that hinges on the nightmare of degenerative psychological transformation. It pivots around the idea of body horror with its twin mad scientist protagonists (obsessed as they are with ‘mutant women’) far more than the explicit spectacle of body horror typical of Cronenberg’s earlier films like Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986). As Lowenstein noted, Dead Ringers is the first Cronenberg film that reverses his previous tendency towards making ‘genre films that utilize art film devices to complicate their generic structures’, and rather is an ‘art films whose structures are challenged by the injection of genre elements’. What runs throughout, Lowenstein argued, is ‘the presence of deliberate friction between genre and art elements geared to strain viewer expectations and frustrate genre/art categorizations’.54
Dead Ringers follows the downfall of doctors Beverly and Elliot Mantle (both played by Jeremy Irons) as they collapse into madness and substance abuse, their loss of professional power paralleled directly with their increasingly destructive relationship dynamics. This propels the film towards the seemingly inevitable tragedy of their deaths. That the two main protagonists are twins and the consequent blurring of their identities again recalls doppelgänger traditions and the mask has played a crucial role in the long history of horror’s various tales of doubling and fractured identities. Throughout the film, it is often difficult to tell the twins apart; both for the audience and for Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold), the third participant in the film’s central love triangle.
In the surgery scenes throughout the film (each marking a point of decreasing control as the twins descend into insanity), their costumes contain a distinctly sacred aspect, ‘astounding red gowns with flowing robes, copes and mantles (the name affinity is surely not accidental) whose Catholic-religious overtones are daringly obvious’.55 Aspects of religious ceremony are heightened by the heavily ritualistic gestures and tone of the surgical ‘performances’ themselves: the sacred-medical rituals of the Mantle brothers reconfigured their professional capacity as surgeons with religious ritual to underscore their own godliness, a central thematic pillar of the film discussed further momentarily. These rituals are performed consciously for an audience (both the film audience and characters in the operating theatre) and as such Dead Ringers exemplifies Lowenstein’s observation that ‘Cronenberg’s cinema crystallizes the fraught translation of a private, embodied self into a public, abstracted social body’.56 In the first surgical scene, Bev – the (initially) more confident brother – instructs students from his position of authority. As he describes what is happening, the patient on the operating table is laid out like a sacrifice on an altar, emphasising the heavily ritualistic aspects of the scene’s construction.
This intersection of professional authority and ritual drives the deterioration of its protagonists. The troubled, arrogant brothers who configure themselves as surgeon-as-deity figures is made explicit when Claire screams during sex with Bev, ‘Oh Doctor, Oh God’. But the ritualistic construction of the surgery scenes make this just as clear, for instance where Elliot strikes a Christ-like pose in his red robes, his ‘sacrifice’ reflected in the window before him, waiting on the ‘altar’ of the operating table. Beard describes Bev here as ‘the Chief Priest or Cardinal’ being ‘ritually vested by his acolytes’.57 At the end of the film, the symbolic power of this costuming is rejected, where Bev ritually disembowels his brother in their apartment. For Steven Shaviro, ‘the hieratic red robes that Beverly dons when performing operations give way to the Caravaggiesque nudity of the two brothers in the final shot of the film’, as ‘the rituals of medical power and prestige are turned back against the selves that they had previously confirmed and inflated’.58 Recalling Catholicism-imbued ritual acts of self-sacrifice, the surgical masks so central to their performance as god-doctors mark a transformation often overtly linked to power and ritual. The mask is symbolically linked to the power they felt they gained from their roles as urban, professional shaman-healers. The shamanic imagination imbues these scenes of masked surgical ritual with immense power that through the collapse of their identities in a number of ways ultimately destroys them.
In Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Anatomy, masked medical rituals are driven by more explicitly ideological and historical motivations unique to its country of production. In many ways, Anatomy is a key example of Adam Lowenstein’s identification of the ‘allegorical moment’ discussed in my introduction that relies on a ‘complex process of embodiment, where film, spectator and history compete and collaborate to produce forms of knowing not easily described by conventional delineations of bodily space and historical time’, particularly in regard to national trauma.59 Following aspiring surgeon Paula (Franke Potente), who is accepted into the prestigious surgery school at the University of Heidelberg, she uncovers there a secret association – the Anti-Hippocratics – who undertake mercenary covert medical experiments in their pursuit of greater knowledge. With explicit references to Nazism and notorious German SS officer Josef Mengele, Anatomy mines national anxieties about Germany’s past active within its contemporary moment. For Steffen Hantke, Anatomy ‘draws on Germany’s failure to come to terms with its Nazi past’,60 while for Alexandra Ludegwig, it ‘deals with Nazism not as a discrete period of history but rather as an ever-present tendency in any civil society’.61 Anatomy exemplifies Linnie Blake’s claim that ‘by focusing on the sites where ideologically dominant models of individual and group identity are sequentially formed, dismantled by trauma and finally re-formed in a post-traumatic context’, horror movies can
demand not only a willingness … to undertake a fundamental questioning of those ideologically dominant models of individual, collective and national identity that can be seen to be deployed across post-traumatic cultures, as a means of binding (hence isolating and concealing) the wounds of the past in a manner directly antithetical to their healing.62
While surgical masks play a more explicit role in the promotional material for Ruzowitzky’s less explicitly political 2003 sequel Anatomy 2, in both films surgical masks denote the susceptibility of patient-victims, powerless at the hands of medical professionals.
Anatomy’s neo-Nazi conspiracy is part of a small but notable trend in some contemporary European genre films concentrating on neo-fascism, eugenics and racial purity.63 The return to horror in German-language cinema is significant: as Ludegwig noted, despite early achievements in the genre by directors like Robert Wiene and F. W. Murnau, a general distaste grew after the Second World War against horror that – consolidated by Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) – saw horror as ‘an unnecessary reminder of the “bad German”’.64 Aside from the spike of Rialto Film’s Edgar Wallace-inspired Krimi films from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Ludegwig claims it took more than sixty years for German-speaking directors to stage a horror revival, privileging Austrian Ruzowitzky and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Das Experiment (2001).65 For Ludegwig, these directors explicitly ‘fuse … historical references with elements of popular genre’, in a contemporary context to launch ‘a new school of film, as they reveal a novel perspective on Nazi crimes, not only because of their setting in twenty-first-century society, but also due to their choice of genre’.66 This is demonstrated by the use of surgical masks in Anatomy which foreshadow impending acts of violence.
The power of mask-wearing surgeons and the powerlessness of their patient-victims are used in a horror context explicitly framed in reference to Germany’s Nazi past. The first murder vignette uses music, narrative context and pacing to foreshadow a spectacular death scene. A man opens his eyes on an operating table and sees bright surgical lights shining above him. The scene is riddled with abstractions, denoting his subjective viewpoint as he struggles to comprehend his surroundings. We see from his perspective figures in surgical masks casually talking about the patient in the third person, ignoring his questions as sinister music intensifies. He sees his own organs removed from his body as the surgeons chat excitedly about Paula’s arrival. He looks down to discover that most of the skin and flesh has been removed from his hands, shifting his gaze towards a Dissecting Room sign. In a later scene, a young man with a rare disease Paula met earlier on a train awakens in a similar scenario: he again sees masked figures talking and he pretends to be unconscious. He grabs a scalpel and attempts to fight them, but they retaliate and kill him, disappointed: ‘too bad, he’s dead … we can’t use him anymore’. Both scenes contrast the vulnerability of the victims with the inhumane ‘experiments’ and professional dominance of the masked figures. Surgical masks are crucial in the transformative dynamic in Anatomy as seemingly ‘normal’ medical students become faceless monsters.
This combination of professionalism with monstrosity materialises symbolically in the doctors’ masked faces through the ritualised space of the surgical theatre. With its references to Mengele, as Ludegwig noted, these surgical horror scenarios ‘evoke … connotations of the horrors of the Holocaust, especially as the viewer is visually reminded of the similarities between the cruel operations being depicted and Nazi medical experiments’.67 This is emphasised in the film’s setting at the University of Heidelberg specifically, an institution openly supportive of the Third Reich who eagerly enacted some of that regime’s most shocking medical programmes.68 In Anatomy, surgical masks symbolise the transformation of human to monster and, located as they are at this explicit location, the film draws direct parallels between the atrocities of the past with the Germany of the present, offering Paula and her generation as an idealised generational force of resistance.
The films explored in this chapter demonstrate how repurposed horror masks overlap and deviate in terms of their functionality and symbolic specificity. Repurposed masks can manipulate assumptions about class and gender in the genre (My Bloody Valentine and Evidence), can imply a perverse sense of play when sports masks are deployed in a film like Friday the 13th Part III, and in the case of surgical masks, their use in the Japanese urban legend ritual game Kuchisake-onna is the starting place of unflinching interrogation of domestic violence in Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman. The professionalised sphere of medicine incorporates surgical masks in different ways in Dead Ringers and Anatomy, in their respective tales of ritual, power and transformation, pertaining to the personal in the former and the national in the latter. Collectively, these films demonstrate how the symbolic potency of masks linked to one function – hockey masks, surgical masks, welding masks, gas masks – is broadly transferrable in horror cinema. Simultaneously protective and menacing, the generic potential of repurposed masks is again largely reliant on myriad intersections of transformation, ritual and power, but as demonstrated here – and throughout this book – these elements frequently manifest in dynamic, original ways. I now extend this argument in my final case study as we move away from a chronological, post-1970s period of codification and towards a more elastic view of how technology and temporality intersect in horror movie masks, providing some insight into the potential future of the object in the genre to come.