Ritual, Power and Transformation
THE FINAL SECTION of this book steps away from the post-codification period after 1970 and takes a more elastic approach in considering how masks in horror movies function at the seemingly very contemporary intersection of technology, transformation, power and ritual in horror film masks. While the bulk of the films here are also made after 1970, two key films – The Mask (Julian Roffman, 1961) and Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) clearly pre-date that period, yet are hugely useful case studies when attempting to recontextualise the relationship between masks and the concept of transformational technologies. As will be elaborated shortly, these two films are of interest here precisely because of their anachronistic relationship to masks, technology, ritual, power and temporality itself; if approached through the key arguments of this book, they provide perhaps surprising ways that we can rethink the role of the mask in horror film today, and in the future.
The word ‘technology’ might suggest from a contemporary perspective ‘non-human, mechanical instrumentalities, in confrontation with human, rational and organic attributes’, but as Montserrat Ginés Gibert noted, ‘“Technology” evokes a broader, more inclusive type of knowledge beyond the technical artefact itself’.1 While we often think of ‘technology’ in this mechanical sense (especially in regard to cameras, screens and other moving image technologies), in the case studies here, we employ this more elastic definition of ‘technology’ to this preliminary consideration to consider its interplay with ritual, power and transformation through horror film masks.
Horror masks are often closely aligned with technology and ritual. As Heather Margaret-Louise Miller argued, if ‘rituals can be defined as stereotyped patterned behavior or activities of any kind, whether religious, political, social, or a mixture’, they can be conceived ‘within the context of an overall technological system’ that can focus on ‘the social and cultural context in which these rituals are occurring’.2 For Crumrine:
In co-ordination with other items of material apparatus, masks act as elements within human systems, systems that also include charters or explanatory myths, personnel occupying differing social positions or statuses and sets of rules or norms that structure the roles of status-holders. Generating co-operation, such systems focus upon sets of activities and ultimately fulfil certain functions useful in achieving continuity in human groups.3
Christina Pratt noted that shamans have historically employed the ‘technology’ of action – ‘drumming, singing, rattling, making offerings and dancing’ – as part of their healing rituals.4 As part of the shaman’s toolkit, masks are a significant part of this technology-based ritual, a tradition that has evolved in a dynamic way to manifest anew across the horror films we will now explore: Peeping Tom, The Mask, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, The Den, Månguden and The Poughkeepsie Tapes.
Technology played a significant role in literary horror, long before the rise of moving image culture. For John Bowen, gothic horror traditionally ‘loves modern technology almost as much as it does ghosts … which is why a novel like Dracula is as full of the modern technology of its period – typewriters, shorthand, recording machines – as it is of vampires, destruction and death’.5 For Jeffrey Sconce, contemporaneous discourse about once new media technologies (radio, television, virtual reality, etc.) has historically leant itself to supernatural metaphors. For example, he argues that Orson Welles’s 1938 Halloween radio play of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898) that was famously misinterpreted by some of its audience as a live broadcast of an actual alien invasion ‘was as much a panic over the new and rather suffocating presence of mass communication as it was a panic over extraterrestrial invasion’.6 For Sconce, ‘tales of paranormal media are important … not as timeless expressions of some underlying electronic superstition, but as a permeable language in which to express a culture’s changing social relationship to a historical sequence of technologies’.7 Gothic, horror and supernatural stories have long demonstrated a complex relationship with technology.
From an archaeological perspective, the broad ways that ‘technology’ has been conceived is useful when thinking through the endurance of horror film masks. As transformative devices, masks have a technological capacity. For Miller, technology is ‘an outwardly expanding, nested set of actions and relationships: from production itself, to the organization of the production process, to the entire cultural system of processes and practices associated with production and consumption’.8 This consideration of technology as a ‘set of actions and relationships’ evokes associations with another primary concern of this book: ritual. Technology and ritual are closely aligned, as indicated by Miller’s identification of technology as an ‘active system of interconnections between people and objects during the creation of an object, its distribution and to some extent its use and disposal’.9 Across the six films considered in this chapter, the way that masks function and intersect with technology reveal a range of transformative possibilities, reliant in each case on ritual practices that speak to diverse power relations.
Technological Masks and Temporality: Peeping Tom (1960) and The Mask (1961)
As noted, the most obvious deviation in this chapter from those in Part Two concerns the era of production of its first two case studies, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Julian Roffman’s The Mask. While Part Two focused on films made after 1970, these films are explored here because their relationship between masks, ritual, power and transformation relate directly to histories of perception themselves: both in terms of technological history (in the sense of the ‘mechanical instrumentalities’) and from the broader archaeological perspective as outlined above. Apart from being ‘historical’ in the sense that these films pre-date 1970, I privilege them because they employ masks-as-technology through ritual to grant their wearers’ mastery, knowledge or control both literally and figuratively in ways that refers specifically to time: through the shamanic imagination, these two films hinge on the wearing of technological masks in diverse ways that allow their antagonists to move across time itself. While Peeping Tom has received much critical attention in terms of its relationship to both the dominance of the male gaze and the camera, I explore how its camera-weapon is itself worn as a facial covering, pressed close to its antagonist’s skin, with a conscious goal of both hiding his face and transforming him into a powerful monster. In The Mask, the technological aspects of its eponymous object are privileged in two distinct yet intersecting ways. First, the ancient mask in question is worn by characters in the film as a psychiatric device that exposes them to the darker elements of their subconscious. Yet in its status as Canada’s first 3D film, it also explicitly invites the viewer at certain points to ‘put the mask on’ – a demand to place their magenta-and-cyan lensed ‘mask’ – so they can experience the film’s technological spectacle of 3D.
In Peeping Tom, Mark (Karlheinz Böhm) is a young film cameraman employed at a film studio who shoots pornography on the side, and is also a serial killer. He equips a camera with a large mirror, light and a tripod-embedded-knife to force women to watch their own terrified faces as they die while he films them. For Shohini Chaudhuri, Peeping Tom offers an ‘extreme example’ of Mulvey’s identification of cinema’s dominant and sadistic male gaze. Chaudhuri noted that the title alone ‘effectively positions its spectators as Peeping Toms: the darkened auditorium gives each spectator the illusion of being a privileged voyeur, peeping in on a private world, separate from the rest of the audience’.10 With its power dynamics hinging on a man-with-a-killer-camera and women-as-objects of that camera’s violent look, Peeping Tom is a near literal manifestation of Mulvey’s theory.
Peeping Tom’s meditation on the culpability of the camera and the moral responsibility of the person wielding it for some feminist film theorists aligns it with overt reflexivity. For Clover, ‘the self-reflexive dimension of Peeping Tom … has led to its reevaluation … as first and foremost a sustained reflection on the nature of cinematic vision’.11 For Michele Aaron, films like this ‘remind … spectators that they are watching a film, they are made aware of themselves as spectators’.12 This is essential to the film’s gender politics for Kaja Silverman, because ‘not only does it foreground the workings of the apparatus and the place given there to voyeurism and sadism’, but it ultimately renders the film through its film-within-a-film structure ‘a device for dramatizing the displacement of lack from the male to the female subject’.13 It is, for Clover, a horror movie ‘that has as its task to expose the psychodynamics of specularity and fear’.14 Clover offers Peeping Tom as further evidence of her broader claims for gender fluidity active within horror spectatorship, an approach to the film shared by later critics.15
While many critical considerations on Peeping Tom have been concerned with its intersection of the gaze, spectatorship and reflexivity, other critical lines of enquiry are also available. Elana Del Ray identified the film’s ‘pervasive articulation of a discourse of touch and the provocative ways this discourse is intertwined with the general thematics of vision for which the film is so acclaimed’.16 In her claim for Mark’s ‘embodied voyeurism’, Del Ray recalled Silverman by stating that with his contraption, ‘Mark tries to erect [a barrier] between himself and his victims so as to dissociate himself from them and thereby consolidate his own claim to the paternal legacy’.17 This barrier denotes a literal space between Mark and his victims, separating him both physically and morally from the pain he is inflicting and thus constructing technologically mediated vision itself as a literal mask. As mentioned in chapter 1, the sensory dimension of horror cinema spectatorship is significant, regarding the often intensively constructed sense of materiality that permeates the genre and provokes what Sobchack described as a ‘sensual and sense-making experience’.18 As a transformative device with a clear ritual function, Mark places a physical object between his own face and the events occurring before him, and as an audience we have a sensory awareness of this ‘barrier’ even if it is not registered consciously.
Del Ray’s argument thus allows a rethinking of Mark’s relationship to technology through the iconographic potency of horror film masks. ‘Technology’ here can be understood in multiple ways: not only in terms of the camera as moving image technology, but the bespoke murder contraption Mark has crafted to ritually execute women. The actual object is therefore worth further consideration in terms of both its construction and functionality. Throughout much of the film, Mark approaches his victims holding the camera close to his face. For me at least, there is a sensory awareness when Mark raises the camera to begin filming: the tightness of his grasp is superseded by the sheer force and determination with which he presses the object against his face. While his purpose is to film a murder, the ritual-like repetition that marks this act indicates that it is arguably even more than the ‘barrier’ Silverman and Del Rio suggest. Rather, Mark wears the camera: aside from granting him the simultaneous ability to film and kill, by ‘wearing’ it in this manner, the object is granted an important place in the history of horror film masks. He executes these murders as masked rituals that are emphatically transformative: through his camera-mask, he is granted new powers.
This is of course not the only function of his camera-mask. Mark has grafted other attachments to service his needs: a bright light and what is revealed at the film’s conclusion to be a tripod leg with a knife attached and a large, distorting mirror that forces his victims to watch their own murders. In terms of the intersection of masks, technology, transformation, power and ritual, these two acts – the filming of the murders and forcing his victims to witness their own deaths – are, while occurring simultaneously, executed with distinct goals in relation to time and space. Mark films the murders so that he can watch them later, for use in his ongoing ‘documentary’ project that Clover notes was ‘begun by his father and continued by Mark himself (through the filming of his murders and of the public reaction that attends them) and finally completed by him as well, as he films his own suicide with and by the same “magic camera”’.19 But the mirror is as much about his victims at the moment of their deaths as it is to Mark documenting their murders for later use. Powell himself has called Mark ‘a technician of emotion’:20 he refers here not only to Mark’s emotions but also to those of his victims. These two experiences exist in distinct temporal moments.
When worn on his face, the camera-mask distances man-child Mark (who is rendered sympathetic by the lengthy descriptions of his experience of child abuse) from the crimes against women we see him commit. It is not sympathetic, survivor-Mark who commits these crimes, but rather the camera-masked Mark: he has transformed from victim into aggressor through the ritualised wearing of his hand-crafted ‘mask’. While the image-making technology of the camera-mask records events for later reference, the mirror acts both as part of that filmed spectacle, while simultaneously – and crucially – linked to the immediacy of the moment of death. The camera-mask in Peeping Tom may be intrinsically linked to oft-cited notions of the gaze, gender and power, but its effectiveness as an object of horror is simultaneously dependent on its transformative power as an object worn on his face. Although not commonly recognised as such, Peeping Tom is an important and highly sophisticated reimagining of horror’s mask-wearing traditions.
Julian Roffman’s The Mask also explores the transformative possibilities of the mask to allow symbolic movement between the past and present in explicit relation to acts of masking. Like Friday the 13th Part III, it too required its audience to wear mask-like 3D glasses upon its initial cinema release. The film is therefore not only about characters wearing a mask, but about the audience knowing that same sensation: to experience the film fully, the audience is forced to mimic its title action. By doing so, it reflexively collapses the conceptual distance between the audience and the film’s diegesis. The Mask begins with archaeologist Michael (Martin Lavut) haunted by violent dreams after acquiring an ‘Indian burial mask’. Telling psychiatrist Dr Allan Barnes (Paul Stevens) that he is possessed by the ‘evil’ of the mask, he dies by suicide and leaves the mask to his sceptical doctor. Describing it to his girlfriend Pam (Claudette Nevins) as a ‘horrible looking thing, unearthly’, through a number of 3D nightmare sequences it is revealed that the mask has the same influence on Barnes as it did on Michael. The conclusion reveals that the mask will only make those already with a proclivity to violence susceptible to its power, Professor Quincey (Norman Ettlinger) explaining the cross-cultural belief that masks can transform the personalities of those who wear them. While there are undeniable issues surrounding the fact that the eponymous artefact hinges on an undesirable Othering of non-Western cultures (thus granting them access to what is coded unambiguously as dark, ‘primitive’ magic), the film uses masked transformation, ritual and technology to interrogate masculinity and violence.
Discussing The Mask and David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), Caelum Vatnsdal suggests that both films reveal that ‘it only takes a single alien element for the house-of-cards society we’ve constructed to fall down around us’.21 In The Mask, that ‘alien element’ is explicitly foreign – an Aztec mask – but the film is clear in its final revelation that the demonic forces unleashed through the mask do not work on everyone: the transformation from ‘civilised’ westerner to violent ‘primal’ sex criminal is triggered (and not created) by the mask – that desire must already lie repressed within its wearer. The mask, Dr Allen realises early in the film, reveals deep subconscious desires and thus he considers it a powerful psychological technology with research potential. These fantasy scenarios are brought spectacularly to life through 3D anaglyph sequences – in the opening scene with Martin and then two lengthier scenes when worn by Dr Barnes. But as Ray Zone noted, the movie is largely a ‘black-and-white horror film’ and these more traditional aspects are just as significant when considering the transformative potential of the mask and its intersection with ritual.22 While the bulk of the film set in suburban 1960s Canada presents a world of rational civility governed by logic and order, the wearing of the mask – both by Martin and Dr Allen and the audience in the form of their 3D glasses – presents a primal world rendered in 3D, riddled with stereotypical horror iconography (skulls, snakes, skeletons, etc.). The centrepieces of these masked-induced fantasy scenarios are acts of sexual violence, in Dr Allen’s case against a blonde mask-wearing woman, reminiscent of his secretary Miss Goodrich (Anne Collings). These sequences are heavily ritualistic, suggesting ancient ceremonies far from the moral propriety of supposedly ‘civilised’ suburbia.
The monstrous past Dr Allen and Martin return to through masked transformation grants them a subconscious space to indulge in their pre-existing violent sexual desires. These masked transformations collapse civility through these hallucinations and render tangible distinctions between the suburban/normalised/‘contemporary’ present (presented in black and white) and a spectacular/fantastic/‘primitive’ past, witnessed by both the film’s diegetic mask wearers and the 3D mask-wearing audience. The audience too are likewise compelled to ‘put the mask on’ by a voice in the film, simply because it is essential for experiencing the 3D spectacles of the film itself. The unquestioning acceptance with which the audience wear the mask in order to transform their vision is subtly acknowledged from within the film to mimic what it codes as a dangerous addiction to mask technologies: numerous characters refer to the mask as a drug, addiction and curse. The lure of the mask – to both the male protagonist and the audience who accept the demand to ‘put the mask on’ – emphasises the intersection of masks and ritual, manifesting in the audiences’ compulsion to reflexively mimic the precise behaviours they see problematised on screen.
Technological Masks and Consumerism: Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) and The Den (2013)
When adapted into new contexts, masks intersect in myriad ways with rituals, themselves old and new. Of these, a more overtly contemporary ritual is that of consumerism. As noted in chapter 5, Halloween III: Season of the Witch notoriously deviated from the Michael Myers narrative that marks the rest of the Halloween franchise, a stand-alone story that concerned a popular brand of children’s Halloween masks designed to trigger a mass human sacrifice. The Den presents a different critique of technology and its relationship to consumerism, turning to social media usage and the role of masks, transformation, power and ritual in the commodification of users themselves as physical products to be bought and sold online.
Martin Harris suggests that while critical treatments of horror franchises like Halloween emphasise postmodern aspects like open narratives that are ambivalent about closure and unmoving narrative truths, he argued that Halloween III is a significant case study because of ‘the way the complicated, extratextual narrative of the conflict between commercialism and art surrounding the film is reflected in the film itself’.23 Replacing Myers’s slasher killer figure are the monstrous witches led by Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy), a deranged practical joker who runs the Halloween mask company Silver Shamrock. He embeds his popular masks with computer chips and fragments of Stonehenge itself (explicitly evoking rituals past and present), to be activated on Halloween eve when the Silver Shamrock ad plays on television and slaughtering its child-wearers en masse. The story was conceived by British screenwriter Nigel Kneale, who had previously united technology, horror and history in the cult British horror teleplay The Stone Tape (Peter Sasdy, 1972). While Kneale left the project,24 Halloween III echoes The Stone Tape’s fascination with the ability of technology to bridge old and new: here, technology unites ancient and modern through masks themselves.
Eschewing the Michael Myers storyline that otherwise defines the franchise, masks remain central in Halloween III. The Silver Shamrock masks are aggressively marketed and therefore popular with children, configuring them according to the film’s own logic as therefore already potentially ominous and linked to mind control. In Halloween III, the wearers of these masks are victims, not antagonists. For Tony Williams, Halloween III thus shares Halloween II’s focus on sacrifice ‘and post-1960s ambivalent feelings towards childhood’, describing Cochran as a ‘ritual “monster”’ with the privileging of Stonehenge in his murderous plan.25 Cochran also seeks to replace humans with a corporate robot-army as part of his planned technological utopia, resulting in what Williams called ‘the destruction of children and the victory of patriarchal corporate control’.26 But the method Cochran uses to execute his plan is notable: while Harris called Cochran a ‘prankster’,27 he is in fact a contemporary trickster, fitting Hynes’s definition of a figure who is anomalous and ambiguous, who plays tricks and is deceptive, who imitates gods, who inverts situations and who engages with both the lewd and the sacred.28 Most of all, Cochran evokes associations between trickster traditions and shamanism through his ‘ability to cross the dangerous boundary between the world of the living and the realm of the dead’:29 the shamanic imagination is again here crucial in providing the conceptual foundations that account for why we as audiences assume masks contain great power, especially when combined with ritual.
The focus on technology and consumerism is alluded to in Halloween III’s opening credits. Rolling static appears alongside Carpenter and Howarth’s minimalist synth soundtrack and its visual aesthetics recall a monochrome CRT computer monitor, colour treated to be in black and orange. This defines the screen as a consciously mediated space, marked by technological presence. As lines appear and disappear, the camera pulls back to reveal a computer-generated image of a digitally rendered pumpkin vector. The centrality of the pumpkin continues an opening credit tradition established in Halloween and Halloween II, but this screen-centric construction is crucial to Halloween III’s broader critique of technology, foreshadowing the use of television to trigger mass murder via the Silver Shamrock masks. Cochran’s company offer three models for sale: a witch, a skull and a jack-o’-lantern. The Silver Shamrock ad is played on high rotation throughout the film, a musical countdown with structural functionality leading to the moment Cochran executes his plan (‘six more nights till Halloween’). The ad is ubiquitous: children (even those of the film’s protagonist Dr Dan Challis, played by Tom Atkins) flock to their televisions to watch the commercial, their susceptibility to advertising the cornerstone of Cochran’s plans.
This self-reflexive consideration of the commercialisation of horror itself is emphasised by the fact that Carpenter’s original Halloween is screening on one of the channels within the diegetic world of Halloween III. Scepticism about the marketing strategies that are narratively central to Halloween III are expressed by Thomas M. Sipos’s in his dismissal of the mask in Wes Craven’s Scream (1996): ‘The Scream mask is popular not on the film’s merits, but due to Miramax’s heavily bankrolled, Halloween merchandising machine, trying to do by design what Halloween’s “shape” mask did by serendipity.’30 Released fourteen years before Scream, Halloween III certainly complicates Sipos’s observation through its central employment of a killer television transmission signal: at play is the assumption that children are now fully controlled by the mask (and by the commercial powers that seek to control them). As consumer objects, masks in trickster-Cochran’s hands become weapons to use against those that paid for the privilege of wearing them, allowing him ‘to punish America for its commercialization of the holiday’.31 Halloween III is therefore, as Harris suggested, ‘a sustained satire targeting American consumer culture’, which it achieves through the explicit emphasis of masks themselves as commercial products.32 Sold through television commercials, controlled by computer chips and activated as weapons of mass destruction via analogue television signals, the masks in Halloween III transform their wearers – lacking self-control through the paralysing effects of television advertising – through the ritual of Halloween mask-wearing itself.
Horror masks, technology and consumerism combine in a different way in The Den. Closely related to the found-footage horror subgenre, The Den is typical of the much smaller sub-subgenre I previously identified as ‘interface horror’ – horror films diegetically and formally implied to be playing out on a computer screen, where characters are computer users who participate in a range of horror scenarios that unfold in online social spaces.33 The Den follows grad student Elizabeth (Melanie Papalia, who appeared also in Smiley) through her research project on a video-chat website similar to ChatRoulette called The Den. Recording encounters with random strangers as a psychology experiment to document ‘human behaviour in its most transparent form’, there is a degree of hubris to her project as she feels protected by her researcher status from the perils of her unrestricted consumption of the website’s services. The film reveals that she has been placed in extreme danger through her exposure to an organisation of masked users who torture and murder young people like Elizabeth, selling footage of their crimes on another website as snuff films.
This plot intersects thematically with tensions between visibility and invisibility, rendered most coherently through the film’s focus on surveillance technologies and Elizabeth’s willing submission to them. The Den exposes what it considers the dangers of unchecked social media usage, where the practices Elizabeth wishes to study enable her own dangerous engagement with strangers on the site. Surveillance culture rose significantly after the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001,34 with tensions between paranoias about being watched and a desire to be watched triggering broader cultural anxieties that manifest in horror films like The Den. Both David Lyon and Adam L. Penenberg emphasised the ubiquity of surveillance technologies through mobile phones and surveillance cameras, peaking in what Penenberg suggested is the ‘round-the-clock surveillance as entertainment’ phenomena of reality television.35 The Den both critiques and – in its status as ‘surveillance as entertainment’ itself – promotes these surveillance anxieties as a rich source of inspiration for horror. The Den seeks to both profit from and critique these anxieties, and commercial gain is itself integral to the conclusion of The Den, where Elizabeth’s murder becomes a commodity on a pay-to-view website.
Like the business-suited robots in Halloween III, the ominous corporate figures in The Den are literally and symbolically faceless: in Halloween III they are inhuman, whereas in The Den they wear sack masks. Importantly, these figures symbolise larger structures – corporations, governments, etc. – who oversee real-world, global surveillance agendas. But transformations via masking and unmasking appear earlier on in the film: the more spectacular aspects of The Den represented by these masked figures stand in contrast to more banal moments as Elizabeth clicks endlessly through random faces, looking for people to talk to. If Elizabeth’s initial experience on The Den reveals anything, it is how deeply embedded casual sexual harassment is within her everyday experience online: these encounters at first are presented comically and as an assumed norm of what women should expect in online spaces, positioned between a stream of more innocuous scenes of cats licking their stomachs and giggling Japanese schoolgirls. Elizabeth scrolls through these scenarios like she is channel surfing – under the guise of research, Elizabeth finds pleasure in acts mirroring Penenberg’s ‘round-the-clock surveillance as entertainment’ observation.
What Elizabeth witnesses on The Den are framed as micro-performances and the rare encounters where she appears to make sincere connections are atypical. Trevor J. Blank used the term ‘digital performance’ in relation to the Internet ‘to indicate the process of aesthetic production, reception and response in digital environments’, and these are brought to life in The Den as Elizabeth searches through a seemingly endless parade of ‘digital performer[s]’.36 The identities presented on The Den can in this way be understood as digital masks akin to what Harold Bell referred to as ‘social media masquerade’, hinging on ‘the underlying assumption … that … user profiles, personify the lives that people live’, when ‘the reality is quite the opposite’.37 For Armina Dinescu, ‘the striking lack of rules apparent on the web’ render it a prime space for misrepresentation as one may ‘represent oneself as wildly inaccurately as one pleases’, an observation reliant on social media spaces being a forum for often radical transformation.38 As Dinescu noted, ‘In the case of ChatRoulette, identity play can be as obvious as masking one’s webcam with photos of famous people, to literal masks, or as subtle as “lying” about one’s geographical location, gender or age.’39 The Den is a horror movie about the potential threat inherent to this ‘identity play’.
The potency of deceptive transformations as acts of figurative masking first becomes overt when Elizabeth encounters a user who claims their video is not working, so they materialise on her screen as a still photograph of a young woman and communicate only via written text. Elizabeth assumes an indexical relationship between the user with whom she is communicating and the girl in the photograph, but it is later revealed that this young woman has been murdered to make a snuff film to be sold online, a fate that will also befall Elizabeth. But it is the uniqueness of this still image that initially attracts Elizabeth and brings her to the attention of the film’s ominous commercial powers. Elizabeth’s assumption that there is a correlation between the user and the image presented is proven incorrect, as the image was bait that resulted in Elizabeth’s own death. After the mysterious group behind the snuff film business hack Elizabeth’s computer and contact people as Elizabeth without her knowledge (another kind of transformative ‘masking’), her friends and family are soon also targets for the literally masked villains. Despite her friends’ desperate pleas with her to stay offline, she cannot and is drawn fatally towards the group’s headquarters. There she discovers an entire community of masked killers; she is tortured and killed, the footage sold in the final scene to an eager consumer.
The sack masks that prove so central to The Den provide a direct parallel between the history of horror film masks and the violent potential of online anonymity and ‘digital masks’. This act of masking has a dual representational function, acting as ciphers for both the faceless, organised bodies that control surveillance (corporations, governments, etc.) and the performed masks of social media users. In the horror-fantasy world of The Den, online surveillance technologies and social media are tools for commercial control in the creation taboo (and highly priced) snuff film commodities. The horror of The Den is consciously configured around the mask as a cipher for anonymity, governed as much by sadism as commercialism. In both The Den and Halloween III, masks, ritual and transformation intersect as moral warnings for audiences who unquestioningly consume technology.
Technological Masks and Performance: Månguden (1988) and The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)
The last section of this chapter – and the final case studies of this book – examines the Swedish television horror movie Månguden and the US found-footage horror film The Poughkeepsie Tapes. These both reveal how filmed performance and masked transformations (diegetically coded as existing within each film) are reflexively incorporated through masked rituals and film-making technologies themselves; celluloid and videotape respectively. In both films, masked performance and technology intersect again in ways that render the screen itself as a kind of mask, their killers taking on a consciously ‘screened’ disguise, parallels both emphasised and gestured towards by their wearing of more traditional horror masks.
While this focus on the intersection of masks with digital technology will be revisited shortly in my discussion of The Poughkeepsie Tapes, it is important to not conflate this intersection as pertaining only to digital technology. Jonas Cornell’s Månguden interrogates the relationship between technology, masks, ritual, power and transformation in horror through a focus on analogue moving image technologies. While little writing exists in English on the film, amongst horror fan communities it is a privileged cult artefact due to its scarcity until a Swedish-language DVD was released in 2010.40 According to the Cinezilla blog, the film’s status as ‘a holy grail amongst enthusiastic collectors’ with a reputation as ‘one of the bloodiest Swedish TV productions to the most nightmare inducing TV movie ever shown on the tube’ in Sweden stems from its revisiting of the still unsolved Appojaure murders in 1984, where a couple were murdered in their sleep while camping.41 This context is ignored by Pidde Andersson who, without this real-world association, dismissed it as ‘an utterly strange film which in the weirdest of ways combines traditional, stiff, old-fashioned TV drama with the slashers of the 80s’.42 Yet, according to the Cinezilla blog, so strong was the public reaction to the September 1988 broadcast of Månguden that people cancelled their camping holidays and complained to channel SVT in large numbers.43
Issues of reception are crucial to Månguden because spectatorship lies at its core both thematically and diegetically. Superficially a standard police procedural, Månguden is based on the discovery of a series of home movies that depict a figure in a ‘primitive’ Moon God mask (the Månguden of the title) as he murders camping families in wooded areas. His most extreme acts – performed through elaborate masked ritual – like Peeping Tom focus on fathers and the murders are consciously constructed for the camera. Troubled police investigator John Vinge (Tomas Laustiola) has little luck with the case and is forced to collaborate with Erland Salander (Per Myrberg), a neuropsychologist with past successes in assisting the police on serial killer cases. As Vinge investigates the history of the mask he meets anthropologist Rebecka Nordenskiöld (Agneta Ekmanner), the film’s climax revealing that she is the spirit of Salander’s mother, returned to comfort her son who is revealed to be the masked ‘Moon God’ killer. Ritually re-enacting the murder of his parents Erick and Anna Van Meer as they plundered the African villages during the 1930s, Salander seeks vengeance against all fathers as he held his father Erick responsible for his orphan status.
The filming of the ritual murder ‘performances’ in Månguden is thematically central. Walid El Khachab argued that ‘cinema bears the traces of the Sacred simply because the physical film – particularly during the celluloid era – and the flattening of the image projected on the screen act like sympathetic equivalents of the world’. He suggested that ‘film fulfils the same sacred function as the ritual engravings on temple walls, or in prehistoric caves’.44 Growing up in isolated African villages that suffered at the hands of Erick’s colonial exploitation and witnessing his parents murdered when his father’s mass theft of tribal relics was revealed, Salander uses film to re-empower himself, restaging his childhood trauma. But now – through masked transformation – he recasts himself as the powerful aggressor-deity (the Månguden), rather than child victim-survivor. By making these films, Salander assumes a highly engaged diegetic audience in police investigating the case (of which he is included). Through film-making technology and masked performance ritual, Erick seeks to rewrite history to address his own trauma. Evoking the shamanic imagination, this recalls El Khachab’s claim that
The act of viewing a film is therefore a ritual that is based on ‘recollection’ not just in the sense of piecing together images and fragments of past experience into the stream we usually call memory, but also in the sense of ‘rememorating’ a time when one can argue that the decisive distinctions between the Human and Nature, or between the Human and the Animal were not yet accepted wisdoms.45
While Månguden recalls Freud’s return-of-the-repressed and Oedipal anxieties, it is the relationship between moving image technology, ritual, power and the horror mask itself that renders the film of particular interest.
Månguden’s status as a film-about-film is visible in its opening credit sequence that shows strips of celluloid film rushing through machinery in slow motion, defamiliarised until the location is revealed as a film processing laboratory. Moving to the first crime scene, the ritualised nature of the murder and the investigation surrounding it are emphasised. The Månguden mask first appears in close-up as it is handled by police technicians who make a model from an imprint at the crime scene. Throughout the film, the passing of time and the importance of transformation is highlighted by repeated shots of the moon in different lunar phases, which also indicates to the investigators when the next crime is likely to occur (all eight murders ritualistically occur under a full moon). Of the mask itself, Nordenskiöld tells Vinge that when worn by the killer ‘the face isn’t just hidden for others, but also for the wearer … perhaps he protects himself against a part that he won’t accept’. Implicit in retrospect is Nordenskiöld’s belief that Salander is unaware of his crimes and Salander’s statements that the killer makes the films because ‘he wants to see what he has done’ and that ‘the murderer is trying to reproduce an underlying trauma’ are implied to be honest diagnoses rather than conscious deceptions.
With the revelation that Erland is the killer – transformed by the mask into Månguden – Nordenskiöld vanishes, leaving no trace in the contemporary moment. Just as Erland uses the mask and film-performance as a wormhole back through time to restage childhood trauma, the cinematic object Månguden – the television movie the audience have been watching – has reflexively provided a space for his mother Nordenskiöld (really Anna Van Meer) to return also, in an attempt to stop Erland and to soothe his suffering. In the film’s climax, Vinge chases Erland across a rooftop, the latter wearing the Moon God mask. When removed, he is far from the typical horror villain. Unmasked and weeping, he is sympathetic and tragic, rather than a monster. As the mask falls and shatters on the ground in slow motion, the masked transformation Erland maintained throughout the film ends and he is taken into custody. But near the film’s final moments, the footage of Nordenskiöld/Anna Van Meer is shown running through a projector. As Vinge pauses the film to reveal her unaged face in the 1930s footage, the celluloid burns in the projector and the image is destroyed. ‘She has left,’ says Vinge and she too becomes faceless, transformed into a memory that now exists diegetically beyond cinema and yet materially etched within the movie Månguden itself.
Technology, ritual, power, performance and masked transformation merge in a different way in the 2007 found-footage horror film The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Like Månguden, murder scenarios are configured diegetically as being performed specifically for a film camera: this is both central to the plot and to the pleasures the films offers as a horror movie. Like The Den, there is also a conscious parallel between on-screen anonymity and the wearing of literal masks. The Poughkeepsie Tapes concerns analogue videocassette technology – rather than The Den’s streaming digital video or Månguden’s celluloid home movies – but while the film-making technology differs, it emphasises and extends the confluence of masks, technology, ritual and power as seen across these other horror movies. A mockumentary that tracks the criminal history of an unidentified, uncaptured serial killer after he allowed 2,400 hours of archived videotape footage of his crimes to be discovered in a house in Poughkeepsie, New Jersey, The Poughkeepsie Tapes combines this footage with interviews with investigators, other law enforcement officials and families and friends of his victims to structure the film’s elaborate horror vignettes, marked as much by their synthetically deteriorated (thus materially implied ‘authentic’) VHS aesthetics as by the violent sadism of the acts recorded.
Like The Den, masking functions in two ways in The Poughkeepsie Tapes. First, the videotapes are a conscious attempt by the killer to disguise his identity while simultaneously revealing the heinousness of the crimes he has successfully avoided punishment for. At one point, FBI agent Simon Alray (Michael Lawson) describes how the killer must have practised a particular movement when he held the camera in front of himself and a victim in a car, drugging her while simultaneously obscuring his face from the camera. At another point, the killer holds his hand over his face in surveillance video from a petrol station that he knows the police will retrospectively view after the discovery of the tapes. But, unlike The Den, the scenes where he murders and tortures his victims are explicitly masked performances of a more overtly theatrical nature, conceived with the camera in mind. One investigator acknowledges his ‘bizarre sense of theatricality – you know the costumes and what not’, offering it as evidence that he ‘is extremely mentally ill’.
Recalling the previous chapter’s focus on repurposed masks, at times in The Poughkeepsie Tapes the killer wears a gas mask while he hacks away at often-unidentifiable body parts, evoking associations with toxicity and abjectness. Yet the most disturbing images are arguably those he has clearly gone to some effort to stage in terms of blocking and the crude mise en scène of his torture chamber. Here, the technological mask of the videos themselves merge with another kind of mask: he wears a traditional plague doctor mask, worn by medieval doctors during the Black Death. As Mack noted, ‘The dominant visual feature, the exaggerated nose, was not developed the more completely to conceal the masker; stuffed full of sweet-smelling herbs, it acted rather to conceal the stench of death and was intended to prevent the spread of contagion.’46 Today, however, it has been ‘recycled to cohere with contemporary expectations’ and is little more than ‘part of the fun and spectacle of medieval pageant’.47 The Poughkeepsie Tapes both supports and complicates these usages: in the context of the elaborate, theatrical and ritualistic sequences, this particular mask appears to be consciously used as a prop in a perverse pantomime, knowingly engaging with the carnivalesque aspects of costume and subversion that have marked the history of horror film masks. This is in striking tension with the macabre specificity of the mask’s original functionality as summarised by Mack: while medieval plague doctors wore the masks as a practical means of diffusing the smell of dying bodies and protecting themselves from infection, by wearing this mask in The Poughkeepsie Tapes, the killer acknowledges the intensity of what a room that has seen so much carnage must smell like. And, like the gas mask, the notion of protection – that the mask will filter out diseased air – only adds to the dehumanisation of his victims, reduced in his eyes to diseased, abject meat. Often teamed with a long black cape and a ruff, he has put great effort into his costume, adding evidence to the construction of these videos as much ritualised performances. These echoes of European history in particular recall Carnival traditions – this mask is still a popular costume at the Carnival of Venice48 – and the power this unnamed killer attains through myriad acts of mask-wearing (especially when combined with his destructive penchant for perverse, trickster-like play) reveal again the influence of the shamanic imagination.
This killer’s understanding of masks as related to power, transformation and ritual is far more sophisticated here than in almost any of the other films explored in this book. For, as depicted so memorably in his victim Cheryl Dempsey (Stacy Chbosky), he does not merely wear the mask himself, but forces his victims to wear them in deliberate strategies of dehumanisation and submission. Abducted from her home at the age of nineteen, Dempsey was believed dead until her masked body was found alive in a makeshift plywood coffin in the house in Poughkeepsie where the tapes were discovered. Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, Dempsey was so disoriented by her return to her previous life that – missing the approval of her captor she so craved during her years of physical, sexual and psychological abuse – she died from suicide soon after her release. The plague mask first appears in scenes of Dempsey’s torture, far more intricately constructed vignettes than with any other victim. Dempsey is, therefore, grotesquely privileged and she is shown as the victim of a gruelling range of torture acts, both psychological and physical. At one point, he offers to remove her ball gag, replacing her costume with a fetishistic PVC maid costume and a generic plastic mask of a woman’s face (recalling that of Alice Sweet Alice, again emphasising idealised ‘plastic’ femininity). While this further reduces her in his eyes to an everywoman-as-submissive-victim symbol, there is no indication that at any point during her captivity Dempsey would have been able to see her own reflection: from her point of view it would simply have felt like a restrictive plastic facial covering. Dempsey’s horrific experience would have therefore resulted not only from the physical sensation of suffocation, but the psychological detachment of not knowing what she looked like.
As his killings intensify in violence and theatricality, the killer changes his modus operandi to avoid detection. At the film’s conclusion, one FBI investigator acknowledges that their future strategy to locate and identify the killer is hoping that he turns up to screenings of The Poughkeepsie Tapes, diegetically coded from within as an ‘authentic’ documentary: they assume that he will be incapable of resisting seeing his own performance on a cinema screen. This feeds back into carefully constructed tensions between technology, transformation, power, ritual and masked performance, both literal (in the case of the gas mask and plague doctor mask and the mask he forces upon Dempsey) and symbolic (in terms of the titular tapes themselves being a ‘disguise’ or method of hiding his own identity). The tapes present an empowered self, transformed through ritual and masked performance into a seemingly omnipotent and extremely powerful, sadistic force.
The six films examined here underscore both the simultaneously diverse yet overlapping ways that technological masks, ritual, power and transformation function across contemporary horror cinema. The notion of performance runs through many of these explorations, particularly in instances where masked transformations are diegetically presented as consciously staged. This is clear in Peeping Tom, where killer Mark’s iconic camera-weapon is rethought in terms of the mask, with the duel functionality of capturing movie footage for his later viewing, while simultaneously revealing to his victims their own terror as they are murdered. Temporality is just as significant in The Mask, where the wearing of a so-called ‘primitive’ mask acts as a catalyst of the regressive, violent fantasies of its wearers. This runs in tandem with The Mask’s own status as a 3D film, its audience compelled to ‘put the mask on’ to fully experience the film’s special visual effects. Both Halloween III: Season of the Witch and The Den explore anxieties about technology and consumerism through ritual and masked transformations to critique in different ways two historically distinct screen technologies: television in the former and social media in the latter. Lastly, Månguden and The Poughkeepsie Tapes explore transformative masked performances at the intersection of screen culture and identity, pivoting around home movies. Like the other case studies in this book, these examples demonstrate the broad ways that ritual, power and transformation intersect, overlapping and diverging, to account for the endurance of horror film masks. But they also do something much more: they give us an insight into the way that masks in horror respond to advances in technology, which in turn might allow some useful context for mask-centric horror cinema to come in future years.