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Ask most people what the Frankenstein Monster looks like, and they’ll mention a green-skinned behemoth with a flat head, surgical scars on his forehead, and bolts on the sides of his neck. It matters little that this isn’t close to the way the creature is described in Mary Shelley’s novel. This is what they remember from the 1931 Universal thriller and its sequels (well, minus the green skin, anyway).
For over 100 years Hollywood has given fans some of the most recognizable horror images in pop culture. The looks of Max Schreck in Nosferatu, Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, Linda Blair in The Exorcist, or Robert Englund in A Nightmare on Elm Street are synonymous with cinematic scares. Occasionally, though, filmmakers choose not to show the faces of their antagonists. Often the menace’s true visage remains hidden beneath a mask, heightening the suspense until the reveal (and sometimes not even then).
In today’s MovieFrightFare installment we’d like to take a moment to salute some of the more memorable masks and disguises worn on the sinister silver screen. For brevity’s sake we’re limiting our list to films of the 20th century (apologies to The Purge, The Strangers, and Trick ‘r Treat). Our top picks are:
The Phantom of the Opera (1925) – Sure, Lon Chaney’s deranged cellar-dweller Erik spends much of the film behind a plain mask. But for sheer ghoulish glamour, nothing matches the Phantom’s disguise as the Red Death during the “Bal Masqué” sequence. The scene is made all the more fascinating by its early use of color.
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Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)/House of Wax (1953) – Funny how both Lionel Atwill’s Ivan Igor and Vincent Price’s Henry Jarrod were able to sculpt amazingly lifelike and surprisingly flexible wax masks which enabled them to hide their fire-ravaged true faces.
The Invisible Man (1933) – Okay, technically what see-through scientist Griffin (Claude Rains) uses in James Whale’s Universal shocker isn’t a mask, just bandages with a wig, glasses, and a fake nose. But it’s nonetheless effective…up to a point.
Queen of Outer Space (1958) – A team of American astronauts lands on the planet Venus and finds it’s inhabited by a hostile all-female society in this classic B sci-fi tale. The dictatorial queen (Laurie Mitchell) and her allies all wear masks to hide their scarred faces, the result of an earlier war with a planet of men.
Black Sunday (1960) – A 17th-century witch (Barbara Steele), convicted of sorcery, is condemned to death. The authorities hammer onto her face the Mask of Satan, a demonic bronze mask with sharp spikes on its inside, in this debut solo directorial effort from Mario Bava.
Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960) – One of the most haunting masks in cinema came courtesy of French director Georges Franju’s surgical shocker. Known stateside as Eyes Without a Face and The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, it stars Edith Scob as a car crash victim whose plastic surgeon father kidnaps women for skin grafting experiments to restore his daughter’s dace.
The Mask (1961) – Three decades before Jim Carrey tried on Loki’s mask, the folks in this Canadian chiller (originally made in 3D) donned an ancient Aztec ceremonial mask and were subjected to maddening psychedelic visions.
Onibaba (1964) – Set in Medieval Japan, Kaneto Shindō’s gem of mystical and psychological terror finds a woman donning a demon mask in order to frighten her widowed daughter-in-law into staying to look after her instead of leaving with another man.
Phantom of the Paradise (1974) – It may not be as iconic as the masks that Lon Chaney wore a half-century earlier, but there’s something striking about the headgear that scarred composer Winslow Leach (William Finley) dons as he seeks vengeance on devilish music mogul Swan (Paul Williams) in Brian De Palma’s cult favorite.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) – The one and only Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface. Nuff said!
Alice, Sweet Alice (1976) – Best known today as the film debut of Brooke Shields, this eerie psycho-thriller follows an adolescent girl suspected of strangling her younger sister in a church. The haunting image of a masked (thought by some to be an altered Betty Boop mask) assailant dressed in a yellow raincoat was inspired by the red-coated killer of 1973’s Don’t Look Now.
Halloween (1978) – Yes, John Carpenter and his crew actually spray-painted a William Shatner Star Trek mask white, redid the eyebrows, and teased out the hair to give Michael Myers his otherworldly “Boogeyman” look.
Friday the 13th, Part 2 (1981) – All good ’80s “slasher film” fans know that Jason Voorhees was seen sans mask in the original Friday the 13th, and that he first put on his trademark hockey headwear in the series’ third installment. What some folks forget, though, is that the resourceful young psycho concealed his identity with a handy burlap sack (one eyehole only, of course) in the second film. There is a certain hominess to his original mask, which may have influenced the look of Sam in 2007’s Trick ‘r Treat.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) – Fan theories abound as to whether or not this shocker is part of the Michael Myers saga. One thing is certain: the bizarre tale of Druid magicks, high-tech costumes with deadly microchips, and (yes!) Stonehenge also boasts some fine-looking–and lethal–masks.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991) – The costume designers went through a number of looks, from fencing masks to one that looked disturbingly like the “bee helmet” Nicolas Cage would later model in 2006’s The Wicker Man, for Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) to wear while in police custody. The one they settled on–a partial hockey mask with mouth “wires” and plenty of room for Hopkins to act with just his eyes–was clearly the right choice.
Scream (1996) – Did it derive from Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream,” ghosts in a 1930s Betty Boop cartoon, a 1969 Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? episode, or the film poster for Pink Floyd: The Wall? No one is sure, by in 1991 the company FunWorld came out with a Halloween costume dubbed “The Peanut-Eyed Ghost.” Five years later, producer Marianne Maddalena saw the mask and brought it to director Wes Craven’s attention. And “Ghostface” has been deconstructing the slasher film genre–as well as his/her/their victims–ever since.
Do you have a favorite masked horror movie character that we’ve neglected to mention? If so, please tell us about it in the comments below.