The best slasher horror movies rely on these 6 masks

John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic HalloweenWhile it wasn’t the first movie to use slasher, it inspired others who rewrote a lot of the elements that fans love about the genre. The most lasting element of slasher movies is perhaps the cast of young people who are picked off one by one. HalloweenThe mask. The killer Michael Myers — which Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill sometimes call “The Shape” in their script — wears a ghostly white mask, blank and expressionless.

In the movie’s reality, Myers swipes the mask from a store. But Halloween’s production designer Tommy Lee Wallace actually made the prop by spray-painting a pre-existing mask of William Shatner’s Star TrekCharacter Captain Kirk by widening the eyes. Though ostensibly an off-the-shelf product, the modified mask was strangely grotesque — and now, it’s iconic. The time was now Halloween’s closing credits rolled, memorable masks had become essential accessories for blade-wielding maniacs.

Horror filmmakers experimented with different looks for masks over the decades and decades to come. They have reimagined them in fascinating new ways. Halloween’s “disturbingly abstract” mode. Understanding the blurred lines of categorization, let us now present six major groups of slasher-masks. They are categorized by the way they look on the surface, and the effect they have on the audience.

Blank and/or sleek

Universal Pictures

Prior to HalloweenIn horror movies, the cleanness of masked killers is what they gravitated to. In Mario Bava’s seminal giallo film Blood and Black Lace, the villain’s head is wrapped in a skin-tight, shroud-like, anonymous white cloth — as is the head of the murderer in Sergio Martino’s classic giallo Torso, and the one in Clive Barker’s cult favorite Nightbreed. By contrast, the plastic, silver half-mask in Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the ParadiseIt stands out with its prominent bird-like nose & large eye-holes. Its dazzling appearance makes it seem unreal.

In Sophia Takal’s 2019 version of Black ChristmasThis mask is a symbol of misogynistic evil and it’s vastly different than the previous versions. It’s black and polished, looking like faux-stone. Yet like the white and silver masks above, there’s an emptiness to the design that allows viewers to project their impressions and fears. There’s something sickly clinical about all these masks. They’re not like something you’d see on a phantasmagorical monster. They’re more like what some very human, very kinky fetishist might wear.

Sacks

Warner Bros. Pictures

As with the blank, shiny masks of movie stars, burlap masks are fundamentally featureless. But there’s a rawness to sack-masks that makes them more shocking than a form-fitting or a craftily molded blank mask. Serial murderers who throw a bag over their heads seem like they’re in a hurry. They need to kill. Get it now

One of the first of the sack-headed slashers — not so well-remembered today — appeared in the 1976 horror film The Town that Feared Sundown. Charles B. (Arkansas B-movie Impresario) creates a microbudget thriller. Pierce The Town that Feared Sundown riffs on the semi-true story of a 1940s “phantom killer.” Later examples of effective bag-masks include StrangersIts sequel The Strangers, Prey at Night; and the scarecrow-masked kiddo known as “Sam” in the anthology film Trick ‘r Treat

The sack’s disorienting visual effects can be explained by its resemblance with a scarecrow. Burlap-covered killers look as though they once were stuck in cornfields by farmers to scare their flock of birds. Now they’ve come to life and they’re coming after You

Off the Shelf

Image: Paramount Pictures

Sometimes even horror fans can forget this. Friday, 13th’s Jason Voorhees wasn’t the killer in the 1980 original (spoiler alert: it was his mom) and that he didn’t wear a hockey mask in the 1981 sequel (where he wore, instead, a sack!). It wasn’t until 1983’s Friday 13th, Part IIIJason got the hockey mask that has been with him since his first franchise entry. Sometimes his masks look like they could see action tomorrow at a local ice rink, and sometimes they look as outsized as Jason himself has become over the decades, as he’s evolved into something Superhuman.

The quasi-practical mask isn’t superCommon in slashers. (One of the most prominent non-Voorhees examples is the gas mask in 1981’s My Bloody ValentineIn its remake in 2009. The horror movies that make use of them create a fear in the audience. It might seem normal to see someone wearing a hockey or gas mask while walking through an arena or mine. If we were walking in the parking lot, would it be strange to see someone wearing a gas mask? A man in a gas mask approached us. We’d likely be unnerved, wondering why someone was wearing that out of its usual context. We’d be confused and panicked … right up to the moment when a pickaxe started swinging toward our chest.

Animals

Lionsgate Image

Nearly all slasher movies call back to cautionary fairy tales and the notion of a “big bad wolf.” But some are more explicit about thIt is than others. In Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass’s meta-horror Creep films, for example, the killer — if he actually is a killer and not just a lonely prankster — dons a wolf head. The home invasion thriller You’re NextIntruders appear to disguise themselves as lambs, tigers, or foxes. And even in the Saw franchise — which already has horrors aplenty — the writers and directors come back again and again to the image of a disgustingly realistic pig mask.

Wolf or not, it’s easy to see why animal masks have such a visual impact. They’re a reminder that we aren’t too far removed from any other beast that’s out in the wild, scratching for survival and trying not to get eaten. They’re also a reminder that we share this planet with other creatures, who can be inscrutable and sometimes dangerous.

Ironic

The 1976 curio is a good choice for young horror lovers. Alice, Sweet AliceA brain-bending murder mystery in which several characters, including the killer, wear yellow raincoats with baby doll masks. This is a prime example of a kind of slasher mask that’s still used effectively today: one that’s outwardly cutesy and fun, but which disguises something menacing. Slasher fans have been able to see similar masks in recent years such as the Happy Death Day films (with the oversized baby-face masks), and the Purge series. In these movies, some anarchic agents wore grinning masks with puffy, round cheeks like a mixture of Jimmy Carter and Guy Fawkes.

One of the most enduring ironic masks is worn by multiple iterations of “Ghostface” in the Screamfilms. Those films are at once ruthlessly terrifying and smirkly self-aware; so it’s no coincidence that the Ghostface mask resembles Edvard Munch’s painting Scream. As in the movies, Ghostface is kind of a joke. But, perversely it taps into some real, hurtful emotions. It’s no wonder Ghostface has become such a popular Halloween costume in the 25 years since the first ScreamThe mask is fun! It’s fun to wear the mask. AndIn almost equal parts, disquieting

Grotesque

Criterion Collection Photo

Ask any film enthusiast what their favorite slasher masks are. Odds are, there will be a fair number of votes for Jason Voorhees’ arena-ready attire, and perhaps even more for Michael Myers’ pale, bloodless Shatner. But even hardcore fans of the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises will likely admit that the most bone-chilling masked killer is Leatherface, from 1974’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre Its many, many sequels. A wild cannibal — who like any good hunter tries not to waste any part of his kill — the hulking Leatherface typically covers his actual face with the stitched-together features of his victims. He’s a bad dream, come to life.

Leatherface’s original distorted, decaying look also set a standard that many subsequent slashers have tried to match. It’s always going to be a challenge to come up with a mask as singularly horrifying as his; but the teams on movies like The Burning Behind the Mask SmileyMany more designs have been created that are close to this, using design motifs such as exaggerated eyes or mouths and stitching that looks like scars.

All of this brings us back the original HalloweenThis is how it looked after a couple of minor adjustments to the color and the features that make up a human’s face. InHuman. A great horror film mask is able to do this: Take something familiar and make it appear alien. Sometimes these films and their costumes frighten us just by warping the ordinary, and reminding us that we’re not as far removed as we think from living inside a nightmare.