The Mask

“This is a living nightmare!” archaeologist Michael Radin (Martin Lavut) frantically spills to his shrink, Dr. Allen Barnes (Paul Stevens), explaining that his dreams have become all too real, even murderous. He’s convinced he’s fallen under a curse and that its source is an ancient tribal mask unearthed on a recent expedition. The mask itself is super-cool—a mosaic-style Aztec design modeled like a skull, complete with teeth and big, round eyes—but does it have evil effects on its wearers? The psychiatrist initially believes his patient to be rather disturbed, but once the archaeologist kills himself after mailing the creepy relic to his shrink, Barnes learns the truth for himself. Mask in his possession, the doctor becomes the film’s improbable hero—the sinister-eyebrowed dude frankly doesn’t seem like someone you’d want to bare your deepest, darkest secrets to—as the artifact’s power takes hold of him, too, like a highly addictive drug.

The Mask’s melodramatic subplots focusing on the romance between Dr. Barnes and his adoring fiancée, Pam (Claudette Nevins)—she, no joke, at one point sits at home sketching her beloved’s portrait while awaiting his arrival—and the almost comically lax police investigation into Michael’s death, may not be anything to write home about, but once that “unearthly” (Pam’s word) mask goes on, the action really comes alive. Those sequences—accounting for just about 15 of the film’s 83 minutes—are positively eye-catching, even without the 3-D experience (in theaters, audiences were supplied with Magic Mystic Masks, chintzy anaglyphic red/green-lensed cardboard glasses made specifically for the movie—pairs of which can be found on eBay today).  

Preceding the psychedelic-’60s phase by a few years, The Mask came out while Timothy Leary was still testing out LSD’s effects—but who needs drugs when we have movies? Director Julian Roffman, who started out working in documentary for the National Film Board of Canada but also dabbled in genre film—previously directing the Beat thriller The Bloody Brood (1959) and later co-writing the sci-fi/action hybrid The Glove (1979)—here sends us on a creepily atmospheric trip. The hodgepodge of haunting images depicting hooded figures, sacrificial rituals, smoke, skulls, eyeballs, and of course many macabre masks act as immersive hallucinations.

The Mask (later rereleased as Eyes of Hell) is known for marking some notable firsts: the first horror feature to hail from Canada, the first full-blooded Canadian production to secure a wide international release, the first film to employ the 3-D technique known as Depth Dimension, and the first—and to date only—3-D movie made in its country. It also almost enjoyed the distinction of having its surrealist dream sequences designed by Slavko Vorkapich. The man known as an originator of the Hollywood montage in films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) received screen credit for his prohibitively expensive ideas. Though only his influence lives on in the final film, that’s more than enough to make those segments a breed apart from the rest of the proceedings.