When you think about classic horror movies, what comes to mind? Chances are it’s some sort of evil killer chasing around teenagers and more often than not they’re wearing a mask. Those masks become inextricably linked with the characters that wear them, and some are so iconic a movie poster doesn’t even need words.
Jason from Friday the 13th immediately comes to mind, as well as Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise. There are also a bunch of other masks that might not be quite as legendary but still do the job of inspiring fear and malaise in people everywhere.
Not all horror masks are made equally, however. Let’s go through the best.
Michael Myers from Halloween
It feels like Michael Myers is having a moment. With the latest movie in the franchise, Halloween Ends, knocking fellow horror movie Smile off the top of the box office, Myers is officially back and still sporting one of the most recognizable horror masks in history.
This mask is scary for a few different reasons, the least of which is that it’s actually a mask of William Shatner’s face. In the first Halloween movie from 1978, Myers escapes from Smith’s Grove Sanitarium and steals some necessities from a hardware store, including the mask. There have been some varieties to the mask over the years, but that pasty white facial artifice remains a standard. So how did it come about? Well for starters, the first movie didn’t have the type of budget the new one does. While Halloween Ends boasts a budget of between $20 and $30 million (it’s already made almost 60 as of this writing), the initial film only had about $300,000 to work with.
This forced some creative cost-cutting measures. Production designer Tommy Lee Wallace ended up buying a Star Trek William Shatner mask for two dollars. To make the mask less human, he made the eye holes bigger and he got rid of the sideburns. Then he spray-painted the mask white.
There were a few other options before the production crew decided on the Shatner mask. At one point it was going to be a clown mask with red hair. A Spock mask and a Richard Nixon mask were also considered. Good thing they went with the Shatner mask, as it’s one of the most recognizable masks of all time.
Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
While he’s known as Leatherface, that name is sort of a misnomer as his mask is made from the human skin of his victims. So skinface is a better descriptive term for it. But the leather name doesn’t come from nowhere (we’ll get to that in a second). Leatherface is of course the antagonist from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
There are a total of nine movies, including prequels, sequels, and remakes, but none really match the raw power of that original 1974 classic, which made $30 million on a budget of around $90,000 – not too shabby. So where did the mask come from? The story is somewhat convoluted due to a pretty messy timeline, but there are some things that are canon in the universe.
Leatherface’s mom apparently worked in a slaughterhouse and died during childbirth. Leatherface was left to die by the slaughterhouse boss but he was taken in by a family and named Thomas Hewitt (he’s also known as Jedidiah Sawyer). The mask comes from having a reaction to a skin disease that severely disfigured his face.
He would get made fun of a lot and he wore a leather mask to hide it. This is where the timeline gets tricky but basically he killed someone, was sent to a mental institution, and escaped. Here’s where things get even weirder. Leatherface has a number of skin masks and he wears different ones depending on his mood.
For example, he’ll wear an elderly lady mask for his brother and a woman’s mask with lipstick in honor of his mother. Hey – if you forget the whole ‘murder and wear your skin’ thing, he’s kinda sweet! As for the short answer: he’s dealing with childhood trauma.
Jason from Friday the 13th
Jason Voorhees is a legend. One of the most recognizable horror movie villains ever. At this point he’s like Pepsi or Coke, just ingrained into the public consciousness. And that hockey mask – it’s like Weird Al’s curly hair or Michael Jackson’s weird relationship with kids, they don’t exist without each other.
The story for how the mask became a thing isn’t as exciting as say – Leatherface, but not everyone can use human skin the way he can. While he’s 100% associated with the hockey mask, Jason actually didn’t start wearing it until the third movie. Jason’s mom is the killer in the first movie and when he’s the killer in the second he wears a burlap sack over his face.
The reason he wears the mask is unfortunately circumstantial. The third movie was going to be shot in 3D and in the script Jason wore a mask, but the type of mask was never specified. During a lighting check, director Steve Miner asked for a mask and 3D supervisor Martin Jay Sadoff happened to be a big hockey fan.
He just happened to have a Detroit Red Wings goalie mask, and just like that history was made. In the movie itself, Jason also randomly grabs a hockey mask and puts it on without any real thought. In the 2009 remake, he starts with a burlap sack and it’s knocked off his head and when he goes to pick it up he sees the hockey mask and picks that as an alternative.
Jigsaw’s pig mask from Saw
The character that probably comes immediately to mind when we think about the Saw franchise is Billy the Puppet and his cute little bike. However, there’s another thing that really sticks out: the pig mask. It’s something that killer John Kramer and all of his associates use to conceal their identities. There’s also a lot of thought behind it.
Saw writer Leigh Whannell and director James Wan always wanted to incorporate some kind of mask for John and came up with the idea of a rotting pig’s head due to John’s crappy view of the world as well as a reference to the disease that was eating away at him.
We learn that the mask is a sort of tribute to the Chinese “Year of the Pig,” the same year John started his “work.” The original mask that producers got was from a Halloween store and fairly rote. The makeup artist on the film added things like long black hair and pus to make the mask look more realistic and uncomfortable. The mask eventually became one of the identifying characteristics of the franchise.
Ghostface from Scream
The Ghostface mask from the Scream franchise was immediately recognizable and also instantly iconic. Like Jason’s mask, the story behind it isn’t as exciting as the character itself. First of all, the mask was meant to be a reference to the famous Edvard Munch painting “The Scream.”
It also references the cover of The Wall by Pink Floyd and the ghosts from old Betty Boop cartoons. The mask also wasn’t created for the movie. It was bought from a company called Fun World as a part of a series called “Fantastic Faces.” After the movie it became the most worn costume of all time in the United States.
Screenwriter Kevin Williamson told Slashfilm that at first they couldn’t figure out what mask to use.
“No one could agree on a mask and I remember we were in a location scout, and we found Ghostface… in a box of stuff in a garage… Wes [Craven] immediately looked at it and said, ‘This is like the famous Scream painting.’ And so we took that to our production and we said, ‘Riff on this… make something like this.’ They must’ve done 20 different designs. Every one of them was rejected by the studio, and finally we were like, why don’t we just get the rights to this mask?”
Sometimes it’s just that simple.
Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs
Psychological horror has come a long way since 1991’s seminal classic The Silence of The Lambs, but those movies have a lot of debt to pay to Anthony Hopkins and his character Hannibal Lecter – a performance so good it won him an Oscar for best actor. Part of his iconography is the wire mask they used on his face.
Like a lot of other horror films, the production crew couldn’t quite figure out exactly how they wanted the mask to look. There were actually a number of different options, which you can see below:
Because they couldn’t quite agree on anything they decided to make their own, according to a “making of” feature. Costume designer Colleen Atwood said eventually they agreed on a design and decided to make it out of a certain material.
“We got more to the idea of the fiberglass mask. The thought had been for the mask to have a finish on it, but when we received the [final] sample, it was raw fiberglass, which looked like an old piece of dried up leather — or even skin. And it was so great, so it never went back for its paint job.”
Once they found the right mask, everything else fell into place.
