Weirdhouse Cinema: The Mask (1961)

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe finish out three weeks of 3-D movies with 1961’s “The Mask.” It’s a black-and-white Canadian thriller full of surrealist visions and artifact-based freakouts. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and
today we are going to be talking about the nineteen
sixty one horror thriller The Mask, coming straight from Canada
and our third film in our three Weeks of three
D series. So this is a three D horror movie,
smelling like poutine, bringing some pretty good cinematography overall, and

(00:38):
also I think quite strong three D effect sequences.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah, this one is a film. I mean, given some
of the details about it, you know that it's the
first full length Canadian three D picture and apparently the
first feature length Canadian horror film, and that this is
nineteen sixty one we're talking about here. I think you
would be reasonable to expect something a lot more dash
than what we get with The Mask. I feel like

(01:04):
there's a lot of effort that went into this one,
and you can you can see the results of that effort.
It's gonna be fun to to discuss this one because
it's still at the heart a gimmick picture. It is
very much a three D picture that embraces the gimmick
that even gets a little silly with it at times,
and has that baked into the overall structure of the film,

(01:25):
and yet it's it's not dependent on the gimmick for
your cinematic enjoyment.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
I'm gonna say this goes. This fits somewhere in between
Treasure of the Four Crowns and House of Wax. So
Treasure of the Four Crowns was the most three D
movie we have ever seen. At least half of the
runtime is three D gags, and the three D gags
don't make any sense at all. In two D. It's
just pointless, just kind of stuff flying at the camera,

(01:54):
like people poking a broom handle or extending an antenna
towards your face. You know, it's three D for three
d's sake, and it doesn't really work very well without it,
though it is a very fun, campy ride. House of Wax,
on the other hand, was a movie that I thought
worked entirely without the three D effects at all. In fact,
you could watch it and not even know it was

(02:15):
a three D film, though we weren't able to watch
it in three D. I'm sure if you saw it
in three D that would add another layer of sort
of gimmicky enjoyment. This one fits somewhere in the middle.
I don't think it's quite on the standalone level of
House of Wax, but it mostly works as a two
D movie, and this is one where we actually did
get to watch it with the three D effects via

(02:38):
some glasses. Maybe Rob, you can explain the circumstances here
with some glasses, and you know what, once you have
the glasses on, the dream freak out sequences are even
more interesting and impressive.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah. Yeah, So the situation with the mask is that
it's not like our other two picks for our three
D tree. Here, it's not a situation where the entire
picture is in three D. Only certain sequences are in
three D, and this is of course just I think
gimmick excellence. Here. There's a magic mask in the movie.

(03:13):
When people put on the magic mask, they have these
intense vision quest sequences, these dream sequences, these psychedelic sequences,
and when the character puts on the mask, you the audience,
put on your three D mask and then you get
to experience this sequence in three dimensions, which I think
is pretty clever, but it also means that, especially on me,

(03:35):
this was a Chinoclassics Blu Ray that came out of
the movie. I believe that the Blu ray has a
three D version of it if you have all the
three D equipment to run modern three D on your
three D Blu ray and your three D TV and
with your three D glasses. But if you're two D
people like us, you can watch the movie in two D.
And then one of the extras on the disc is
you can watch those sequences. It's like something like twenty

(03:58):
something minutes total. You can watch all those sequences in
three D with the traditional red and blue three D glasses.
So we rented this one from Videodrome here in Atlanta.
Atlanta's only a video store. Go there if you have
a chance. It's a great place. It's like a temple
to cinema. But when we rented it, they rooted around

(04:21):
in this kind of tub of like paper cardboard three
D glasses and gave us several. They weren't sure exactly
which ones will work, so they're like, here, take four
of them, see what works for you. And it was
an interesting selection of glasses.

Speaker 3 (04:35):
I used the three D glasses from Saw four. What
did you use?

Speaker 2 (04:39):
I think I used them as well. Those maybe the
ones I had to turn inside out to get them
to work, because you have to have the right color
over the correct eye in order for things to sink right.
But it was cool. It was cool getting to watch
these altered state sequences in three dimensions. I think my
wife did laugh at me when she walked been and

(05:00):
saw me setting in the middle of our living room
floor in the middle of the day with these contraptions
on watching this sequence, and for me personally, I quickly
felt it was weird. It was intense, and it started
giving me a headache, which seems appropriate when you're engaging
in this experience of a character trying on a cursed

(05:20):
ancient mask.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
So before we got started, you were saying, Rob that
really it's the same concept as the Jim Carrey movie
The Mask. It's not quite, but it's pretty close. One
thing you'd have to invert is that the hero of
the movie is the Ben Stein character, the psychiatrist.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, what if in Jim Carrey's The Mask, what if
it didn't turn him into a fun, loving, over the
top zoot suit wearing a cartoon character. What if it
just made him kill people? Then that's what you have
in the mask.

Speaker 3 (05:52):
Now that's not quite fair. It doesn't just make him
want to kill people. It also makes him want to
understand science. He wants to keep putting the mask on
because he's like, think of the scientific value that will
come from me putting the mask on. I don't know,
Like it's never quite clear what exactly discovery is waiting
for him on the other side of the mask experience,

(06:13):
but clearly he thinks that this will reveal something about
nature and human nature.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
And I love that. I think this a great element.
I think the one thing that's missing from this cocktail
is sort of that to think to David Cronenberg's The
Fly is a great example of this. That's a movie
where you have somebody toying with some sort of technology
or discovery or revelation, thinking they can control it, thinking
that they can stay on top of it, thinking that

(06:38):
they can retrieve something from that experience, but then things
go too far and they're consumed by it. And it's
that middle ground that maybe in retrospect could have been
a little more defined in this picture, that period where
he thinks he's in control of it, where he thinks
he's making a breakthrough, but in reality, he's just being
pulled closer to the void.

Speaker 3 (06:59):
I made a comment in our notes exactly to that effect.
I was expecting a more gradual ramp up to mask
madness in this film, but instead it's just like there
is one taste of the mask and that is all
it takes before you are a full blown mask maniac
and there's no returning.

Speaker 4 (07:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:16):
I mean, there's kind of a Beatnick drug movie. Beatnick
Junkie Vibe did this where they get one taste of
the honey and then there's no stopping them. They're just
completely mad.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yeah, it's a reefer madness. One puff and now you're
playing the piano at ten time speed. Yeah, okay, we
ready for the elevator pitch.

Speaker 2 (07:34):
Let's have it.

Speaker 3 (07:35):
Doctor Alan Barnes has a very troubled patient, a young
man who says his mind is filled with nightmares created
by an ancient mask. When the mask comes into the
possession of doctor Barnes himself, he has to decide whether
he will shrink away in Cowardice or whether he will.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Ha ha. All right, I think that sums it up.
But let's go ahead and hear the wonderful audio to
the trailer in full. This is a good one. This one. Oh,
you'll get some taste in this trailer of things we're
going to talk about here in a minute. Quote Bomb

(08:22):
mass On now, Quote Bomb mass On now.

Speaker 5 (08:30):
No, ladies and gentlemen, there's nothing wrong with the projection.
But you can't share the shock until you have the
miracle movie mask. At showings of this motion picture, each
patron will receive his own miracle movie mask. Then, but
let's watch.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
The scene again.

Speaker 5 (08:46):
Then you will lift your mask as he lifts his,
and you will look through it with him, into the
weirdest nightmare world that man has ever dreamed, or the
screen has ever dared show the new realm of horror
that can only be seen through the mask. You to
tell you more is the supreme authority and all things weird.

(09:09):
Initiative is strange and mysterious. The world's greatest colosser and
collector of masks, mister Jim Moran.

Speaker 4 (09:17):
I have seen wonders. I've traveled to the remotest corners
of the globe, to dead cities, through savage jungles, to
the inner sanctums of esoteric cults, the temples of exotic rituals,
to tombs and caverns and palaces. The result the most

(09:38):
comprehensive collection of masks in the world summer works of art.
Some are astounding and horrifying. But nowhere in all my
travels have I found a mask so absolutely remarkable as
this mask, the Miracle Movie Fright Mask, the mask that

(09:59):
you will be invited to put on when you see
the motion picture called the Mask. This is the mask
that will open your eyes to such things as man
has never dared imagine, the mask that will make you
part of the sensations of the most staggering experience of
your life.

Speaker 3 (10:20):
But be warned, the.

Speaker 4 (10:21):
Things that you will see when you put on this
mask will surely take you to the very limits of
your nerves and to the very boundary line of sanity.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
All right again, Keinoclassics put out an excellent blu ray
of the film several years ago. It features both three

(11:12):
D for three D players and a two D cut
which is also just beautifully restored. This is a great
looking black and white picture. The disc again also features
red blue, three D and a glyph cuts of the
three D sequences that you can check out with glasses
classes sold separately, so you'll have to, you know, find
your own bucket of old cardboard three D glasses to

(11:34):
root around in. Maybe that's a bucket or tub you
have in your house. And I could be mistaken on this,
but it looks like, according to the letterbox, looks like
you can stream this movie at metrograph dot com. I'm
not sure what metrograph dot com is, some sort of
a theater company or something, but those seem to be
the main two ways to watch the film these days.

(11:54):
Though I was reading I was reading in one of
the Psychotronic Guides from Michael Weldon, and he'd pointed out that,
you know, it came out, maybe it wasn't that big
of a hit at the time, but he said that
they kept bringing it back to theaters. So it sounds
like for a while at least, it was regularly brought
back just because it was so gimmicky, you know, with
the three D it was kind of you know, maybe

(12:16):
a certain level of income was guaranteed from this film
when you showed it. So anyway, it'd be interesting to
hear from anyone out there, especially some of our more
experienced theater going crowd, if you've ever seen a three
D viewing of The Mask in the theater. All right, well,
let's jump into the connections here the people who brought

(12:38):
The Mask to life. We're going to start at the
top with the director and producer Julian Roffman, who lived
nineteen fifteen through the year two thousand. Roffman was a
Canadian film producer and director who came up through the
National Film Board of Canada. If you look him up
on NFB dot ca A, you can see a couple
of his earlier short films that he did, and apparently

(13:01):
he's somewhat of an underappreciated figure in the birth of
the Canadian film industry. Again. This film was Canada's first
three D full length feature and its first full length
horror film and one that was released internationally through Warner Brothers.
It was his second attempt at creating a film that
could enjoy this kind of breakout success potentially internationally, the

(13:22):
first being The Bloody Brood from nineteen fifty nine. No
connection to Cronenberg's The Brew. This was a bet Nick
crime movie with Peter Falk in it. You can really
see how much effort went into the mass though some
of the names and talents that were about to discuss
that he brought in to help realize this vision. You know,
I don't think it was really I don't get the
impression that it was as much of a treasure of

(13:44):
the four Crown situation where they're like, let's three D up,
we got, we gotta get in there, we got we
gotta give them all the three D before they know
it hit them, you know, just keep keep it coming
at the audience, before they realized that the rest of
the picture is not really all that wealth. I think
a lot of thought went into the mask. According to

(14:04):
Rothman's son, he even his father even contacted Timothy Leary
for a little inside into sort of like psychedelic experience,
though it is notable that this would have been pretty
early in Leary's days as a psychedelic researcher. This would
have been before the Concord prison experiment if I'm not mistaken,
But still, I mean, no reason to doubt this. Rothman

(14:27):
didn't direct again after this, but he went on to
produce a handful of films, including a nineteen sixty five
techno spy movie called Spy in Your Eye that I
believe involves like somebody's eye being replaced with a camera
and without them realizing it, or or some sort of implant,
So sounds kind of interesting. Also in nineteen seventy three,

(14:47):
a cult movie titled The Pie, The Peaks, I'm not
Sure the Pyx starring Karen Black and Christopher Plummer, and
an exciting, at least to me sounding techno thriller called
The Glow starring John Saxon, Rosie Greer, and Joanna Cassidy. Basically,
there's some sort of like power glove that lets you

(15:08):
like super punch people, and John Saxon has one, Rosy
Greer gets one, and they're on a collision course with
their power gloves.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
Look at this poster. It's like it's got spikes on
the knuckles. It's kind of a rollerball glove situation. And
the person wearing it is dressed like the Black Knight
from Monty Python.

Speaker 2 (15:29):
Yes. Yeah, there's a really long trailer for this, one
of those trailers that I think shows you pretty much everything,
Like they get you right up there to the final fight.
But that's ultimately what you're selling here, glove versus glove.
So I may have left to look into that one
in the future. Next time I need a John Saxon Head.

(15:55):
When it comes to the script here, I mean, I'm
to understand the Roffman had a at a hand in
almost every aspect of the film. But when it comes
to credited writers on this, it's basically a trio of
individuals who only worked on this film. Two of them
were associate producers Frank Tobbs who lived nineteen twenty four

(16:15):
through two thousand and three, Sandy Haver who lived nineteen
twenty five through nineteen eighty four, and Franklin Dellasert, who
live well, we don't know. I don't have dates for him.
This was his only film. But there's also a credit
for Dream Sequences to Slavko Vorkopitch, who lived eighteen ninety
four through nineteen seventy six. Now there are a couple

(16:38):
of caveats in his credit here, but essentially though he's
a very interesting guy. Basically, he was a Serbian born montagist.
His specialty was montages, at times kind of surreal montages
in films, particularly in the nineteen thirties, in the nineteen forties,
and I think certainly a time when there was a
lot more skill required and maybe a little a lot

(17:00):
more vision to create something outside of cinematic norms. He
worked in some pretty big pictures like Mister Smith Goes
to Washington has one of his sequences, and he was
brought in on the Mask to help bring these surreal
sequences to life and to also bring ideas for what
they might be. But apparently his ideas were both too involved.

(17:24):
I think one of them reportedly called for hundreds of frogs,
and also Roffman didn't think they felt visionary enough at
the end of the day. So his credit remains on
the picture though, But the Dream Sequences are said to
be primarily the work of Roffman, apparently according to his son. Anyway,
you know, put a lot of effort into to storyboarding

(17:46):
these out, trying to figure out how to then do
the things that they storyboarded, Like there are some snake
sequences in this that they really had. He really had
to sort of rack his brain to figure out how
they were going to make them work on screen. So,
at any rate, an interesting story.

Speaker 3 (18:02):
These would be the snakes jabbing in and out of
the eye sockets of the skull. Yeah, yeah, that's funny,
because I would say those are definitely not the highlight
of the Dream sequences.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
No, those are the points where you can tell, you
can see the struggle that was taking place. You know,
they're not the worst fake snakes I've seen in a movie,
but you know, in retrospect, they might have been better
without those snakes, especially since there are a lot of
things that work really well in these sequences, as we'll discuss. Yeah,
all right, the cast doctor Alan Barnes, who already mentioned

(18:35):
this is our main character. This is our mask researcher,
played by Paul Stevens, who lived nineteen twenty one through
nineteen eighty six, American actor, perhaps more recognizable for supporting
roles in nineteen seventies patent in nineteen seventy three's Battle
for the Planet of the Apes, in which he plays
one of the sort of humanoid mutant characters. I believe.
He did a lot of TV, appearing on such shows

(18:56):
as Gun Smoke and Mission Impossible. He also had second
billing is Diogenes in the nineteen sixty five film Hercules
and the Princess of Troy, starring Gordon Scott as Hirk
and directed by the Band family patriarch Albert Band. Mmmm.

Speaker 3 (19:12):
Okay, maybe we got to check that out. In the future.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
Yeah, I mean, I'm always up for a Hercules movie.
But anyway, Paul Stevens I really dug him in this,
so I that he does a fine job, and just
visually he reminded me a lot of Martin Landau. He
has that kind of like that kind of bill, that
kind of expressive face and that kind of energy.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
I agree. I thought he was very good and he
to me is sort of a cross between Martin Landau
and Scott Bacula.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
All Right, we also have Claudette Nevins playing Pam Albright.
She lived nineteen thirty seven through twenty twenty. Redheaded American actor.
Now that you can tell that she has red hair
in this, because it's black and white, it comes off
more as brunette, I guess, just by virtue of the
lack of color. But anyway, she had a long career
on t screen, appearing in supporting roles in such big

(20:02):
films as nineteen ninety one Sleeping with the Enemy, nineteen
ninety eight star Trek Insurrection, and she also appeared in
such genre films as the female wrestling movie starring Peter
Falk All The Marbles from nineteen eighty one, and a
nineteen seventy seven occult movie. This may have been a
TV film, I'm not sure, titled The Possessed, which had

(20:23):
a young Harrison Ford in it. On TV, she was
also a Croft Super Show regular player and appeared on
such shows as jag Melrose Plays Police Squad and Returned
to the Planet of the Apes. This, however, was her
first screen role. I thought she's pretty good though. I
thought it was a pretty good performance.

Speaker 3 (20:40):
Agree again, you know, I thought Paul Stevens and Claudette
Nevins both did rather well with a script that asks
them to have stronger feelings in lines about a mask
than would seem to make sense given their level of
experience with the masks so far in the story. Does
that make sense?

Speaker 2 (21:00):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, But ultimately, you know, this is kind
of this is to go back to Cronenberg's The Fly.
This is essentially the Geena Davis role. The person who
has feelings for the main character who's being pulled into
the madness of this obsession, and then ultimately is having
to try and resist being pulled in as well into

(21:20):
that obsession.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
Right. The voice of reason, the person who tells the
mad scientist, like, you've got to stop this is taking
control of you, except it takes control of him immediately
in this movie.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Yeah, all right. We also have Ann Collings playing Miss
Goodrich slash woman in Nightmare. This would be one of
the dream Vision sequence characters. She was born in nineteen
thirty nine. British born actor of TV and screen. She
had a small part in The Bloody Brood, but also
appeared in the nineteen seventy Rod Serling pen TV movie
A Storm in Summer, starring Peter Eustonoff. Now this is

(21:54):
nineteen sixty one. It's a Canadian film, but we've still
got to have a strong police presence and that. But
we have in Lieutenant Dan Martin played by Bill Walker
who lived nineteen twenty two through nineteen ninety five, a
Canadian actor who did various CBC TV variety shows in
the fifties and sixties, along with some other credits.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
And your John Agar of today's film will be.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
Yeah, this guy is the square jaw of justice. Ooh,
Now we have a very interesting, short lived character in
the film. The character's name is Michael Rayden R A
D I N. Which I realize is an actual last name,
but I also like it because in this film especially
it has a certain cronenburgery of energy to it, Michael Raid.

Speaker 3 (22:39):
And yes, like many Cronenberg character names, it has a
quality of it is a human's name, but it sounds
sort of like a dangerous chemical product. You know, It's
like Darryl Reviick or something.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
Yeah, and there is a certain danger to this character,
for sure. Michael Rayden is played by Martin Levoute, who
lived nineteen thirty four through twenty sixteen, a Canadian actor, writer,
and director. Outside of this, his more noticeable acting roles
are actually voiceover roles for such films as nineteen eighty
one's Heavy Metal and nineteen eighty three's Rock and Rule,

(23:14):
both notable, especially heavy Metal, both notable eighties animated films
aimed at a at a grown up audience for the
most part, or like I guess, like teen and above should.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
We say over eighteen as opposed to grown up maturity
level pending?

Speaker 2 (23:29):
Yeah, maturity level in question when we're talking about heavy metal.
I mean, I love heavy metal, but you know.

Speaker 3 (23:35):
It applies to us also, Yes.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
So. Lavoot also appeared on the Canadian psychic TV show
Seeing Things with Louis del Grand. We've talked about on
the show before. He's the guy who's head blows up
in Scanners, and as a director, his credits are pretty interesting.
He directed episodes of Fraggle Rock, the Eighties, Twilight Zone Revival,
and Friday the Thirteenth, the series, which of course Cronenberg

(24:01):
was also involved in. He wrote and directed the two
thousand and six documentary Remembering Arthur, a biography of Canadian
filmmaker Arthur lips It.

Speaker 3 (24:12):
You know, actually, I thought that Martin Levout was probably
my favorite performance in the movie. And it's a smaller
one because he dies early in the film, but he's
got a few scenes and in them his presence is remarkable,
very striking and unsettling.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
Yeah. Yeah, it's strong and creepy, and it hits you
rather early in the film. Like a lesser three D
picture would be very quick to just bombard you with
three D imagery. This film instead, like throws you into
a terrifying scene that will relate in a bit with
a very unsettling performance from this actor.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
He has a kind of Anthony Perkins quality. He's able
to combine a look of innocence and helplessness and even
placidity with nevertheless a strong but ambiguous aura of menace.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
Yeah, yeah, it's easy to imagine that Psycho may have
had some influence on the ultimate form of this picture.
But yeah, I think the Anthony Perkins comparison is apt.
All right. One more actor, sort of an actor of
note in this picture, because he's not really a character
in the film. He is there. You heard him in

(25:26):
the trailer. He is the mask expert playing himself. Apparently
Jim Moran, who lived nineteen oh seven through nineteen ninety nine.
I didn't know anything about this guy, but apparently he
was considered for a time the master of the publicity stunt.
He apparently made a career out of doing things like
finding a needle in a haystack and other things, you know,

(25:46):
making a big deal about some sort of a performance
based stunt, especially in the thirties, forties, and fifties, and
on more than one occasion he did one of these
stunts as part of a movie promotion. Apparently this sort
of thing was out of fashion by sixty one, but
they brought him in for whatever reason. I don't know
if this was through the filmmakers or if this is

(26:08):
something where Warner Brothers was like, we want to we
want to really push this. So we've got this guy.
He's great, he was great back in the day. He
can you know, he's a great promoter. Let's get him.
Let's film him with the mask, introducing audiences to the mask,
and then we can also shoot an additional sequence for
the trailer.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
I thought this was the funniest and hammiest part of
the movie, and it's right at the beginning. It's the
first thing you see.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah, so it is weird watching this film because it's like,
you're here for the three D. You come in, here's
this gimmicky introduction, and then you're gonna be thrown into
a horrifying chase sequence. So yeah, it's it's a It
really twists you around, all right. Finally, the music is
very interesting in this film. At times it's it's more

(26:55):
traditional late fifties early sixties thriller, but when it really
wants to lay on the menace of the titular Mask
or certainly immerse Us into these lengthy vision sequences, the
score goes into experimental electronic territory in a major way.
Highly effective and I think ahead of its time in

(27:15):
some regards. Really worth checking out, and you'll know when
it starts going into that electronic territory because it feels
more thoroughly modern. So there are two individuals credited here,
which again is not surprising when you sort of hear
this difference between the music. I wouldn't say that it
feels jarring, though I don't know it feels it feels

(27:37):
appropriate given the shifts in reality that are taking place
in the film. But apparently we have the electronic music
is brought to us by doctor Myra and Schaeffer, who
lived nineteen oh eight through nineteen sixty five, an electronic
music pioneer and one time head of the University of
Toronto Electronic Music Studio. He apparently worked with a lot

(27:59):
of some sort of like tape real based musical creation,
and he also studied folk music pretty extensively, so you
can certainly hear some of that. It seems like that
seems like this all went into choosing this guy to
create the audio for these sequences.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
Yeah, it sounds like that kind of tape based early
electronic music that you would hear in like the original
Doctor Who theme, Delia Derbyshire and things like that. So
it's very good for the scenes it's used in the movie.
He creates this kind of deep pulsing rhythmic theme for
the mask. It's in any scene where the mask is

(28:38):
calling out to someone to put it on, we hear
this kind of like throbbing, almost kind of like a
metal tape playback loop from below. It's very creepy and
it works.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
Yeah. Now, the other music in the picture is brought
to us by Lewis Applebaum, who lived nineteen eighteen through
two thousand, Canadian composer who worked a lot in radio, film,
and TV in addition to concert work. He was at
one point the music director for the National Film Board
of Canada. He apparently worked in Hollywood in the nineteen forties,
but then returned to Canada and worked there for the

(29:10):
rest of his career, where he was a pretty big
name in the Canadian composing scene, and ultimately was a
recipient of the Order of Canada, which, if I'm not mistaken,
is like the second highest civilian honor. All right, before
we get into the plot here, let's just have a
quick sample though, of that Myron Schaeffer audio from the film.
This is really good. All right, Shall we get into

(30:05):
the plot?

Speaker 3 (30:06):
Oh, I think it's time. So one thing I was
wondering about the opening credits. I watched the whole film
in two D, and then I went back and I
watched the dream sequences as the extras in three D
with the glasses, But I wonder were there other was
I guess I don't really know. Was the whole film
shown in three D and they just pulled those out

(30:28):
as extras on the disc? Or were those the only
scenes in three D? Because I'm wondering, like the opening credits,
you know, they don't have anybody saying put the mask
on now, but they have like those oscillating plasma effects
and things flying toward the screen. So I kind of
wonder if those were meant to be in three D
as well.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
I'm not for certain, but I would venture to guess
if the credits are in three D. But I don't
think anything outside of possibly the credits and definitely the
vision sequence as we're shot in three D, and I
think part of that, I mean, we know from our
discussions regarding House Wax, just how much effort had to
go into shooting three D. And if people aren't gonna

(31:11):
have their mask on for those sequences, why would you bother?

Speaker 3 (31:14):
Maybe they figured people would be trying out the masks anyway,
and during the credits, because it's the first thing that happens.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Yeah, and is someone who's whose head feels weird watching
three D? I applaud a film that says, let's let's
keep the three D limited to certain sequences. Agree, Yeah,
let's let's let's limit that.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
And actually it works very well with the conceit of
the movie because those are dream sequences, so it almost
it feels more acceptable that you would have to put
on a piece of equipment and see them differently because
they are showing you a different reality as opposed to
just scenes of the same contiguous, real three D space
in the narrative of the film suddenly coming out of

(31:55):
the screen when they didn't before.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
Yeah. It also I was thinking about this when you
put the mask on in the theater. I wonder if
it sort of also heightens the feeling of cutting yourself
off from other people, the idea that these vision sequences
are supposed to be inner journeys. You know, by engaging
in three D, by strapping something else to your face,
you're kind of perhaps cutting yourself off a little more

(32:20):
from the actual world surrounding him.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
Okay, Well. The movie begins with a statement by a
distinguished mascologist. This is Jim Moran. He is a man
in a suit and a tie, leaning against a wall
in a study that is covered in masks. He has
a wide, thick goatee, and he's holding a tobacco pipe
in his hands. And he says, my name is Jim Moran.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
I have just.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
Returned from a journey around the world collecting strange and
unusual masks. Is this true? I don't know about this.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
I have my doubts. Given what we know about Jim Moran.

Speaker 3 (33:02):
Well, he says, I think it's safe to say I'm
something of an authority on rare masks, festival masks, drama
and religious masks, dance masks, and death masks from ancient tombs.
Man's desire to change his face, to assume a strange
or frightening disguise, to impersonate his gods or to frighten

(33:22):
devils is a desire older than the history of language.
I've seen masks unearthed from the ruins of crumbling tombs,
and masks hanging in exotic temples to ward off evil spirits.
But nowhere in all my travels have I seen anything
to compare to the power of this mask, and he
reaches out. He lays his hand upon the central prop

(33:45):
of the movie, the mask, the one in the title.
It's kind it's like a human skull with a freak
out expression. It has sort of chameleon eyes that are
convex eyes with little tiny holes in the middle of them,
bulging out of the sockets, and then there is a
sort of mosaic tile skin all over it.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
Yeah, it looks really good in black and white. It
has definite meso American influences, I think on the design, though,
I'm kind of all over the place about where this
mask is supposed to actually be from. In the picture,
I feel like it's described as being both from India
and South America, but I could be wrong.

Speaker 3 (34:25):
I think they do clarify in the end they say
that it supposedly came from a place near the ancient
city of Tikal, which would be in Guatemala.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Oh okay, Yeah, but yeah, there are other times where
they're describing it in terms where I'm a little confused.
But at any rate, it looks pretty cool. It does
look it has those crazy looking eyes, and it's hard
to really judge the mask on its own merits in
this scene where we have this kind of dry introduction
by this guy who's definitely not Rod Serling, but also

(34:57):
whose description does kind of like at first, like this
guy's kind of dry, but the more he talks, the
more he kind of draws me in. But later on
in the movie, it's definitely creepy in the actual scenes
where people were tempted by it, scenes where people were
putting it on their face and like clutching it, all
while that intense electronic music is playing.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
And the lower jaw is only it's not rigidly attached
it like the lower jaw can jiggle when the person
wearing it moves. I don't know if that makes it
scarier or funnier. Maybe both.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
Well, we're not ready to put this on yet. There's
still more introduction, so Jim Moran keeps talking. I'm not
going to transcribe his whole speech, not least because the
sound in this movie is not fully normalized, And no
matter how much I turned it up, there were little
parts where his voice became quiet and I couldn't tell
what he was saying. This was also especially true of
a character we meet later named Professor Solmes. There were

(35:53):
parts where I could not hear what he was saying,
but I got the gist. Here are the bullet points.
So this mask in particular is the most diabolical of artifacts.
It's used in rituals so unspeakable that they have been
wiped out of the memory of humankind. Jim Moran says,
he is not a superstitious man, but no matter what,
he will not put on this mask, not for all

(36:14):
the gold and the indies. Isn't that what he says?

Speaker 3 (36:16):
Okay, you and the theater have been given a special privilege.
You've been given a mask too, referring to your three
D glasses. When somebody in the movie puts on the mask,
you put yours on too, and you will get to
see what they see, he promises, quote you will see
things never before seen on any screen. And then he again,

(36:38):
in very brod serling fashion, he introduces the character he's
like doctor Alan Barnes, you know, caught in the wheels
of progress. He says, you will meet doctor Alan Barnes.
He will put on the mask. Okay, thank you for
telling us. And again, when he puts on the mask,
you put on yours too.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
Now I want to describe the mask real quick. We
did not have to have access to an original, of course,
but it doesn't really look like the skull mask. The
version I've seen is green. It has like a red
and green panel on each eye.

Speaker 3 (37:11):
You're talking about the glasses people were given them.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
Yeah, the glasses people were wearing in the theater.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
It looked.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
It brings to mind more the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Actually,
and it has the label on it Magic Mystic Mask.

Speaker 3 (37:25):
I wonder if this mask had to be, like if
the specifications for printing it had to be sent out
before the film was actually made, and so they didn't
know what the final mask prop in the movie was
going to look like.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
Yeah, yeah, or I mean thinking back to the creature.
Creature was a three D picture, so maybe this was
a mask originally designed for some showing of Creature from
the Black Lagoon and then they just like repurposed it.
I'm not sure, but the printing on this as Magic
Mystic Mask for the Miracle Movie the mask, so there's
no doubting.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
That the Miracle Movie it's a miracle anyway, we've got
this Hammi gimmick. Introduction by Jim Moran, the world's foremost
expert on masks, and then we smash cut to something horrifying.
It's a woman in a dark forest, desperate, drenched with rain,
screaming in terror, and then we see across from her

(38:19):
a reverse shot the thing she is afraid of. It's
a man. It's a young man who doesn't look inherently
very frightening. He's not large or monstrous or wielding a weapon.
He looks kind of calm, expressionless, almost docile. But like
I said earlier about this actor, he brings a kind
of an unsettling Anthony Perkins quality with his expressionless face.

(38:44):
So the woman turns and runs. She's terrified. She's dashing
through the trees and the undergrowth in the rain, and
the man meanwhile is walking very slowly and calmly in
pursuit while she runs and flails around. And I wonder
if this scene inspired later slasher movie killers who do
the same thing. You know, the killer walks slowly and calmly,

(39:06):
refuses to pick up the pace, but somehow later they
appear in front of their victim to intercept them. So
some carnations of Jason Vorheez are like this.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
Another comparison to this guy's performance, he reminds me a
bit of the later performance by Robert Patrick is the
T one thousand and Terminator too. There's a way that
he in this chase scene, like he moves his body
at a steady pace toward the woman, but his head
is moving very little and his gaze is sort of

(39:39):
locked right on target the whole time, no blinking or
turning the head or looking away.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
Yeah. Yeah, this sort of great, relentless, inexorable approach. And yeah,
I was thinking about it. I was looking around a
little bit. I wonder how far this goes back, Like
what are some earlier examples this, And I don't know,
maybe it goes all the way back to Frankenstein, But
I don't remember specifically any scenes in Frankenstein that are
like technically composed in the same way, But I could

(40:09):
be wrong.

Speaker 3 (40:10):
Well, anyway, I thought this chase scene was very frightening.
It's stark, it's raw. I was immediately sort of at
full voltage from the cinematography. So it takes place in
a forest at night, but there are lights, bright ones,
with the sources obscured by brush, and the lighting is
not even throughout the forest set, there were sort of

(40:30):
beams that cut in particular passages through the trees with
black shadow in the spaces beyond, and I really liked
this effect. The film already has a distinctive and original
look and I'm a fan.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
Yeah, and again looks especially good in this beautifully restored
print that we were watching.

Speaker 3 (40:49):
Another thing that would be similarly done in later slasher movies,
where Jason Vorhees is running through the woods after some
camp counselor, is the cutting back and forth between the
feet or legs of the two people, so you see
her feet running in his feet walking. But eventually he
catches her and she is murdered in some way, obscured

(41:11):
by a tree. But while he kills her, she scratches
his face, leaving bloody claw marks in his cheek. And
then suddenly we cut to the next day in a
therapist's office and the receptionist is telling a man named
mister Raydon that he can't see the doctor yet, only
to pull back and revealed that it is the killer
from the woods who is here for his therapy session.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
Yeah, this is mister Raydon.

Speaker 3 (41:35):
So finally the therapist emerges and this is Paul Stevens as
doctor Alan Barnes. He invites Raydon in for his session,
and wow, I did not expect this movie to be
hitting such peaks of like weird sensation with mere dialog scenes.
I thought this therapy scene where nothing psychedelic happens, it's

(41:55):
just Raydon giving a disturbed performance. I thought it was
very unsettling and very good.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah. Yeah, no three D effects right in your face here,
It's just a solid sequence with some creepy dialogue and
great performance.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
So Michael Raydon says that he has had horrible, unshakable
visions of his hand on a woman's throat. He thinks
he may have killed her, and doctor Barnes suggests this
was just a dream. Then Raydon points to the scratches
on his face and he says, did I get this
in a dream? Doctor Barnes says, well, that could have
been self inflicted, and Raydon resists. He says, it's not

(42:32):
a dream, it's a living nightmare. Then there's this really
striking moment where he says I'm cursed. I am cursed.
Now Barnes scoffs at this. He says, Michael, you're a scientist,
is it very scientific to believe your nightmares or the
result of a curse. Isn't it more logical to believe
they're the result of unresolved emotional turmoil? And Raydon sits

(42:57):
down and he looks directly in Barnes's eyes. He has
this posture with his hand sort of outstretched, hovering above
the couch, quivering, and he says, doctor, I need help.
I'm like an addict. It's like I've been hypnotized. Barnes says,
who would be hypnotizing you? And Raydon says the mask.

(43:18):
Barnes says, what mask? How could a mask hypnotize you?
Raydon says the mask is to blame. So they negotiate
on this idea. Barnes expresses doubt that the mask could
really be the cause of Rayden's problems, but he's willing
to explore the issue further, so he asks Rayden to
show the mask to him. Raydon says, why do you

(43:38):
want me to show it to you. Barnes says, why
not if it's causing you all this anguish? Raydon says,
you want me to give it to you. Barnes says,
if you like. Raydon says, you want it for yourself,
and all the while there is this mounting sound, this
kind of low pounding, echoing rhythm in the soundtrack. Very

(44:00):
and then finally Barnes says, what would I do with
the mask? And Raydon says, you'd put it on, you'd
find out again, I think actually a very very good scene.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
Yeah, absolutely sucked me in.

Speaker 3 (44:14):
But Barnes again, he tries to sort of talk Raydon down.
He says that if he showed him the mask, they
could discover that the nightmares don't come from the mask
at all, but from him, and Raydon won't accept this.
He says, you're a fool, and he runs out of
the office. So after this, there's a scene with Barnes
and his office assistant. This is Jill Goodrich, and she asks,

(44:35):
you know, should we notify somebody, maybe mister Raydon's parents,
that he is so disturbed, And Barnes says, no, I
think he'll be all right. He just needs to cool down, Yeah,
walk it off. Yeah, So Barnes sends miss Goodrich home
and I guess they have kind of a flirty interaction here,
something that'll pay off later in the movie.

Speaker 2 (44:53):
Yeah, Yeah, I didn't didn't really register with me. Upon
first viewing, But there we come back this later on.

Speaker 3 (45:00):
Now, Unfortunately, the next thing that happens with Raydon is
he goes back to his apartment and he ties up
a package. He gives it to his landlady and asks
her to mail it mail it off to someone. Probably
not a big surprise that he's mailing the mask to
doctor Barnes. And then Raydon kills himself in his apartment.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Yeah, it's a dark scene. I can only imagine it
had even more punch than sixty one I'm assuming anyway.
But at any rate, Yeah, it's a disserving sequence, especially
if you're sensitive two sequences like this already though in
this picture though, it's like I could imagine some viewers wondering,
It's like, well, we promised three D, wasn't there going

(45:40):
to be three D? This film's gotten really real at
this point. But at any rate, Raydon did not walk
it off. Raydon is now dead and the mask is
in the mail.

Speaker 3 (45:51):
Here we begin. I think the least interesting subplot of
the film, which will eat up a lot of the runtime,
is the police investigation.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
Yeah. I would have liked more scientific inquiry of the
mask and less police randomly questioning anyone who knew Rayden
or involved in his treatment and care.

Speaker 3 (46:12):
Yeah, so the police detectives they arrive on scene, they
figure out that he works for a local museum of
ancient history. They go to the museum to interview Rayden's colleague,
Professor Solmes. This is the other guy whose audio was
really tough to hear sometimes. Solmes confirms that Raydon was
a brilliant archaeologist and that he had possession of several

(46:33):
artifacts from the museum in his belongings at home. This
was so that he could work on them during his
hours away from the office. But one of those artifacts
is now missing, a rare and beautiful ceremonial mask. And
then Solmes says, there's a legend connected with this mask.
The detective says, yes, I can imagine, but surely, doctor Solmes,

(46:55):
you don't believe in these legends, not in this day
and age, okay, And Someme's protests, He's like, I'm not
saying I believe in the legend. I'm merely giving you
information about the legend of the mask. And it's funny
that the detective reacts this way, because pretty soon he's like, oh, wow,
we need to warn people about the magical power of
this mask. Yeah, but anyway, so what Somelme says is

(47:19):
that it's not much of a legend, but he explains
it like this. The legend states that in the wrong hands,
the mask can do a great deal of harm. It
can put the wearer in a hypnotic trance, make him
do cruel and unnatural things. Then the cop says, that's
quite a legend, doctor, is it. There's not really a story,

(47:41):
there is there.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
No no, And you know, I guess in retrospect, I'm
kind of glad there's not a like culture specific story
that they bust out for the mask. And there are
plenty of examples of movies where you get into some
get into some trouble doing that. You know, it doesn't
necessarily up to certainly modern viewing. But the obscurity of

(48:03):
the mass, the idea that the mass real history is
so terrible that like our collective memories have erased it.
I like that, you know, it adds this element of
the weird and you know, a cosmic horror to the
whole surrounding lore.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
Sure. So yeah, so the detective says, that's quite a legend.
He says, if I believed it, it would solve a
lot of things. However, I'm a policeman, not an archaeologist. Okay.
Some's goes on to say the legend tells of rights
connected with the mask, which are filled with human sacrifice,
and then he says, now, suppose someone knew about this

(48:44):
legend and believed it. So next the cops go to
interview doctor Barnes. Of course, Barnes feels guilty now because
he failed to alert anyone about Raydon's agitated state. He
underestimated how us Raiden's condition was, and he wishes he
had brought it to someone's attention that could have intervened.

(49:05):
They discuss Rayden's obsession with the mask, but unfortunately Barnes
does not know where it is. And then there's a twist,
which is that this whole time they're having the conversation,
the mask is in camera. It's sitting in an unopened
parcel on the desk. So after the detective leaves, Barnes
opens up the package and he finds the horrifying mask
staring up at him. Oh and then we briefly here

(49:29):
get an introduction to Claudette Nevins as Pam Pam is
Pam Albright is Barnes's fiance. They're engaged.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
That's right, yes, different hair color. This is the individual
he's actually engaged to, not the individual works in the
office that he has a flirty relationship with.

Speaker 3 (49:48):
I think she says she's going to go out and
get something and come back. I don't remember what She's
going to run an errand and Barnes opens up the
letter enclosed in the package with the mask. So I'm
not going to read the whole letter, but it says,
among other things, once I was a scholar. Now I
am like an animal fleeing from my own nightmares, sleeping

(50:12):
by day, prowling by night. And how about you, doctor Barnes,
are you certain that just underneath the surface of your
own mind there does not lurk a storm and fury
waiting waiting to be released. So he sort of invites
Barnes to quote make the experiment. He says, you hold

(50:32):
the key in your own hand. If you are not afraid,
put the mask on now. Put the mask on now.
Put the mask on now. And so I think, if
you can't tell this is the queue to the audience
sitting in the theater like Oh, I need to get
the mask out of my purse.

Speaker 2 (50:51):
Yeah, yeah, we're up with that mask. Dig it up
and find it on the floor, dig it out from
underneath your seat, put it on your face. It's now
three D time.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
So doctor Barnes is overwhelmed with temptation. His hands quiver
as he slips the mask over his face. He starts
to tremble all over that. There's that pulsing rhythmic score
growing louder, and then begin the visions. So I'm going
to try to describe this first vision scene in as
much detail as I can, and maybe I'll do less

(51:22):
detail in the later scenes, but just to try to
give you a flavor, because a big part of the
appeal of this movie is the surreal imagery in these scenes.

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Yeah, they're wonderful. The main place my mind went was,
of course, the ring video like that it's not one
to one, but like that level of sort of like
cryptic surrealistic content that doesn't necessarily tell a story but
takes you to some sort of other realm.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
Yes, So in his office, first, doctor Barnes, he's in
his office with the mask on, and he sees a
kind of negative inversion of all color and light, and
we see ripples of plasma fluttering through the air like
in the gift store. Plasma ball smoke billows out from
underneath his patient couch, and then the mask, now enormous,

(52:13):
flies out of the wall to confront him, mask to mask,
and then the setting of the doctor's office fades away.
Now it is only emptiness and the mask. But the
mask does not remain a mask. It becomes a human skull,
real bone and crooked teeth, and then it is gradually
incarnated with eyeballs, but eyeballs without lids, so they stare

(52:39):
with the ultimate shock in surprise, there is a lidless
infinite gaze. Then the skull disappears, leaving only the eyes,
and the eyes rush toward us. Then more eyes emerge
from the darkness and they fly out of the screen
in your face. Then here we see a character someone.
Originally I did not know who this was, but I

(52:59):
think this is I think this is the same actor
as doctor Barnes. He looks much younger in this version
of himself.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
I thought that it first, but I think according to
the credits, this is actually a different actor. But he
is wearing the face of doctor Barnes. Huh. So all
the humans that we seem to encounter in these dream visions,
their faces have kind of like a waxen face over
their face that it's very reminiscent of, of course, the

(53:33):
highly influential French horror film Eyes without a Face. It
has that kind of strange impression and wide staring eyes there.
So you're supposed to think that this is like the
vision world version of Barnes. But he's like, he's what,
he's dressed in rags, kind of like tattered garments, and

(53:54):
he has almost kind of a Frankensteiny quality to the
way he's interacting with the world.

Speaker 3 (54:00):
Yeah, okay, so I did take this in the end
to be Paul Stevens, but I guess that could be wrong.
I did not pick that up at first, so I
don't know. It's a young man. I was calling him
the wax man or the waxy boy. He's a young
man in a tattered shirt and jacket with the waxy
looking flash dark, sunken eyes, and he stands there in

(54:21):
an empty place filled with cyclones of fog. And then
we see doctor Barnes still in his office, still wearing
the mask, and he sort of walks out to meet
the young man in the empty place, and then once
again color and lighter inverted. We see a sort of
negative image of everything, and then the young man in
tattered clothes, the waxy man, is somewhere else. He is

(54:44):
in a cave with stalactites hanging and leafless branches of
dead trees. These really pop out of the screen in
the three D cobwebs woven all around. There is something
wrapped in cloth, a giant sort of grub sh shaped
mass that seems to breathe as it hangs from a branch.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
Well, that moment is so good and and it also
really pops in the three day, because that pulsating mass
is in your living or work in the theater with you.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
So the young man feels his way through the cave
with his hands as if he couldn't see, as if
he were blind, or as if the cave were pitch black.
Except for us, the cave is full of light. Then
the young man comes out into an open space which
seems to be beneath large twisting masses which I interpreted
to be giant like tree roots. Then a figure warps

(55:37):
into view from the mist. It's a woman with long hair,
her head hanging down, draped in a black veil. She
removes the veil, and her skin is also crusted with
the waxy substance, just like the young man's. Her eyes
are kind of sunken deep within. The young man comes
toward her in a space which is now surrounded by torches,
and there are pillars that are covered in skulls and glyphs.

(56:00):
Behind the row of pillars and torches, there is an altar,
and over the altar all seeing is a giant version
of the mask, so this is kind of the mask
as a god. And then the woman beckons the young man,
but before he can reach her, she is captured by
a man in a hooded cloak wearing another mask, a
kind of different one, like a smooth, handsome, devious mask,

(56:23):
and the woman reaches back toward the young man as
if for help. There is high pitched screeching that's on
the soundtrack, though she doesn't open her mouth. It's like,
I don't know, rats are screaming somewhere. The young man
tries to follow, but he is intercepted by a different
cloaked figure, a man with his face hidden in shadow,
but a spot of light falling on one piercing eye,

(56:47):
and then, as if by some magic power, he makes
the young man relent and fall to the ground. Evil
men in cloaks stand abreast the altar. A disembodied reptilian
hand with massive claws strikes out at something I think
It slashes the arm of the woman and draws back,
dripping blood. The waxy faced young man again tries to

(57:08):
go for the woman, but he is repelled by some
kind of magic that transforms I think the one eyed
Wizard's arms into fire and then into slime beast arms.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
Yep, you can see the beads in the Three Day especially,
you see those beads of slime dripping. It's so good.

Speaker 3 (57:26):
Then the cultists here place the woman on the altar.
They slash her with some kind of metal claws, while
the evil wizard spits fire at the waxy young man. Eventually,
the woman dies, and her face on the altar transforms
into the skull from earlier with the lidless eyes. Then
the eyes become pools of boiling, bubbling liquid. Then the

(57:47):
skull shoots toward the screen, and then twin serpents dart
out of the eye sockets, and then they just kind
of jab in and out a few times and go blah.
It's not the most tremendous way to end the dream sequence.

Speaker 2 (58:00):
Yeah, the snakes again are the weak point of these visions,
but oh man, what a sequence though. It has this
feeling of surrealistic drama like on the stage. You know,
there's that kind of element to it, but very well
presented for the most part, strong tool music video vibes.

(58:20):
I would say, yeah, like we have we get the
feeling of having dived deep into the collective unconscious or
something here, you know, archetypes upon archetypes and strange prime
evil rituals. Yeah, it's wonderful.

Speaker 3 (58:45):
So that Yeah, that's the end of the dream. And
doctor Barnes wakes up on the floor of his office
clutching the mask and Pam comes back. She comes in
to find him like this, and she springs to his aid,
and I thought this was funny. She's asking him what's wrong,
but he's saying, like the mask revealed something hidden deep
inside my mind. And he's like, if what happened to

(59:07):
me is true, it is of unbelievable importance to the
world of psychiatry, something known three thousand years ago and
lost to modern science. But Pam is saying, isn't this
the thing your patient was saying that drove him mad?
And Barnes is like, well, he had no medical training.

(59:28):
He was a fool. I on the other hand, I
can handle the mask. It's mine now. So Pam, again
being the voice of reason, She's trying to convince him
to return the mask to the museum, but Barnes is like, no,
too important. I can learn so much from it about
a world deeper than the subconscious. I must hide it
from the police. And Pam wants him to go get

(59:50):
some help, to go see an old friend of his,
and not an old friend, an old teacher of his,
professor Quincy, who was his mentor. She's like, going to
He'll be able to steer you right. But at this
point Barnes he's too deep. He refuses. He gets angry
and rough with Pam. He says, I don't need anyone
look at it. Don't you feel it's power? And this
is the part where as we were saying earlier, I

(01:00:12):
was really expecting a more gradual descent into mask madness,
but this is just instant. He is now a committed
mask maniac. And will not be coming back.

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
Yeah, it's like I'm wearing it for the kicks.

Speaker 3 (01:00:26):
So he looks at it, he gets this crazed look
in his eye. He says, it's ordering me to pick
it up. It's demanding I use it now, now, now.
But Pam screams no, I won't let you, and she
grabs the mask, runs outside and hails a taxi. Barnes chases,
and he gets in his own car and pursues them.

(01:00:48):
So the taxi they both end up going to the
Museum of Ancient History, and then I don't know why
I thought this was so funny, but instead of going
in herself, she hands the mask off to her taxi
and sends him into the museum with it, and then
the taxi driver comes back out and they drive off.

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
I would have thought they'd have like a drop off
bin for ancient cursed artifacts, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
Ye had deposit after six pm?

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
Yeah, yeah, or like you know when you're at the
airport and they have like the amnesty bin for marijuana products.
It's like, hey, you got a curse mask, you know,
no questions asked, just drop it off in here.

Speaker 3 (01:01:22):
The illicit product that I was once forced to dump
at an airport security checkpoint was a bottle of hot
sauce because I was trying to bring it home and
they were like, sorry, it is above the volume limit
for liquid products. And I felt like a real like
a real criminal, but one who had been caught.

Speaker 2 (01:01:41):
Did they let you drink it all right there?

Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
Just to well? They might have, but yeah, I didn't
try That was a bummer, though it was good hot sauce.
I tried it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
Okay, but the mask has been returned at this point,
so the mask is safe. Problem solved.

Speaker 3 (01:01:53):
Yeah, it seems fine except Barnes. So she leaves after
dropping off the mask because the taxi takes her on
to somewhere else. And then Barnes arrives and he's like, okay,
I'm done with her. I got to go in the
museum and get the mask. I put the mask on.
Now now, now, now now. And he's walking around in
the museum looking at fossils, and I was like, wait
a minute. Didn't they say this was a museum of

(01:02:14):
ancient history. This looks like a museum of natural history.

Speaker 2 (01:02:18):
He's like looking at mammoth bones.

Speaker 3 (01:02:20):
They've got a whole wing of fossils that anyway. Whatever,
So we're in Solms's office eventually, and Barnes starts ransacking.
There's something calling to him from another room. The pulsing
mask music grows louder, so we think, you know it's
the One Ring. It wants to be found. Wait when
did Tolkien publish Lord of the Rings? Was it after

(01:02:42):
this movie came out? Do you think he was inspired?

Speaker 2 (01:02:45):
I mean it was out, so yeah, could be there
are strong one ring elements to it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
He published nineteen fifty four. Okay, for some reason, I
thought it came out in the early sixties.

Speaker 2 (01:02:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
Anyway, we cut to pamback at home. She seems to
be now she's just back home after having this harrowing
experience with her fiance, who became violent when she tried
to convince him not to put the mask on. But
now she's just calmly sitting on the couch drawing in
a sketchbook. Who is she sketching a portrait of? Is
that Barnes?

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
Maybe? So that's their way of working through it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:20):
I guess, I guess so, But let's see. Oh, anyway,
the police arrive. It's our detective, detective Martin I think
is his name. And he interrogates her about Barnes regarding Rayden,
and she's trying to cover for Barnes. She's like, mask,
what's a mask? I've never heard that, And the detective
is suspicious. I don't know why. The detective is picked

(01:03:40):
up on the legends so much. Now he's like, we
think that maybe this guy has the mask and he's
killing people.

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
Yeah, I mean, I guess if we're being generous. He
sees the legend as like a legend obsession, as motive,
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:03:52):
Yeah, but he explains the legend of the mask to her.
He's like, supposedly it brings out the evil in people.
Mag defies it, but again she pretends not to know anything,
and he's very disappointed and he leaves.

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):
Meanwhile, he does ask if she asks. She says, well,
what if you don't have evil in you? And he's like,
I don't know if you ever met anybody like that.
So he's a hard and detective, right.

Speaker 3 (01:04:16):
Yeah. So meanwhile we go back to Barnes and he's
found the mask. So I don't remember where he finds it.
Maybe he's in a drawer or something, but he finds
the mask and it starts talking to him. I think
maybe he takes it back to his office and it's like,
you know, saying the lines put the mask on now,
repeating many times. And then there is another psychedelic dream sequence.
I'm gonna explain this one in less detail, but there's

(01:04:39):
a one eyed wizard again. There's the boy with the
wax face. We're back in the temple. The altar is
kind of has become the same as the psychiatrist's couch.
Barnes in a suit and tie, appears on the couch
slash altar as himself. Then he becomes only his hands disembodied,
floating in the air, and they're kind of like rolling

(01:05:00):
around in spellcasting motions. The wax boy is threatened by
the cult. There's a fireball from heaven. The undead sorcerer
with a mask for a face comes out, and he's
like the big bad guy. He's throwing fireballs everywhere. The
mask face sorcerer embraces the wax Boy and then he disappears.
He reappears to find the wax faced woman standing under

(01:05:22):
a giant statue of a hand. She beckons him there
are snakes. The wax face comes off. The woman is
I apologize here. It was somebody familiar, but I couldn't tell.
Is this Pam or is this supposed to be miss
Goodrich from the office.

Speaker 2 (01:05:38):
Ooh, I'd have to go back and look. It could
be either of them. A case could be made for
either of them.

Speaker 3 (01:05:43):
Then a skull flies at the screen, and then Barnes
wakes up.

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
Now the undead sorcerer with like the oh, not the
undead Sorcerer, the individual with like half the face, the
one eyed Sorcerer, the one eyed Sorcerer. This is Raydon right, Yes,
I think so, it's the same act. Yeah, another great
psychedelic vision sequence. Though, like all of this stuff is
just it overwhelms you. But it also doesn't feel it

(01:06:09):
doesn't have that like kind of ring video quality of
also feeling completely random. It does feel like there's some
sort of you know, connective tissue. There's there's some sort
of cryptic message or story here that we just can't
understand with our modern minds. So I like it a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:06:25):
So Barnes wakes up, he takes the mask off. He's
drenched in sweat, exhausted from the hallucinatory journey, and he
finds his assistant coming into the office to work late.
This is Jill Goodrich and at this point I was like, oh,
I smell a murder coming on. So he insists on
driving her home and then he just goes straight to
like you're beautiful, I'm in love with you and there

(01:06:48):
and so then there's a fade till later. At first,
I was thinking, like, wait, are we going into a
dream where they're in the car later, But I think
it's just a cut till later that evening. But they
use the blurry dissolve like it doolu doolu kind of
fades out, and I don't know why they did that
if this is just later that night in reality.

Speaker 2 (01:07:09):
Yeah, I mean nobody told me to put on a mask,
so I assume it's just reality.

Speaker 3 (01:07:13):
Yeah, okay, But they're in a car. They're like kissing
and whispering sweet nothings, and then he starts strangling her.
Obviously he's obsessed with mask murder now. But her life
is saved when he accidentally honks the car horn with
his elbow and this snaps him out of it, and
she gets up and runs away and escapes. So next scene,

(01:07:33):
he's visiting a friend. It's like a nerdy looking guy
with a model ship under construction on the desk in
front of him and this friend. Oh, Barnes is essentially saying,
it's gone too far. I must understand the mask. You
must help me and his friend here we figure is
Professor Quincy, the guy who Pam tried to send him
to earlier.

Speaker 2 (01:07:54):
Old man Quincy.

Speaker 3 (01:07:56):
You know, does Quincy seem any older than Barnes to you?
It looks to me like they could be the same age,
or he could be even younger. They do give him
kind of frosty looking hair, looks maybe like sprayed on gray,
but he does not seem old enough to have been
Barnes's mentor no.

Speaker 2 (01:08:14):
No, maybe he just has tenure or something. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
But Quincy says, you were my most brilliant student. Now
you're in the same position Raygen was. But anyway, so
they're talking in Quincy is a real wet blanket. He's like, look,
you shouldn't put the mask on again, you shouldn't give
into its malevolent power, and you should return it to
the police since it's stolen anyway. Blah blah blah. Barnes
hates this. He bucks against all of it. He's like

(01:08:38):
actually I will put the mask on again and you
can't stop me. I must understand how it works.

Speaker 2 (01:08:44):
And again, it would have been nice to have more
of this, like what is the plan? What are you
hoping to get out of this? But it's just straight
beatnick junkie madness. At this point, Quincy finally agrees. He says, Okay,
you can put the mask on, but only under control
old conditions here at my house. And when I say stop,
it has to stop now. In my notes on the plot,

(01:09:06):
I did say we cut back to the police, and
then I was just like, nothing to report in this
scene is more doodling about at the police.

Speaker 3 (01:09:14):
I think they do some forensics or something. They're like,
look at our machine that can analyze fingerprints. But later
Barnes is alone with the mask in his darkened office,
like stroking the mask and gazing at it lovingly, and
Pam comes in and interrupts him, and she asks him
what's going on. He says, it's not just a mask,

(01:09:34):
it's a dream. It's a hope, the hope of man
to understand his own mind, to know what he really thinks.
It can show us places in the human brain that
man has never reached before, and Pam doesn't quite understand.
He sort of patronizes her and then commands her to leave.
He basically gives an I can quit the mask anytime
I want speech, but she rebukes him, and she has

(01:09:58):
a good scene where she she like again, this is
a very voice of reason scene. She rebukes him for
how he has let the mask take over his soul,
and eventually she talks him into going straight to Quincy's house.
From there and Quincy gives him a strong sedative. I
guess he just has these lying around. But then Barnes
wakes up in the bedroom at Quincy's house and we

(01:10:19):
hear the rhythmic mask music again and the chant put
the mask on now, and we get a final dream
sequence he puts the mask on, and I'm not going
to go into as much detail about this one either,
but there's sort of a coffin gondola ride on the
river sticks solid choice, Yep, yep. There's a giant version
of the mask again, this time it vomits snow at him.

(01:10:43):
And then there's the woman in the dream lying on
the altar and we see like X rays of her
legs and see the bones and then.

Speaker 2 (01:10:51):
There's that, by the way, looks better than you might imagine.
Like I actually thought this looked pretty good, even though
just describing it it might sound hokey.

Speaker 3 (01:10:59):
Agree. Agree, there's a skeleton, hug.

Speaker 2 (01:11:03):
Let's sell on that one.

Speaker 3 (01:11:04):
Yes, the altar crumbles, they sort of fall through the floor.
There's fire everywhere, and then the mask comes off, and
then we get sort of a final confrontation. Barnes confronts
Pam and Quincy. He wants to he wants to escape
the house. They tell him he can't, and he says
they're both rotten. He says, I open up the knowledge

(01:11:25):
of the universe to you, and you spit at it.
And they sort of fight. He overpowers Quincy. I think,
does he kill Quincy or does he just sort of
knock him out? I don't think he just kind of
knocks him out. Yeah, But he goes out the door.
He gets into his car. The Pam calls the police
to bring them, and then Barnes goes to Jill Goodrich's house.

(01:11:47):
The office assistant, Uh, oh, this seems like trouble, I
guess she Oh wait, did I misremember earlier her escaping?
Maybe he just honks the horn and stops choking her,
and then she stays in the car because she gets
in the car with him again and they drive out
to I don't know, to Lover's Point, and they're like

(01:12:09):
lying there in the car and Barnes is looking up
at the night sky, beholding the horror of the cosmos,
and he tells her to look at the stars. He says,
for you will never see them again because I am
going to kill you. And she's like, ah, stop telling jokes.
And then he said this, I wrote this quote down.
He says, I must, I must experience the greatest act

(01:12:32):
of a human mind to take another life. But she
runs away. So he fortunately does not kill Jill.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
But clearly and he is fully whacked out on mask
at this point.

Speaker 3 (01:12:43):
Yes, And then he goes back to Quincy's house. I
guess they had to have the showdown here. So he
goes back there and he argues with Pam about the mask.
He tries to force Pam to put the mask on,
but then I thought this was a good twist. He
finally does force the mask onto her head, but she
doesn't see anything. She doesn't see like she doesn't have

(01:13:04):
a vision. She just sees him through the holes in
the eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
Yeah. I like this choice as well. I'm not exactly
sure what to make of it, and I'm still sort
of pondering over what it means, what it could mean,
but the effect is nice.

Speaker 3 (01:13:18):
Well. I think one interpretation of it is that what
Barnes said to Raydin way back in the therapy scene
at the beginning was true. Maybe the mask actually has
no magic power. It is just bringing out something latent
in yourself, And so what was really going on with
Raydin was his unresolved emotional turmoil, and what's really going

(01:13:39):
on with Barnes is the same. That it's just sort
of like giving you permission to have these experiences and
unleash the evil in yourself, but it's not actually magic.
I guess Another interpretation is what Pam said, which is
she's like, so it magnifies the evil in you. Remember
she says, what if you don't have any evil in you?

(01:13:59):
And the detective is like, I've never met anybody like that.
Maybe the deal is Pam has no evil in her.

Speaker 4 (01:14:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):
I do like the idea of it being, you know,
you're treating it like a telescope or a microscope, you know,
very much in line with the psychedelic experience, and very
much in mind with the sort of conversations that were
already taking place at this point regarding psychedelic substances like
psilocybin and LSD. You know that it would provide some
sort of insight, but who knows what you might see,

(01:14:26):
who knows what it might reveal.

Speaker 3 (01:14:28):
Well, in the contrary to what a lot of people
sort of end up believing after they take these substances,
that like, it has put me in contact with external
sources of information that have revealed things to me. I
don't see any reason to actually believe that's true. Probably
what it does is it causes you to have experience
based on things that you already think and already believe

(01:14:49):
and feel.

Speaker 2 (01:14:51):
Or it opens up recesses of the human mind that
have not been explored in three thousand years. Where there
are snakes.

Speaker 3 (01:14:59):
That's true, there's snake. They jab in and out they come. Yeah.
So anyway, uh oh yeah, yeah. So Barnes does not
like the fact that Pam doesn't see anything in the mask.
He is clearly flustered and and this is not what
he expected, and he's upset by it. So he's like, well,
I guess I have to kill Pam now. But before

(01:15:21):
he can kill Pam, Detective Martin arrives and he does
a he does a chop on Barnes's neck to subdue him.

Speaker 2 (01:15:28):
Yep, yep, a nice, nice tight karate chop right to
the back of the neck. You know, we never see
good karate chops like this in films anymore.

Speaker 3 (01:15:35):
James Bond used to do it in the early James
Bond movies.

Speaker 2 (01:15:39):
Yeah, there's a be interesting to see a breakdown of
karate chops in films, you know, because yeah, there was.
There was certainly a heyday of the karate chop. Nowadays
it's all like arm bars and in and a takedowns.

Speaker 3 (01:15:54):
Yeah, so that's the that's the final confrontation. And then
the mask is returned to the museum. Wait, so I
don't know did Barnes survive or was he killed by
the karate chop?

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):
No, he couldn't have been killed by the karate chop.

Speaker 3 (01:16:08):
Do they show him again?

Speaker 2 (01:16:11):
They don't show him again, but I guess, which seems
like a mistake. You know, we should have gotten that
sort of psycho esque scene of Barnes put away somewhere
right that would have been nice and creepy, but for
whatever reason, we don't have that. But this feels too much,
like this feels like a tight Spock esque strike here

(01:16:31):
from our detective, like this is this incapacitates, it does
not kill.

Speaker 3 (01:16:35):
That's right. So the epilogue, we don't really see what
happens to Barnes. Instead, we go to the museum. The
mask has been returned. It's on display. We see a
tour being led through the mask wing of the museum,
and then there's kind of a loan dude from the
tour who's drawn to the mask. He hears the pulsing
and he walks up to it entranced, and there is
fire that fills the screen. So I think it is suggesting, oh,

(01:16:58):
the Mask has a new someone.

Speaker 2 (01:17:00):
Yeah, I think solid creepy ending, even if this dude
is a complete stranger, new character introduced. But yeah, this
feeling that the cycle will continue. The will of the
Mask cannot be undone.

Speaker 3 (01:17:13):
And that's the end of The Mask nineteen sixty one.
And I guess of our three weeks of three D
this has been a fun journey.

Speaker 2 (01:17:19):
It has. Yeah, we got to look at three different
decades worth the films we went to the sixties, the fifties,
and the eighties. You know, we discussed possibly hitting other decades,
but some of the other decades are harder to early
pin down for what you would cover from say like
the seventies or certainly you know, recent decades. But I
feel like each one had its own vibe, its own

(01:17:40):
take on three D. It represented different things about about
the various three D booms and the sort of things
that filmmakers would do to embrace three D to different
levels and use it to tell a story. All Right,
we're gonna go ahead and close it up there. We're
gonna throw the three D glasses back into the bin.
But we'd love to hear from everyone out there. We're

(01:18:01):
already hearing from some folks regarding some of the three
D films that we discussed here, some folks talking about
their experiences seeing them m three D in the theater.
So keep it coming. We'll be back next week with
a new edition of Weird House Cinema. Weird House Cinema
publishes on Fridays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
podcast feed. We're primarily a science podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays we set aside

(01:18:24):
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film
on Weird House Cinema. If you want to see other
films that we've covered, if you want to see a
nice list of them, go to letterbox dot com. It's
L E T T E R B O x D
dot com. Our user profile there is weird House. You'll
find a list and you'll see all those movies.

Speaker 3 (01:18:40):
Huge thanks to our audio producer Jjposway. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:19:00):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.