Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces

Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces
ISBN-10
1786834987
ISBN-13
9781786834980
Category
Performing Arts
Pages
288
Language
English
Published
2019-10-15
Publisher
University of Wales Press
Author
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Description

Why has the mask been such an enduring generic motif in horror cinema? This book explores its transformative potential historically across myriad cultures, particularly in relation to its ritual and mythmaking capacities, and its intersection with power, ideology and identity. All of these factors have a direct impact on mask-centric horror cinema: meanings, values and rituals associated with masks evolve and are updated in horror cinema to reflect new contexts, rendering the mask a persistent, meaningful and dynamic aspect of the genre’s iconography. This study debates horror cinema’s durability as a site for the potency of the mask’s broader symbolic power to be constantly re-explored, re-imagined and re-invented as an object of cross-cultural and ritual significance that existed long before the moving image culture of cinema.

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