The Mask

The Mask (1961)

Look through the mask...if you can't take it...take it off!

A young archaeologist believes he is cursed by a mask that causes him to have weird nightmares and possibly to murder. Before committing suicide, he mails the mask to his psychiatrist, Dr. Barnes, who is soon plunged into the nightmare world of the mask.

Date of release
1961-10-27
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (39)
Runtime
1h 23m
Genres
Horror, Thriller
Director
Julian Roffman

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $287K
  • Filmed in: Toronto

The Mask is a 1961 Canadian surrealist horror film produced in 3-D by Warner Bros. It was directed by Julian Roffman and stars Paul Stevens, Claudette Nevins, and Bill Walker. It was written by Franklin Delessert, Sandy Haver, Frank Taubes and Slavko Vorkapich.

Production

Julian Roffman, a documentary filmmaker who directed The March of Time newsreels, directed The Bloody Brood in 1959, with Nat Taylor as a partner. Frank Taubes and Sandy Haber, two New York advertisers, proposed to Roffman and Taylor, without a script, a 2D film with 3D sequences. Taubes and Haber produced test footage for the film, but Roffman was unimpressed and stated that their 3D effects were "crap".

Raymond Spottiswoode, a friend of Roffman, developed a 3D system called Depth Dimension while working for the United Kingdom National Research Council and The Mask was the first film to use it. The NRC created a 20-minute short using the system ten years prior, but had not reused it. The NRC rented the 3D cameras to Roffman and Taylor for £4,000 a week.

Roffman stated that the idea for the film's plot came after he saw a museum exhibit on the Aztecs and modeled the mask in the film based on an Aztec mask. Joe and Vicky Morhain were hired to write a script, but had difficulty writing the dream sequences. Slavko Vorkapich, who had developed montage sequences for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), wrote the dream sequences. However, Vorkapich's ideas were too expensive and was working slowly.

The dream sequences were written by a collection of people including Herb Alpert, the film's cinematographer and brother of Harry Alpert; Gordon; Townsley; Schwartz; Williams; and Hugo Wuetrich. Wuetrich was a storyboard artist and drew many of the ideas, including ones that were not filmed such as a scene of giant spiders attacking the protagonist.

The film was shot over the course of ten weeks in Toronto from 22 March to May 1961. The 14 minutes of 3D scenes were shot over eight weeks while the remainder of the film was shot in 16 days. The 3D scenes were shot in black and white, but were printed using colour film stock. $100,000 was budgeted for the 3D photography before the effects were added. The 3D scenes were shot first as they were more important according to Roffman.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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