posted 08-13-2016 07:40 AM                       

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Canada's first 3D horror gets ready to scare a whole new generation

The Mask, an early Canadian horror movie released in the U.S. as Eyes of Hell, has been restored and reconstructed for public viewing. That makes it a minor miracle of film preservation as it opens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Friday for a limited release (with other cities to follow).

“I’m pretty thrilled — because it was out of mind and out of sight and maybe even lost,” says Jesse Wente, the programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival who supervised the two-year restoration. He presented the startlingly good results at TIFF in September. “This was not a movie that was on anyone’s radar!”

When Wente says “lost” he means that there were no complete prints of The Mask, which was made in Toronto in 1961 by Canadian director Julian Roffman, who died in 2000, aged 84. TIFF did have an incomplete archived print that was missing the movie’s critical prologue; the movie’s 3D sequences were also in rough condition. That version was shown once in 2011, but the overall print was so badly deteriorated it could never be run through a projector again.

But the 2011 screening, part of an audio-visual heritage day, was still a revelation. “We didn’t really know if anyone knew that this movie even existed,” Wente recalls. “Lo and behold, the show sold out and there was a whole crew of people who had brought their original 3D masks (from the 1960s). So there was definitely a cult following. That sparked the idea of a restoration, because TIFF is very much engaged in preserving and conserving motion picture history, especially when it comes to Canadian movies.”

The 3D gimmick is significant. The Mask contains three separate, surreal 3D sequences that begin whenever someone puts on the powerful tribal mask that gives the movie its title. Viewers simultaneously hold up their own 3D masks for the brief minutes each lurid colour-tinted sequence lasts. The rest of the movie is in 2D black-and-white.

The 3D effects make The Mask historically significant: It was the first time any filmmaker used 3D in a Canadian feature, albeit a decade after it became popular in Hollywood. The Mask is equally significant as Canada’s first horror feature, coming 16 years before David Cronenberg emerged with Rabid.

“It was made, of course, when there really wasn’t a commercial industry in English Canada,” Wente says. “Yet it is such a commercial product. And it jumbles the accepted timeline of Canadian movie history because it is such an outlier. We really just didn’t make movies like that at that time.”

The remarkable thing about The Mask — now that TIFF worked in partnership with Bob Furmanek’s 3D Film Archive in New Jersey to assemble the most complete version possible — is how entertaining the movie is today. It does not just look beautiful in its restoration. It is also genuinely scary, weird and engaging as it tells it story of how two men — one a scientist (Martin Lavut) and the other a psychiatrist (future soap star Paul Stevens) — are transformed into psycho-killers by the satanic properties of the mask.

Twitter: @Bruce_Kirkland

bruce.kirkland@sunmedia.ca

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