Written by Jonathan Wojcik
Morbid Enterprises Masks
It's been a while since we've reviewed some Halloween masks, hasn't it?
Three years, in fact, since I pretty much scoured the internet for noteworthy examples back in 2013 and had an all-out Halloween Mask blitz.
But, a lot can happen in three years, and I've repeatedly seen masks under the "Morbid Enterprises" brand ranging from the positively kickass to the bafflingly ludicrous,
both of which we're going to check out today!
Let's start with the mask that actually spurred me to look into this brand. I spotted "ROCK ON" at Oregon's own "Halloween Warehouse" only days ago, and I knew I couldn't get away with never showing you something this completely ridiculous. Us this entity some sort of musical demon, or is its love of metal just incidental to being a hand-headed abomination?
What's even better than ROCK ON is the fact that you can buy basically the same exact mask without any face, just in case you really wanted your entire head to be one big giant horned hand with "METL" tattooed across its fingers but you feel having a
face on said hand is just
a tad much.
From the preposterous to the genuinely disturbing, this mask is simply known as "WARTZ," and it wouldn't be half as creepy if it were any other kind of blemish. Warts are
messed up. A wart is pretty much a virus rebuilding your flesh into a high-volume virus factory, hoping you might brush them up against somebody else's flesh so they can set up a new colony, and you never know if a wart is going to go away on its own, hang out indefinitely or just keep getting worse and worse.
The fact that this guy's warts are so concentrated around his mouth and even moved to his
tongue is one of the most horrible things I have ever considered.
...But if WARTZ is too creepy, just absorb this "SCREAMING EAGLE" for a while. In fact, the next time anything at all makes you feel afraid, or sad, or angry, or even merely bored and agitated, I want you to picture SCREAMING EAGLE. Let this face fill your mind's eye with its glory. Imagine the sound of this eagle actually screaming, as advertised. Every single person reading this is probably imagining a completely different scream, in a completely different voice, and I think that's just magical.
CREEPY TIME! Anyone remember when I
predicted that plague doctors might establish themselves as a Halloween monster? Five years later, I've seen
tons of different plague doctor masks, costumes and even a few props, not to mention all their video game appearances. I know there's people who start to hate something once it becomes popular, but plaguedocs are popular
for a reason, and I really dig how this broken mask reveals its not-quite-human wearer, with bubo-riddled skin and luminous green eyes!
I really like the simple freakiness of "BLUE ALIEN." I have to say I haven't actually seen that many skull-faced aliens unless they also had exposed brains, in imitation of
Mars Attacks, and as much as I appreciate exposed brains on just about anything, it's rather nice to see a somewhat subtler skullien, and I really like the tasteful, pale grey-blue scheme throughout.
You really wouldn't think so, given how basic an image it is, but a full-head Halloween mask of
just an eyeball is incredibly difficult to come by. Maybe The Residents have been running some kind of racket on them all these years, I don't know. Of the very, very few that are out there, I'm gonna say EYECLOPS is one of the best, if only because it includes some red nervous tissue for your neck.
Now this is how you do a "creepy" clown mask. In other words, you don't even have to
try to make it creepy. It doesn' need fangs, or blood, or veiny eyeballs; pretty much any vintage-style clown is going to look somewhat off as soon as it's taken out of its original context.
That's not to say "CLOWN DOLL" doesn't have its merits, combining two of the most popular modern horror symbols with a stylistic sense that isn't too straightforward or obvious. The huge, black smile and underbite are pretty distinct to this particular creepy clowndoll.
PALM BITER GLOVES aren't a mask, but close enough, right? They really
should come in mask size, though, a huge hand for a head would look pretty killer with a fangley mouth in the palm, and then you could wear the gloves with it and be a three-handed, three-mouthed weirdo.
I'm kind of torn on "ZOMBIE HORSE." The classic horse mask is actually a lot more unsettling with its wild, all-too-human staring eyes, capturing what makes actual horses kind of disquieting themselves. Zombie horse sort of loses that quality by straying too far into the
deliberately scary, but it still looks pretty nice. Most "zombie versions" of non-zombie things just go for green skin and a few scars. This one gives us beautifully sculpted muscle tissue, splotchy but still naturally colored flesh, and eyeballs glazed such a lovely yellow-green. It's not as funny-creepy as it could have been, no, but it really pulls off
cool-creepy.
And speaking of cool-creepy, the "sexy nurse" is one of the most generic of all Halloween costumes, so I'm glad Morbid's "NURSE TERMINAL" throws in a
surprisingly frightening mask. This isn't just a regular nurse with some blood spatters and vampire fangs. I don't even
know what kind of monster we're looking at here. That bony, white face with perfectly round holes for eyes reads like the very shoddy "human form" of something not
at all human.
Anyway, feel like TOOTHFUL here is the very coolest of Morbid's creations, a monstrosity that may have been human at one time, but whose face has torn open into an almost eyeless, crocodilian maw with a second set of teeth. I like the thought that the skull we're seeing really is its
original skull, not just a skull it's in the process of devouring. The only problem, and this is a problem I've brought up in the past, is that there aren't many costume bodies you can find - or even make - that would adequately complement a mask this striking.
...And then, it's back to the wacky with "THE BIRD," another mask consisting of a big, giant hand, only this one is
pissed. Do you think THE BIRD and METL know each other? Actually, it looks like one of them is a right hand and one of them is a left hand. Could they, in fact, be
twins? Is METL the actual recipient of this flipping-off, or do they work in cahoots, bursting into social gatherings so THE BIRD can flip people off and METL can let all of them know what kind of music they're into?
...At least until THE BIRD gets killed in a tragic accident, or "accident" after flipping off one too many people, and returns as a
spookular spectasm to flip people off
from beyond.
In all honesty, if my own head were a gigantic skeleton hand, I guess I'd just go around flipping everyone off with it too. There just...aren't that many other options, you know?
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