31 Days of Halloween - Day 4 - Movie

No, tonight's movie was not "They Live" (that comes later in the month. "The Mask" (1961) is a decent diversion. A disturbed young archeologist tells his psychiatrist that he thinks he may have committed murder, driven to kill by a mask which has hypnotic powers over him. The mask soon finds itself in the hands of the skeptical psychiatrist, but once he puts it on and finds himself confronted with 3-D hallucinatory horror imagery of disfigured cloaked figures, spiders, snakes, skeletons and mist shrouded bogs, believes that the mask is giving him insight into the workings of the human mind. The mask possesses him like a drug, driving away his loved ones and friends, and putting him on a path into insanity and murder, or is it?

I'm a sucker for cursed occult object stories and Paul Stevens as the tormented psychiatrist gives a good performance, but the movie feels like an overlong "Twilight Zone" episode. If it had been made now, it would no doubt have been the first movie in a franchise series.