10 Fascinating Masks in Movies

"The movies love masks, for umpteen excellent reasons. Acting as we know it was founded on them at some point in the Golden Age of Athens....Behind the mask, for actor as for character, one is truly free to be somebody other than oneself. There's also the theory in sociology, pertinent to both theatre and cinema (and freely mocked in entry number 10 below [The Mask]) that social life is but a stage on which all of us, at times, wear our faces as masks...But above all there are umpteen great movie stories deriving from the mystery of face-masks that offer a frozen vision of beauty, only to conceal a grisly truth on the part of the wearer. Masks—like clowns—are sometimes funny, but more often creepy. For this ten, with regret, one has to exclude the iconic black eye-masks of Zorro and the Lone Ranger. Only a full-face veil, visor or disguiser is fit to our purpose. Sorry, Tonto."
—Richard T. Kelly, *10 Bad Dates with De Niro: A Book of Alternative Movie Lists* (2007)