With face masks becoming an essential part of our lives, here are five movies that take mask-wearing to often artistic, sometimes fantastical extremes … Batman Begins (2005) Christopher Nolan loves masks, as all those who see his new movie Tenet can attest. In the midst of a pandemic, there’s something profoundly strange about watching a film in which characters wear respirators. Still, Tenet is hardly his first “mask” movie. In Batman Begins , the inaugural chapter of his Dark Knight trilogy , he vividly retells the Caped Crusader’s origin story. “My mask is just a symbol,” says Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne, also known as Gotham City’s crime-fighting vigilante Batman. “No, this is your mask,” replies his beloved Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), holding his face – suggesting how Nolan is fascinated by the masks we use to hide in plain sight. That he also faces a villain, The Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy), who dons a crude, eerie sackcloth before spreading his Fear Toxin across Gotham, adds to the theme. Less successfully, 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises saw Tom Hardy’s Bane permanently sporting a metallic muzzle that dispenses anaesthetic (and muffled his dialogue). Halloween (1978) The mask is a horror movie staple, from Jason Voorhees’ ice hockey visor in Friday the 13th to the “Ghostface” in Scream . But is there a more iconic covering in cinema than Michael Myers’ unnerving blank face in Halloween ? John Carpenter’s stripped-bare slasher tale sees Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) terrorised by Myers’ wordless psychotic. The story goes that production designer Tommy Lee Wallace went to Bert Wheeler’s magic shop on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles to buy a mask for Myers – known only as The Shape in the script. He returned with two: a clown mask and one of William Shatner as Captain Kirk in the sci-fi series Star Trek . After spray-painting the Shatner mask white and widening out the eyeholes, “it was chilling”, Carpenter later remarked. While Halloween has spawned numerous sequels and reboots – David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills , the sequel to his 2018 film with Curtis , is due this autumn – none of the follow-ups boasts the unerring power of Carpenter’s original. Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Stanley Kubrick’s swansong is a meditation on marriage, fidelity and desire, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Rhapsody: A Dream Novel . The film updates the story to contemporary New York, where Tom Cruise stars as the well-to-do Dr William Harford, who goes on a bizarre sexual odyssey after his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) reveals a past secret. Ultimately, his journey leads him to a ritualistic and highly secretive orgy in a remote rural mansion. Dubbed the “abyss of decadence” by the film’s producer Jan Harlan, all the wealthy patrons and the swathes of beautiful women there don masquerade-style Venetian masks – an apt choice, given the Italian city’s reputation as both a centre of eroticism and mercantilism. The symbolism goes further, with Kubrick explicitly dealing with the masks we all wear in our closest relationships. Curiously, Domino – the prostitute that Harford encounters in the movie – has the very African-style fertility masks hanging on her bedroom wall that Kubrick briefly considered for the film’s main orgy scene. The King of Masks (1996) The Chinese dramatic art of face-changing is the backdrop to director Wu Tianming’s familial drama The King of Masks (aka Bian Lian ). Set in the 1930s, Wang (Zhu Xu) is a humble street-performer who practices the ancient art form – a part of Sichuan opera in which his face is hidden behind vivid, colourful masks which are switched like magic in front of his audience – with great dexterity. The story sees him yearn for a grandson to pass on his skills to – so much so that he buys a young charge at an illegal child market, only to discover she’s a girl in disguise. Unable to train her – as tradition dictates this is a male-only art – he tries to abandon her but she clings to him, to the point where he teaches her the art of contortion. That she later accidentally sets fire to his home after studying his collection of masks propels the story towards sentimental melodrama, but it’s still a film that serves as a perfect reminder of this beautiful Chinese operatic style. The Mask (1994) It is impossible to write a piece about masks in movies without talking about Charles Russell’s garish comedy, which brilliantly exploited the cartoon-like qualities of Jim Carrey. Through Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and this film, the Canadian comic truly landed on the international stage. It’s a Looney Tunes -style yarn about bank clerk Stanley Ipkiss, who becomes a green-faced superhero after putting on a mysterious wooden mask. Wearing a sharp zoot suit and repeating the catchphrase “Smokin’!” throughout the film, the smooth talker flexes his muscles in a way that Stanley never can. The character’s appearance feels daisy-fresh, as The Mask arrived at a time before Hollywood became obsessed with comic-book movies. The film, which includes a charming romantic subplot between Carrey and a then-unknown Cameron Diaz, was a huge hit – grossing over US$350 million. Fans may be pleased to learn that Warner Bros is attempting to resurrect the franchise with two more movies – and with Carrey on board. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook