If a modern-day horror film were shot in the Royal Ontario Museum, a director might be inclined to set some action in the museum’s bat cave. But the revered exhibit didn’t exist 50 years ago when Julian Roffman directed The Mask, a psychological 3-D horror film which made use of the museum’s iconic totem pole. Premiering at Toronto’s Downtown Theatre on November 10, 1961, it ushered Canadian cinema into the horror genre established by Hollywood in the 1920s. Screened at TIFF Bell Lightbox this week, the film, a drug-use allegory in which an archaeologist blames an ancient mask for terrible … Continue reading Canadian horror cinema turns 50