Your Great Grandma's Skeleton

While I can hear you naysayers already asking me "What is there to possibly admire about a wet trash bag pulled over a decomposing Halloween pumpkin?!", allow me to answer that as thoroughly as I can for you so you might understand me just a little bit better.

First of all, Howlin' Harry here is, like most masks covered on this blog, all about the deets. That's right. The deets. We're bringing back 90s slang tonight. With his hauntingly dislocated jaw and raised eyebrows, his face ever stuck in a perpetual "You did WHAT?!" pose, he's just as artistic as any other mask I've talked about even with nowhere near as much work put into him. For once, the color Grey has been used in the correct way and his tone really actually helps out the design here, which I'm assuming was supposed to be "middle aged Crypt Keeper's second wife". His teeth are all varying shapes and sizes, and that big gaping black maw is magnificent, especially when paired with his eyeball-less sockets. Mousy braided dreads that look like they were done at a discount hair salon in your local mall, and two tiny nostril slits, Howlin' Harry is everything I want to be made from almost nothing.

While part upper white class reggae wanna be and part old man yelling at raccoons, this mask is the definition of simplicity. There's almost nothing here, and yet it's still somehow perfect because the people making these things know exactly what they're doing. I love the wavy sagging lines running vertically and I love the hair that looks nearly superglued on, like it was added at the last minute. I absolutely love his raised eyebrows, they're so expressive, and with that unhinged jaw like he's about to eat you like a giant snake, it really makes him all the more perfect, design wise.

From the side view, we can actually see that the "hair" seems to be more of a netting with hair strands coming off it, which I think is an interesting choice. I also love how his jaw curls inward, giving him an ever more mournful look. I also love, and this has nothing to do with the mask itself, that the person who took these pictures for their eBay listing didn't have a mannequin head sitting around so they thought fuck it, we'll use a mason jar. And it works, I mean, he's propped up and supported well, so.

I can only imagine how long it took someone to create all those lines along his entire face. That had to be excruciatingly dull, but it was necessary, as it really adds a dimension to something that is otherwise dimensionless. I could see this guy looming in a cemetery somewhere, watching over a group of stupid teenagers as they unknowingly summon him to eat their souls. Or maybe just hang out. He could just want a few brewskis. Not everything has to be evil, you know. Sometimes monsters just wanna chill. He's clearly already a fan of moonshine, I mean, the mason jar, come on. I love how his mouth and eyes aren't too hollowed out, they're the exact depth they needed to be. Really, whoever sculpted this did it with a fine tooth comb and my hat is off to them. In fact, all my hats are off to them. Every seasonal hat I own. I have a lot of hats. Lady needs to accessorize.

And being nearly noseless is perhaps the best design decision in this things creation, honestly. Giving him what I'll describe as Voldemort Nose is a pretty brilliant move. It doesn't add another layer to the face, thus keeping it flat and inhuman, but then the nose they do give him makes him all the more inhuman. Good job, guys. So despite looking somewhat like a ghoulish version of your great grandma's skeleton, this mask is wonderfully made, and perfect tonally.

I miss the inhumanity that these masks I cover represented. There's just nothing really like them out there anymore. Sure, if you search long and hard enough, maybe even find just the right Spirit Store, you could theoretically stumble across something unique and greatly made such as these but...now it's all plastic masks and superhero costumes. That or it's people molding plastic in their garage to create realistic Stormtrooper armor for conventions. That's not a dig at them either, that's an impressive skill that I certainly wish I possessed myself. But you can understand what I'm saying. It's commercial now. It's bland, it's brand based, it's certainly much more economically viable to simply slap together the latest Superman outfit (or, I guess, in this eras case Deadpool) and not pay someone a ton of money to create something really unique like this.

Not that the people who make the newer costumes don't work hard either, I'm sure a lot of effort goes into those as well, but they didn't have to come up with something. They're handed a template, they know what it is, there's no ingenuity there. There's no creativity, because it's something that's based on a pre-existing character so all the creativity has already been done. And you can't change the character, you can't alter it and make it your own, because Superman has to look like Superman. Or Bizarro Superman, I guess. I miss...the artistry. Someone, somewhere, sat down at a table in a shed or workspace and thought about what kind of horrible monster they could envision a child wearing over their face.

And this thing was the result of all that time.I miss that I can no longer find things like this without scouring the bowels of an ancient garage sale website. I can no longer simply walk into my local drug store at Halloween and find the most gruesome, artistically creative, well designed pieces of rubber that I've ever seen.

This mask, despite being so very ordinary in so many ways, is still special simply because it's its own thing. Nothing else looks like this. Nobody else is wearing something like this. This isn't a certain version of a character from some giant franchise or something. This is your grand grandma's skeleton, baying her cold dead lungs at the moon as she awaits the arrival of all the spirits like her.

So respect your fuckin' elders and wear this mask.