Moviemakers have always been finding ways to create special effects and real sets in ways that don’t take them over their budget. From egg boxes on the walls of the Nostromo in Alien to faux-fur rugs as costumes on Game of Thrones, it doesn’t always cost a fortune to make something memorable. That was never truer than when Wes Craven’s Scream used cheap, store-bought novelty masks to create one of modern horror’s most recognisable characters – Ghostface. While many horror movies have bespoke prosthetics and masks made for them, Scream followed the lead of Halloween creator John Carpenter and built a horror icon on a cheap mask that cost less than $10. However, one of the masks used in the production of Scream 2 recently appeared in an auction at Prop Store with a huge estimated value that was much more than the production team paid for it.
Used in 1997’s Scream 2, this version of Ghostface’s mask had an estimate of between $25,000 and $50,000 at Prop Store’s Summer Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction. There are two reasons this Fun World “Fantastic Faces” novelty mask based on the famous Edvard Munch painting “The Scream” is now a hugely valuable piece of memorabilia. As one of the masks used in the movie, that immediately adds a couple of zeros to the price, but in addition it also has the signature of Craven scrawled on the forehead. Signatures of Hollywood legends are always guaranteed to elevate the asking price of any item, and with this auction taking place almost exactly 11 years since the passing of the director then it is not hard to understand it came with such high expectations. However, on they day, the bidding fell just short of the $25,000 reserve, meaning it is now back in Prop Store’s vault for the time being.
If there is one thing that this year’s release of Obsession has reminded everyone, it is that movies do not need a multi-million budget to grab an audience. In the last several years, independent and low-budget films have been some of the most profitable of the decade thanks to imaginative storytelling taking president over big special effects budgets. Back in the 1990s, Wes Craven had a budget of around $15 million for the first Scream movie, but it didn’t mean that cash was thrown around carelessly. Masks based on The Scream have been around for decades, yet within the first ten minutes of 1995’s Scream, Craven managed to create a cinema icon who is still wreaking bloody havoc in theaters over three decades later. Naturally, though, just like the Halloween crew spray-painted a Captain Kirk mask to bring Michael Myers to life, Scream made some adjustments to their bargain purchases to get things exactly as they wanted.
The mask that featured in Prop Store’s auction includes a cotton hood with side tassels along with a fastening strip that was used to secure the mask to Ghostface’s black robes. Additionally, the eyes had black mesh added, allowing the wearer to see better while retaining the hollow look of the sockets, and the mouth and nose were blackened for the final effect. While these modifications may not seem like much, they are ultimately what now set this mask apart from thousands of others – along with Craven’s signature, of course – and make it a prize addition to any collection. While early bids pushed the price to $15,000, there was not quite the momentum to see this one selling to a new owner. Still, being worth around $20,000 is not a bad return on a mask that originally cost less than a movie ticket.
