I Went to the 'Eyes Wide Shut' Mask Shop

Hello hello,

I’m writing this from the beginning of yet another New York heatwave. The past few days I’ve managed to hide out inside mostly watching B-horror. I woke up on Monday to the news of Sam Neill’s passing and felt devastated: Possession is one of my favorite films, and Neill blends charm and horror together so beautifully alongside the inimitable Isabelle Adjani.

Then I remembered the Possession remake and became irrationally irate: I’ll let Margaret Quallet freak it with her own divorce rage on this one, but there’s no way Callum Turner has the sauce to deliver anywhere close to what a remake would require. Besides, Turner is too distractingly hot: There is no world where he could be a spy, rejected by a woman, or, quite simply, deranged enough to pull this off. Granted, I do find Neill distractingly hot in Possession due to his unpredictable, almost livewire quality. There’s a danger to both his power and impotence that creates an oscillating force. Put simply, he’s a prestige freak, and I miss him more than I realized and thought possible.

Another gem came up in my week of horror wonders: The Vourdalak (2023) directed by French auteur Adiren Beau. An envoy for the King of France gets stranded in a small village where a family is being terrorized by their grandfather who may or may not have turned into a vampyric entity. Said entity is played entirely by a puppet, which at first is a distracting choice, yet I quickly discovered whimsy can be the gateway to sinister. The film creates this slow burn transition from campy period piece into an unholy nightmare of generational trauma (without it becoming Jamie Lee Curtis “Trauma” if you catch my drift). I was ultimately terrified by the puppet, and quite moved overall by Beau’s debut feature. Cannot recommend enough.

I’ve been holding out a key dispatch from my trip to Venice. Clearly, my obsession with film runs deep, and in doing my research I came across the shop that created the Venetian Masks for Eyes Wide Shut. Ca’Macana, located in the Dorsoduro section of the city, has been in operation since 1984 but offers masks made in a tradition perfected over centuries: They are made by hand, typically in papier-mâché, although many of the masks we saw were then adorned with paint, sequins, feathers, and so on.

Upon walking into Ca’Macana, I saw that every inch was covered with masks, from blank white masks to others shaped like suns or moons. There are the classic characters like the plague doctor, the Drama and Comedy masks, and traditional Venetian figures. But I was there to immerse myself in this piece of tradition that added so much to Kubrick’s masterwork.

It wasn’t hard to find film memorabilia in the shop: Signatures from Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise hung from the rafters, and a book on display with the relevant scenes from the film was displayed up front. I was charmed: The shop knows why you may have entered in the first place, but it seeks out to charm further with its quality, craftsmanship, and variety. Not only were there masks on every wall but also we were able to explore the workshop itself.

A confession: I had yet to see Eyes Wide Shut in its entirety before embarking on this shopping mission. I had tried to watch the film once over a Christmas where I was with my family in Ohio. Wanting to be an edgelord in my room, I put it on my laptop in my room and quickly couldn’t find my way in, which I attribute to my headspace rather than the film itself.

Giving it a second go, I worried that the ritual and conspiratorial storyline would feel hack in a post-Epstein landscape. I was completely wrong: The pacing builds the sense of dread as impotent, freaky Tom Cruise spirals in his attempts to bring about a sexual encounter. Ritual, it turns out, gives way to an Event Horizon-style chaos that is at once deeply transactional and out of control. I left the viewing experience unnerved more than I anticipated, and with a new favorite Kubrick film.

Please enjoy the feast of photos I took. A longer letter will be coming next week. Until then, I’ll be working on my next letter from Vermont Xx