Corey Taylor recently spoke to WAAF about his latest Slipknot mask and the horror movie that provided the heavy influence for it.
Working with SPFX legend Tom Savini on the mask, Corey said the movie that inspired the design was Alice, Sweet Alice.
Corey said:
“We were playing around with a bunch of different stuff; we were kind of throwing stuff back and forth, but nothing had that kind of DIY look that I was going for, that I wanted.
“The way that I wanted it to look like it was made in a basement, you know. Like someone had crafted it in a basement, maybe for nefarious reasons, you never know. I wanted it to have that look and I wanted it to be really off-putting like you couldn’t really look at it, you know.
“That’s how we got to that one, by kind of going, ‘Well, what would it look like if you could almost kind of see through it?’.
“There’s a [1976] movie called ‘Alice, Sweet Alice,’ which is really disturbing. It’s this little kid wearing this, almost like a see-through mask, running around, killing people. And that really kind of inspired me from that point of view, and then I would paint my face underneath.
“And then I actually got some feedback from some people, which took me in a completely different direction, people who had grown up with burns… and it actually resembles the new kind of skin that they wear as the skin is healing.
“I kind of took it out of that horror book idea and immediately it was more metaphorical, and actually more in line with what the lyrics for the album were about. So it actually really felt really good to have something that touched people, in a way.”
It still has a Heath Ledger joker vibe to me nevertheless. I do really love the simplicity of the mask. It’s transparency funnily enough is compared to how the new album comes across. Such a refreshing breathe of fresh-air where internal emotions are transparent through the surface. My favourite Slipknot album to date.
