The Horse Head Mask Shook Hands With the President of the United States

Some products are funny. A smaller number are culturally load-bearing. The Archie McPhee horse head mask, a piece of brown latex with a faux fur mane that has been on sale since at least 2003, belongs in the second group, and its curriculum vitae is better than most people’s.

The Manufacturer Understands Its Product

The listing copy opens by announcing that the company has discovered yet another universal truth, which is that a person wearing a horse head mask looks downright disturbing. That is the sales pitch. Not fun, not festive. Disturbing. Archie McPhee’s own page goes further and warns you to beware of knockoffs, which tells you everything about the state of the horse head mask market.

A Genuine Career Retrospective

Lonely Planet recommended travelling in one in its 2005 Guide to Experimental Travel, which is either excellent advice or the reason somebody got detained in an airport.

In 2010 a Google Street View car in Scotland captured a figure in a horse head mask standing at the roadside, and the internet named him horse boy. In 2012, during Hurricane Sandy, a shirtless jogger in the mask photobombed live news broadcasts while a genuine natural disaster was under way, which remains a difficult thing to defend and an impossible thing to forget.

Then, in July 2014, President Barack Obama walked a rope line in Denver and shook the hand of a bystander wearing one. That happened. There is footage. A twenty-dollar latex horse has been photographed in physical contact with a sitting American president, and your outfit has not.

The Numbers

It carries 4.6 stars across 3,324 ratings and sits inside the top few thousand in Men’s Costume Masks, more than twenty years after release. Novelty items are supposed to spike and die. This one just keeps going, sustained by a steady global supply of people who need, at short notice, to become a horse.

The Company Knows What It Has

Archie McPhee is a Seattle novelty institution, and the mask ships under its Accoutrements brand. The store page describes the product as a worldwide phenomenon with its own Wikipedia page, which is both accurate and a genuinely unusual flex for a costume supplier. Most novelty companies sell a hundred items and hope one lands. This one landed so hard it acquired a bibliography.

What It Is Actually Like

Realistic brown latex, faux fur mane, and the fixed unblinking expression that does the heavy lifting. The genius of the design is that the face never changes. Whatever is happening around it, the horse remains calm, mildly concerned, and completely uninvolved. That contrast is the whole joke and it has never worn out.

The Verdict

Buy it. The maker’s own shop sells it around twenty dollars when stock allows and frequently shows sold out, so the marketplace listing tends to be the reliable route. It is warm, it is hard to see out of, and it will outlive every other costume you own. More importantly, you will be joining an institution. Wear it responsibly, which in this case means never explaining it to anyone, ever, under any circumstances.