Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)

Scream, like Pulp Fiction two years previous, was a good film that just about ruined an entire generation of movies that came after.

For every genuinely clever, post-modern dissection of the horror genre that followed in the ensuing years (I was always kind of partial to The Faculty), we had dozens of Urban Legends, Disturbing Behaviors, I Know What You Did Last Summers, Screams 2 and 3. The list goes on and on. The horror genre damn near sunk under the weight of all that film-school snark. There were occasional glimmers of something different -- a Blair Witch Project here, a Sixth Sense there -- but Scream and its many one-eyed bastard children left the genre with nowhere to go except torture porn and half-baked remakes of nonsensical Asian spooky-kid movies.

For me, the slasher subgenre itself pretty much died with Scream. Sure, we’ve had a recent run of glossy Michael Bay-produced remakes (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 2003, this year’s Friday the 13th) and a couple other feeble death-rattles here and there (usually, it seems, starring Eliza Dushku), but Scream showed pretty definitively that slasher films had long before become a parody of themselves.

That, as they say, was that.

So you’ll pardon me if I was a little skeptical when, at a party, I was told about Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.

The movie purports to be a Blair Witch-style documentary about the title character, a wannabe slasher in a world where Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Jason Vorhees are all real. Leslie -- who seems pretty normal and perfectly charming on the outside, at least until the cracks start to show -- idolizes those guys, and he has set his sights on his own “survivor girl”. Improbably, he has allowed a graduate film student, Taylor (Amanda Goethels), and her crew to follow him around with a camera as he trains for his “special night.”

Hence, we are treated to a scene of Leslie practicing his cardio so he can perfect running while looking as though he’s doing the scary slow walk that masked killers are expected to do without getting winded. He introduces Taylor to his pet turtles, Church and Zoe, and matter-of-factly mentions that he “only keeps pets I can eat.” We meet Leslie’s mentor, a retired (?) 70s slasher who is married to an impossibly hot younger woman (there are strong hints that she was his own once-upon-a-time survivor girl) and likes to sleep in a sensory-deprivation chamber in his back yard. Leslie shows us, from a distance, his own apparently virginal survivor girl, and we get to see how much gosh-darned fun he has freaking her out. He even enlists Taylor and her crew to help him one night behind the diner where Kelly works.

Leslie sees himself as a necessary evil. Without him, his survivor girl would never discover her true potential. In his world view, he’s the psychotic yin to her cherubic yang.

Behind the Mask is a little bit Scream, a little bit Blair Witch Project, a lot Man Bites Dog. If it all sounds way too clever for its own good, it kind of is. But I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The movie knows its references better even than Scream did, and director Scott Glosserman and co-screenwriter David J. Stieve clearly have more reverence for the genre than actual slasher progenitor Wes Craven (Craven has always seemed pretty ambivalent about his role as horror icon, and he famously only agreed to do Scream if Miramax would finance and distribute his “serious” movie, 1999’s Meryl Streep Oscar bait Music of the Heart).

Behind the Mask actually gets more to the heart of what slasher films really are all about -- where they come from, what they represent -- than Scream did. And it’s funnier.

Unfortunately, when the movie switches in the final act into an actual slasher movie and reveals its “twist” (which any self-respecting horror fan should see coming about three minutes in), it loses some of its steam. Here Glosserman is too reverential. The camera work, music, and acting all feel lifted directly out of any generic late-80s to mid-90s horror movie. But that spark that drove the film forward is gone. In its last twenty minutes or so Behind the Mask feels a little like a star slugger who gets thrown out at home plate because he assumed he’d hit it over the wall and so decided to jog in after rounding third base.

Still, overall, I have to say this one was a pleasant surprise.