“Ever dance with the devil?”
I was wary at first about including Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon in this year’s lineup of horror movies, because I made a “no horror comedies” rule for myself, and Behind the Mask is often described as such. It’s got a rich playground for black comedy: it takes place in a world where killers like Michael Myers, Freddie Krueger, and Jason Voorhees are all real figures, who have unfortunately influenced people like this film’s title character. There’s a history for this sort of thing, although not a rich one (I can only think of Man Bites Dog as a similar example). Behind the Mask is funny, yes, but it’s also smart.
Leslie Vernon has invited a documentary crew of grad students to film him as he achieves what he believes to be his destiny: to become the next great killer. Not serial killer, mind you; Leslie’s aspirations are greater than that. He wants to be the next boogeyman, a new incarnation of the monsters who terrorized Haddonfield or Elm Street or Camp Crystal Lake. He even has a backstory to match his heroes’: decades ago, the townsfolk of Glen Echo, MD took a young boy, who they believed to be possessed by the devil, and threw him off of a waterfall. According to Leslie’s story, he is that boy, returned to wreak havoc and ruin on the anniversary of his death.
Despite all this, he’s a charming young man, first introduced playing a prank on the crew. He’s refreshingly candid and almost childlike in his enthusiasm. Nathan Baesel, as Leslie, delivers a nicely nuanced performance, never allowing Leslie to stray into manchild territory, while also allowing him to still be frightening. In the film’s climax, we get a look at his eyes behind his mask, and we see nothing there. It’s a shame that Baesel hasn’t had any roles this meaty since Behind the Mask, because he’s damn good.
He spends most of his scenes opposite Angela Goetharts, who plays Taylor Gentry, the student journalist profiling Leslie. It’s through her that we learn of the deceptively difficult industry of killing. In one telling exchange, when asked why killers don’t just yank their victims from closets, Leslie explains, “We have a code of ethics.” And that right there is Behind the Mask in a nutshell: things go the way they’re supposed to go, because that’s the way they’ve always went. It’s a feature, not a bug, and Behind the Mask has a lot of fun dissecting slasher movies while still respecting them.
Take, for instance, the scene where Leslie takes the crew to a high school so they can watch his vetting process. He becomes positively giddy when he makes eye contact with a girl he intuits is a virgin. In the film’s best sequence, as Leslie prepares for his grim reemergence, he takes them through the necessary precautions he has to take. We see him rig the lights to a remote fusebox he controls; he removes spark plugs; he loosens the head of a sledgehammer and cracks the shaft of an axe. This, the movie tells us, is how the deck is so stacked against kids in these kinds of movies: not because of rotten luck, or narrative contrivance, but because someone took the time to make sure of it. Sometimes the best explanation is also the funniest.
I said earlier that Behind the Mask was smart, and it is. That goes beyond its deconstruction of horror as a genre. It’s fun watching Leslie and Taylor spar about the nature of his plan for his Final Girl, Kelli (Kate Miner, sadly a little bland). The closet is a metaphor for the womb, the garden through which she escapes the birth canal from which she is born anew. It brings to light a certain arrogance of horror movies, the idea that the killer is a catalyst for change in a woman. But from Leslie’s perspective, Kelli doesn’t need him as much as he needs her. This is both of their destinies, the reason that they were both put on this earth.
There’s also a nice subplot of a growing connection between Leslie and Taylor. Baesel and Goetharts have nice, believable chemistry, and the movie doesn’t take it anywhere beyond a look or a touch of the hand, but the point is made. Media is complicit in how it cozies up to killers and perpetrators of atrocities. What’s that old saying? Oh yes – “If it bleeds, it leads.” Chances are slim that we’d still be talking about Dennis Rader or David Berkowitz today if the media hadn’t christened them the BTK Killer and the Son of Sam. Hell, Ted Kacynzski didn’t kill a single person, but he’s still a topic of conversation because he was dubbed the Unabomber.
Behind the Mask stumbles a bit at the end, when it abandons its documentary format. The twist is predictable, if well-acted (one of Leslie’s victims asks Taylor, who knows Leslie’s plan, “You have to tell me – what’s going to happen to me?”). It’s here that the movie becomes, at times, genuinely scary, and Baesel does a nice job with the physicality of a killer. At one point, he sits straight up, in a nod to Michael Myers. The movie is full of references, actually, and none of them feel forced. There are cameos from Poltergeist‘s Zelda Rubinstein, and at one point we see Kane Hodder, the original Jason, returning to his home at 1428 Elm Street. Robert Englund, Freddie himself, has a nice role as a Dr. Loomis-type who is trying to stop Leslie.
It’s impossible to make a movie like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon without being an absolute fanatic for horror movies. That love is evident in every frame of the film, even in the parts that don’t work. It’s not just an inside joke – or maybe it is, one that it really wants you to get.
Thursday, 10/1: Phantasm
Friday, 10/2: Frozen
Saturday, 10/3: Suspiria
Sunday, 10/4: Suspiria (2018)
Monday, 10/5: Emelie
Tuesday, 10/6: Castle Freak
Wednesday, 10/7: Session 9
Thursday, 10/8: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
Friday, 10/9: We Are Still Here
Saturday, 10/10: The Changeling
Sunday, 10/11: The Bad Seed
Monday, 10/12: Verotika
Tuesday, 10/13: The Legend of Hell House
Wednesday, 10/14: Lake Mungo
Thursday, 10/15: Puppetmaster
Friday, 10/16: Marrowbone
Saturday, 10/17: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Sunday, 10/18: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
Monday, 10/19: Sweetheart
Tuesday, 10/20: Girl On the Third Floor
Wednesday, 10/21: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Thursday, 10/22: Triangle
Friday, 10/23: Dog Soldiers
Saturday, 10/24: Noroi: The Curse
Sunday, 10/25: Train to Busan
Monday, 10/26: Tales From the Hood
Tuesday, 10/27: Mandy
Wednesday, 10/28: Sometimes They Come Back
Thursday, 10/29: Veronica
Friday, 10/30: The Wicker Man
Saturday, 10/31: Child’s Play
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