The Fractured Mirror 2.0 #35 Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
The film career of character actor Scott Wilson, who died in 2018 at the end of a long, impressive career that included a multi-year stint on the cult horror smash The Walking Dead, kicked off in a big way with appearances in two of 1967’s best, most important and influential films. Wilson played a murder suspect in Norman Jewison’s incendiary, racially charged cop drama In the Heat of the Night and real-life murderer Richard Hickox in In Cold Blood, Richard Brooks’ instant-classic adaptation of Truman Capote’s landmark non-fiction novel, which turned out to be a lot more fictional than Capote made it out to be.
The twinkly-eyed, paternal thespian unforgettably played a very different kind of murderer in one of his best late-period movies, the fiendishly clever 2006 meta horror comedy Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. The film takes place in a universe where figures we know as legendary slashers, like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Chucky and Jason Voorhees are all real-life figures whose bloody crimes and brutal but effective methods are the stuff of pop culture legend.
In what should have been a star-making turn, Nathan Baesel is chilling and hilarious as the title character, an aspiring mass murderer who dreams of joining heroes like Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers as a real-life bogeyman who hacks and slashes his way through a group of horny, drunk, pot-smoking teenagers in a climactic orgy of deeply meaningful violence as a form of supernatural vengeance.
Wilson has a small but crucial role as Eugene, Leslie’s mentor in murder, a silver fox introduced being dug up from an underground sensory deprivation tank that looks and functions more than a little like a grave. It takes more than several days underground to kill a man like Eugene, who is a unique combination of fatherly warmth and all-American evil. Though it’s never established in the film itself, the movie’s screenwriter conceived of Eugene as the killer from Bob Clark’s seminal Canadian slasher classic Black Christmas. You won’t miss anything by not knowing the connection but as is generally the case here, the more you know about slasher history, the more you will get out of Behind the Mask.
A twinkle in his eyes, a beer in his hand, his adoring, attractive and much younger wife looking on proudly, Eugene holds court for Behind the Mask’s mockumentary cameras about the ever-changing ways of the world and how these newfangled, post-Jason, post-Freddy, post-Michael Myers murderers are all about preparation, planning, artistry and elaborate mythologies whereas the crazed murderers of his day were all about quantity over quality, killing as many people as possible without worrying about the symbolic connotations of their work.
If Leslie is disconcertingly good at what he does, which is killing people in ways pioneered by the great real-life mass murderers of his world and the monsters of our own horror film realm, it’s probably because he learned from the very best. Leslie is, by definition, a solitary figure in Behind the Mask. Crazed killers often are. But in Wilson’s scene-stealing performance we get a glimpse of a makeshift family of murderers that’s surprisingly supportive, even weirdly wholesome.
Angela Goethals costars as Taylor Gentry, a young, aspiring documentarian with the questionable judgment to set out to make a film about Leslie’s peculiar enthusiasms and an upcoming massacre he sees as a work of art, a masterpiece of murder that will be his magnum opus. He’s like a performance artist whose life’s work will never be complete as long as his intended victims are still alive.
Angela and her camera crew follow around the incongruously chipper and upbeat aspiring slasher as he talks happily about the gritty details of his peculiar life’s passion and how he’s devoted his entire life to what he sees as a dark, unavoidable destiny. He’s deeply immersed in the conventions of horror, cliches that will strike a familiar chord with people who’ve seen Scream, its many sequels and rip-offs or any of the many, many horror films that Scream director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson drew upon for its mythology.
Leslie’s grasp on horror is at once academic and bloodily visceral. He happily discourses on slasher conventions like red herrings, the “White Whale” hero out to stop the slasher at any cost and, more than anything, the Final Girl, the virginal, pure-hearted teenaged outlier who inevitably ends up being the only survivor of a mad slasher because they’re morally superior to their degenerate, hedonistic and soon-to-be-dead peers.
The meta commentary in Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Jordan is rooted partially in fan-friendly stunt casting. In the movie’s weird world, Freddy Krueger is a real-life monster who wreaked bloody, gloved vengeance all over Elm Street but the actor who played him, Robert Englund is on hand as Doc Halloran, its Dr. Loomis figure, an intense and driven psychologist who examined our titular anti-hero/villain as a boy and knows just how deadly he can be. Friday the 13th favorite Kane Hodder has a cameo and Zelda Rubinstein, the spooky old woman from Poltergeist ably delivers reams of exposition as a librarian who is suspiciously knowledgable about bloody matters.
As a cheerful sociopath with a deep, unfortunate reverence for the masked maniacs who came before him, Basel accomplishes the tricky feat of being genuinely funny without sacrificing his character’s danger and menace. In full-on maniac mode, he looks a little like a ghoulish version of Simple Jack, the mentally challenged paragon of human decency Ben Stiller’s character played in an Oscar-bait movie in Tropic Thunder. But once the bodies start piling up he’s genuinely scary.
That is particularly important since in its third act Behind the Mask segues from being a delightfully meta riff on the history of slasher movies to being a proper horror movie once the camera crew finally comes to their senses and realizes the morally precarious, not to mention dangerous position they’ve placed themselves in.
Behind the Mask suggests the pitch-black 1992 satire Man Bites Dog as the camera crew becomes increasingly implicated in their weirdly charismatic subject’s life, and by extension, his crimes. But Behind the Mask is nowhere near as bleak as Man Bites Dog. The filmmakers are ultimately less interested in exploring the nature of violence, voyeurism and our fascination with violence and murder as entertainment than they are in generating laughs and scares, albeit not necessarily in that order.
Goethals is all too relatable as an exploitative voyeur who realizes at the last possible moment just what a terrible mistake she’s made joining forces creatively and professionally with someone who is dead serious about realizing his dark dreams of joining his heroes in the great pantheon of legendary American mass murderers.
Behind the Mask walks a tricky tonal tightrope between winking, cheeky, meta-textual, Scream-style comedy and genuine, non-ironic terror. That tension is represented visually by shifts between documentary-style, cinema verité footage of Taylor’s camera crew and more overtly stylized, narrative-style footage of Leslie actually doing all of the horrible, bloody, violent things he spends much of the film talking about.
Leslie is like a magician who tells audiences all of his tricks and then proceeds to deceive them all the same because he’s just that good. On a similar note, Leslie tells us, and the camera crew, exactly what he is going to do and how he is going to do it yet somehow proves dangerous and unpredictable all the same.
Of course one of the biggest conventions of the slasher genre is that you can’t keep a good mass murderer down, and that no matter how many times a killer seems to have been conclusively killed, or beheaded, or set on fire, or drawn and quartered, or shot into space, they always come back, hungry for revenge.
So it seems appropriate that according to the Internet Movie Database, a follow-up to the cult favorite is in the works. It remains to be seen whether that movie will happen but there seems to be a lot of life left in the Behind the Mask universe, even if a follow-up would inevitably be missing one of the original’s best and best-loved characters.
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