Sometimes horror flicks can feel a little soulless and mercenary. Here’s a pseudo-slasher from some people that clearly love the genre as much as we do.
Horror/Comedy is a surprisingly ubiquitous sub-genre, despite the fact that it doubles the degree of difficulty for filmmakers. Generally speaking, Horror/Comedies fall into one of four theoretical quadrants. The ideal is to be both funny and scary. This is remarkably hard to do, and when it happens (Evil Dead 2, Cabin in the Woods) we should all be grateful. I feel like Jordan Peele will deliver us one of these gems some day. Conversely, by far the most populous quadrant is not funny and not scary. Too many movies to count settle here. Laughter and terror are the two most visceral reactions you can hope to get from your audience (even more so than crying, I think), and something about chasing both at the same time seems to make it exponentially harder to do either one. Then we have what I will call “the empty quadrant”, or scary but not funny. I can’t think of a single film that tries and fails to be comedic, yet succeeds at frightening its viewers. Maybe that’s why the most successful and terrifying horror of recent years makes absolutely zero attempt at levity (Hereditary, The Witch). Finally, we come to the quadrant that today’s feature falls squarely into: Funny, but not scary. This is not an uncommon outcome for Horror/Comedies. It is also not a bad outcome, because I will happily watch What We Do In the Shadows or Tucker and Dale vs. Evil over and over again without complaint. Add in the fact that Behind the Mask is filmed mostly as a mockumentary, one of my favorite comedy constructs, and we have a winner despite the fact that my pulse never really quickened.
The movie exists in a universe where horror movie slashers like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees are real, and their murder sprees are the stuff of legend. It suggests, however, that they are not supernatural beings, but rather particularly creative and enterprising serial killers with a flair for the dramatic. Enter Leslie Vernon, an aspiring slasher icon who has agreed to share his story with a group of grad school filmmakers. They follow him as he plants clues about his tragic backstory, picks out his crop of victims, and grooms a virginal survivor girl to be his unwitting foil, all for maximum dramatic effect.
There is a lot to love about Behind the Mask, so I’ll start with its one drawback. It simply isn’t a successful slasher, and I do think the filmmakers wanted to craft a movie that straddled that line of deconstructing the genre but also being a successful entry into the genre as well. The budget is clearly miniscule, and that in part makes it really hard for the horror set pieces to pick up any steam (one excellent death-by-posthole-digger aside). The film even goes so far as to bifurcate the mockumentary-style sections from the intentionally scary ones by switching to traditional horror movie framing for the scenes that come from the victims’ point of view. They even switch from tape to film to really drive home the perspective shift, and it would have been the perfect device to deliver on the horror side if it could have been executed at a higher level. Beyond that, everything about this works. The acting is great, starting with Angela Goethels as the lead documentarian (The blonde sister from Home Alone! “You’re what the French call ‘les incompetents’.” and all that!) I love the way she plays her character as a blend of ambition to capture this incredible story, revulsion at the evil Leslie is perpetrating, and excitement bordering on titillation at being involved with the same. It helps that our protagonist/antagonist Vernon, as played by Nathan Baesel, is wildly magnetic. I can’t believe I’ve never seen this guy in anything before – he gives me massive Walton Goggins energy. His performance is so exuberant, so intense, and so joyful that he is really the beating heart of the whole endeavor. Equally well cast is Scott Wilson (Herschel from The Walking Dead) as a mentor figure for Leslie, a killer from the 60’s and 70’s who has settled down with one of his final girls into a life of domestic normalcy. The best parts of the movie are the scenes where the two of them talk shop over a nice homecooked meal. The dissonance of such a warm, amiable atmosphere and father/son type of bond while they discuss the finer points of mass homicide is pretty spectacular.
Lastly, the script does a really great job of skewering slasher movie conventions. This is where the majority of the comedy is wrung. For example, Leslie explains during a workout that he has to focus heavily on cardio, so that he can walk menacingly towards his victims while they are looking, and then run like crazy to catch up to them when they aren’t. The image of Jason or Michael Myers frantically hoofing it through the forest or suburbs as soon as their quarry turns their head, only to pull up just around the corner from them for a jump scare, is one that makes me chuckle every time I think of it. The film has similar explanations for how villains can appear dead then disappear moments later, why the closet is always the safest place to hide, and how come those damn cars never start when you need them to. The appeal of Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is probably limited to they type of person that is enamored with the slasher genre, as clearly that describes everyone involved in the making of it. Unsurprisingly, of course, that describes me, as well, so I found it a delightfully, if not frightfully, fun time.
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