The Eleventh Night of Halloween: Behind the Mask

ON THE ELEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) by Scott Glosserman. This is an extremely meta mocumentary in which a film crew follows an aspiring slasher villain as he plots out his first massacre. It takes place in a universe where Michael Myers’ homely endeavors in Haddonfield, Freddy Kruger’s dreamy spectaculars in Springwood, and Jason Voorhees’ woodsy romps at Camp Crystal Lake all really happened. We know this because all of these characters and places are emphatically namechecked (Chucky, the Black Christmas killer, the Sorority Row killer, and others are more briefly referred to), along with footage of the famous Haddonfield and Springwood murder houses. Not only are the original movies’ massacres real but all the sequels’ are as well. Moreover, a number of horror icons appear in bit roles, including Poltergeist’s Zelda Rubinstein, Freddy-himself Robert Englund (playing a character who is a carbon copy of Halloween’s Doctor Loomis), and Jason-himself Kane Hodder. 

By 2006, Wes Craven had already twice made a meta-slasher that upended the genre, first with New Nightmare and then with the wildly successful Scream. These are slashers where the characters have seen slasher movies, where the movies are namechecked, where actors from the movies make cameos (sometimes playing themselves), and where the heroes use their knowledge of slashers to survive against the villain. So, all the same stuff. The only thing that’s different here is the mocumentary angle, which seems inspired by what had come to replace the traditional slasher by the early 2000’s, found footage horror. 

But there’s a snag here too, because the film that actually invented the meta-slasher, arriving two years before Craven’s first attempt, was a mocumentary in which a film crew follows a serial killer around as he plots his kills and muses on his lifestyle. It’s called Man Bites Dog (1992), and it’s still the best of its kind, both the funniest and the most genuinely chilling. It isn’t concerned at all with Hollywood horror franchises but instead with the tropes that range over the whole history of horror and how these are both inspired by and go on to inform real world murder.

So, while Behind the Mask is dressed up as a loving homage with a twist, there is no actual twist—all of its morally surreal tension is borrowed from Man Bites Dog. Nevertheless, it continues to rank highly among horror fans and appear on many best horror films of the 2000’s lists (which is why I watched it). I think this is so, however, for a bad reason: it is a suffocating work of fan service. 

Obviously I am a huge horror fan, and there are horror movies about horror movies that I love, particularly Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and What We Do In the Shadows. But those two are classics because they succeed as comedies entirely apart from their references. Behind the Mask (and to some extent Scream as well) leans so heavily on its references that it barely qualifies as its own movie. And honestly, the references it leans on come from stuff I don’t like: franchise horror. All of the respective original films in these series are great, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and to a lesser extent Friday the Thirteenth (1980) are all classics (especially Texas Chainsaw), but none of the sequels are better than merely good-- most are terrible. And the reason for this is not the incompetence of amateur but passionate filmmakers. It’s because they are uninspired corporate products. There is some stuff there that is fun to laugh at, but I don’t think it’s deserving of loving homage? Unless you do, I’d say skip Behind the Mask.