The mockumentary Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon takes place in a world where Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees actually exist—and where an affable young man named Leslie Vernon dreams of one day joining their ranks. That will take an awful lot of preparation and discipline, though. Not only does he need to be in peak physical condition (“I have to do so much cardio, it’s insane,” he says—after all, a serial killer needs to keep pace with his victims as they run away from him while looking as though he’s just walking), but he also needs to line up the proper cast of supporting characters. He needs an “Ahab,” for instance—some obsessive authority figure from his past who can serve as his nemesis. And he absolutely needs to pick out a good “Survivor Girl,” a virgin who he can leave alive at the end of the whole ordeal. Leslie's got big plans for a final battle in which his Survivor Girl will finish him off. (He won’t really be dead; as Leslie explains, serial killers usually take a lot of magic classes, so they’re good at faking illusions and making quick disappearances.)
Behind the Mask owes its premise (a documentary crew follows a chatty, deceptively harmless-looking young serial killer as he goes about his mundane daily routine) to the 1992 Belgian cult movie Man Bites Dog. But unlike that (somewhat overrated) film, Mask director Scott Glosserman isn’t interested in satirizing the media; he’s more interested in examining classic horror-movie tropes and asking what gives them such power. Leslie doesn’t just want to kill a lot of people; he wants to become immortal, an icon, and he knows that means he will have to kill them in a way that has maximum Freudian/Jungian impact on the popular unconscious. Leslie can talk for hours about the importance of letting his victims spend a lot of time in womblike closets and leaving a few appropriately phallic weapons scattered around for the Survivor Girl to use against him. This serial killer has obviously been reading a lot of semiotics textbooks.
Actually, the movie Behind the Mask reminds me of the most is Interview With the Assassin, a 2002 mockumentary about a movie director who stumbles into an uneasy friendship with a man who claims to be the guy who shot John F. Kennedy. They’re both great examples of how a smart director can turn a low budget and a lack of name actors into a virtue—if anything, the unpolished vérité style of both films makes their far-fetched plots seem oddly convincing. (Neil Burger, who made Assassin, went on to direct last year’s The Illusionist, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Glosserman also graduated to a bigger project in a couple of years.)
I hope actor Nathan Baesel gets some work out of this movie too. He plays Leslie with a boyish enthusiasm that’s utterly disarming—whenever he pulls off an especially neat trick, he’ll bound eagerly back to the camera crew and anxiously ask them, “Did you get that? Did you get that?” But he’s not a total goof—when he takes the filmmakers on a tour of the farmhouse where the killings will take place, you kind of have to marvel at how thoroughly and efficiently he’s planned for every contingency.
The logic of the film as a whole isn’t quite as airtight. It’s hard to understand why Leslie would allow a documentary crew into his life; and it’s even harder to believe that this director, a young, wide-eyed university student, would want to tackle a project this sleazy and morbid. Most of the twists are fairly easy to see coming as well, but since they’re just small parts of a large, very well-executed final action setpiece, you don’t get that crummy, joyless feeling that seizes your stomach when you realize you’ve just outsmarted the movie you’re watching.
There are a lot of intelligent young directors working in the horror field these days, but so many of them seem content to waste their smarts devising new torture scenarios. It’s nice to see someone like Scott Glosserman using his talents for good instead of evil—even if the same can’t be said for his film’s unsettlingly likable hero.
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