Behind the Mask takes place in the parallel world where scary movies live, and a team of young filmmakers set out to make a real life documentary about a serial killer at work. Such is their dedication to capturing realism that they are willing to follow the killer around and allow the murders to happen so that they can capture it all on tape. The movie is a fascinating and clever analysis of how the mind of a horror movie slasher works.
More than anything else, the movie is a brilliant horror comedy in which Leslie Vernon, the main character, leads our film-making team through the whole process of how he pulls off the vintage horror-movie murders. It's basically an exploration of how those horror movie scenes are constructed. How the doors slam shut at just the right moment, how the perfect weapons are always available to the killer while the victim can't seem to find anything to protect himself or herself, and how the killer manages to let all the other promiscuous teenagers in the vicinity know that there is a killer on the loose and yet still manage to pick them off one by one.
It also explores the history of the slasher genre, because Vernon is, of course, an avid horror movie buff, and idolizes all the great masked murderers. At one point in the movie, he claims that having Michael Myers and Freddy and Jason come back from the dead was a "radical change in philosophy. Changed the whole business."
Nathan Baesel gives the perfect performance as Leslie Vernon. He's obviously disturbed and is also the product of a rape of his mother, but the most startling aspect of his character is how incredibly NORMAL he is. He laughs and jokes and talks to the film-making team as though they were making a documentary about his collection of rare toy cars than about his habit of brutally murdering large numbers of people. He's far too casual and easy-going to really be able to accept him as a serial killer (he even drives a Prius!), but that is the heart of the movie's charm.
In the second half of the movie, however, the team decide that they were not as dedicated to their film as they thought they would be, and they decide that they can't just stand by and allow the killings to happen. In one of the movie's best scenes, Vernon stands there in full masked slasher get-up, mask and weapon and all, and scolds them like a babysitter scolding a naughty kid.
It's hilarious the way he is so clearly offended by their behavior as he tells them that they have "that 'we can't just stand here and let this happen' look on their faces" and says that now they have to leave.
Unfortunately, this is where the clever horror movie analysis ends and it turns into a more conventional slasher movie. The acting falls off a cliff and the killings stop making sense. But worst of all, having lost all of her footage, the remaining member of the documentary team at the end of the movie makes the bizarre and senseless decision to burn Vernon's body, I guess to destroy any remaining evidence of her crazy story, just in case she later had to explain any of this.
But other than that, it's a unique and fresh look at the horror genre and a fun exploration of its history and methods.
