When the low-budget horror mockumentary Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon hit SXSW in March 2006, a follow-up seemed inevitable. A movie this entrenched in and with this much affection for horror movie tropes surely has something to say about sequels. However, aside from a graphic novel and a short spin-off film, Behind The Mask II never panned out. Until now. Tonight, at a 20th anniversary screening of the film in Los Angeles, the film’s original creative team, director Scott Glosserman, writer David J. Stieve, and stars Nathan Baesel and Angela Goethals announced that Behind The Mask II: The Return Of Leslie Vernon is on the way.
Bringing back Baesel, Goethals, and the series’ “Ahab,” Doc Halloran, played by Robert Englund, Behind The Mask II has all the pieces in play. Much of the original crew is returning, including Grammy-winning composer Gordy Haab and Jaron Presant, Rian Johnson’s long-serving DP. He might even finally nail that “Walk-Run” sequence that they couldn’t get right last time.
Set 20 years later, Behind The Mask II catches up with Leslie Vernon (Baesel) and his final survivor girl, Taylor Gentry (Goethals), the reporter who embeds herself with the killer to see how the sausage gets made. Reuniting these two hasn’t been easy. “We tried many iterations ago to reboot,” Glosserman tells The A.V. Club in a sit-down interview with the cast and crew ahead of the screening. “During the aughts, the whole thing was the sequel, the prequel, the remake, we had the spree-make, the spreequel, like whatever it was.” The film’s DVD commentary is a living record of the team talking about the influx of horror remakes and prequels hitting theaters amid the rise of found footage and extreme horror, like Saw and Hostel. But by 2010, and one unsuccessful Kickstarter project later, prospects dried up. Still, in a pre-algorithmic age, people continued to share the movie on DVD and recommend it to anyone who would listen.
“In most people’s experiences, the ones that really adore the film, it was a recommendation, or they were browsing a Blockbuster shelf on a Saturday night, and they came across something that surprised them,” says Baesel. “The fact that they could trip on something that’s a gem all on their own, that’s pretty special in the horror genre.”
“I’m one of the people who passed it around,” says Aaron Koontz, a producer from Paper Street Pictures. Koontz connected with Stieve via an unlikely mediary. “A mutual friend of ours, Adam F. Goldberg, the guy who created The Goldbergs, tried to help them back in the day.” Goldberg told Koontz of the behind-the-scenes horror story of how things fell apart for Team Vernon. But after seeing Stieve’s short film, Wait For It, which is set inside the Vernon-iverse, Koontz reached out to see if expanding the idea appealed to the writer. Stieve panicked and tossed a Hail Mary.
“I don’t have a feature on Wait For It, dude, but all anybody ever asks me about is a sequel to Behind The Mask. You want to do that?” Stieve recalls. There’s like this beat of like stunned silence on the Zoom call.” It worked.
Released when the classic era of slashers was ending, Behind The Mask was a smart, scary, and often hilarious exploration of the genre that was changing. Today, slashers and meta-slashers amount to some of Hollywood’s most reliable moneymakers. With Scream 7 and Scary Movie 6 already looking to hack sequels to bits, Return Of Leslie Vernon has its work cut out for it. Thankfully, they have a killer monster behind the mask. “Leslie has a heightened substantive conceptual understanding of the true conventions and archetypes of the horror genre and brings that level of academia to the movie,” says Glosserman. “It’s not parody. It’s not superficially meta. It’s really deconstructing these genres. It’s almost like a college-level class in an entertaining film. I wouldn’t say it’s as commercial as Cabin In The Woods, which is something we’ll work on.”
That intelligence is evident in the first movie, but the way it blends humor and horror keeps it from ever appearing to be too pretentious for its own good. “This movie is so robust. It’s got such strong scaffolding in intelligence,” Goethals says. “There’s a playfulness, there’s an artistry, and there’s a poetry, but there’s also a deeply resonant intelligence. It’s very supportive. As a fan, you might be attracted by the color of the archetype, you might be attracted by the color of this as a slasher killer that I’ve never seen before. You might be attracted by so many different things, but simultaneously, you’re secretly getting an education on the genre, on the creative process, on all of this meta shit. It’s all happening all at once.”
The film’s metatextual elements extend to the cast and crew. Now 20 years later, they’re bringing their own successes and disappointments to the role, imbuing them into how Leslie Vernon, who never became a horror icon on the level of Michael Myers, feels about himself. “This is the film that we need to make now because we have so much to inform it with, not just with where we’ve been the last 20 years as people and as characters, but where the genre is now,” says Baesel. “We’re furthering the ball. We are pushing the ball and the conversation.”
“Leslie is not just here because he’s got an opportunity here, because he is going to change the world, right? He’s not just looking to have another story this time around. He’s looking to change the game.”