Rental Store Memories: Leslie Vernon

There's a particularly nice memory I harvest and grow whenever possible. Harvest is funny in how it is used by Leslie Mancuso (Nathan Baesel, who I thought was just fabulous in the title role), carrying Taylor along during a monologue he's joshing her about in the talk of an orchard his made-up killer supposedly endured tilling at the orders of his mom. Anyway, I hearken back to a rental store my little home town once had that stayed open for maybe three or so years. 2006 was right in the middle of its run. When the economy went into the toilet in 2008, the store soon folded. I bought a bunch of VHS horror films off the store during its "we're shit out of luck and need to get rid of the shelf inventory" going-out-of-business sale as 2008 was at a close. It was a store called MovieTyme, started up right about 2004-05 when horror was enduring a nice run (Masters of Horror was doing well on Showtime and showed up in rental stores after their airings on the premium movie channel), and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) had emerged as a rental shelf horror dynamo. It reminds me of It Follows in that there was a great debate regarding its value as a slasher film/parody. Some like me praised it for its unique use of documentary footage until about the 62 minute mark when Behind the Mask alternates to a cinematic film as those who were shooting Leslie Mancuso (Taylor and her two camera operators) try and stop him from killing a select group of college kids he successfully manipulated into hanging out at the "Leslie Vernon haunted house". The look behind the curtain (well, mask: Mancuso's tricks of the trade are fully explained to Taylor, likened to a magician revealing his magic tricks) gives us, the viewer, a complete dissection of how the killer thinks and operates. It is clever and amusing. The impeccable casting is such an asset. How the film twists and turns (for one, the final girl who works at the diner is not quite so virginal) and doesn't go as Vernon was predicting (what does happen seems to have been exactly as Vernon actually planned!) to Taylor makes for a nice bit of helter skelter developing plot. Slasher getting turned on its head is never a bad thing, I think. "Convention" can be a bit too formulaic...a monkey wrench can be a good thing if formula begins to go stale.

At any rate, I remember having a fun conversation with the owner of the store about Leslie Vernon when she noticed I was renting it. Conversations often turnabout when two people (in this case, the store owner and myself) realize they have something in common: horror was a cool introduction to each other. We talked about our similar interests in slasher film and horror genre, and it went on for about thirty minutes...a pleasant experience. She knew her shit, too. Leslie Vernon was kind of a catalyst. I saw it on the shelf, and took a chance based on good word of mouth. I was on the imdb horror board, learning the goods about the genre from a diverse group of people who love the genre like me, and Leslie Vernon was on the tongues of folks. There are these kinds of films that emerge, catch the eyes of horror folk, begin a stream of positive output, and earn a small vocal movement that gets others to try them out. Vernon, in 2006, was such a film.