Boy you people are going to like the new horror film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. One part horror movie, one part mockumentary and two parts awesome. Director Scott Glosserman and his main star Nathan Baesel have taken the conventions of 70s and 80s slasher horror and taken it to a place that even Scream creator Kevin Williamson would fear to tread. On the eve of resurrected serial killer Leslie Vernons latest bloodbath, a documentary crew is videotaping all of Vernons preparations. They include finding a hero girl who will survive the murders, fighting his Ahab played by Robert Englund in the traditional Donald Pleasance Halloween type and of course being able to appear behind any one character at any moment.
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon opens on March 16th
Daniel Robert Epstein: Did you have the idea of doing a horror movie or did you want to do a post modern type thing and this fit in the horror genre?
Scott Glosserman: I would have to preface that by saying I was steeped in the curriculum of deconstructing horror films because I had written the equivalent of my thesis in college in a Conventions of Horror film class. I did this whole explication of The Shining. Seven years later when I was reading scripts and looking for something to develop and direct, my manager at the time gave me a screenplay by a guy named David Stieve which was the first derivation of this movie. It was something upon which I felt I could infuse my academic knowledge of the true conventions and architects of horror into but at the same time it already stood as a very funny, very self-aware movie about this guy on the cusp of psycho-slasher stardom. So it was both things I guess.
DRE: Its tough to use a word like post modern without sounding like a pretentious twit. But that is exactly what this movie is. One of the coolest parts was when Leslie is outside talking about how he only wants to cut only certain branches on the trees so that someone can escape from the house onto a tree but then eventually hit a certain branch and fall. It is so post-modern your stomach aches. Its really wild.
SG: We had a really fun time. Those things make it a Damn, why didnt I think of that movie. A lot of the things are very tongue in cheek and very fun. I tried to actually shoot the walk run sequence a couple times. Leslie Vernon is working out and says Ive got to work my ass off to make it look like Im walking while everyone else is running. But trying to shoot that scene and stay true to the two camera documentary feel of [documentary cameramen] Todd and Dougs mockumentary cameras was tough but we had a great time trying to do that without making it be supernatural. What really pleased me, beyond that superficial deconstruction, was that we really delve into the cerebral and academic response that some of the themes and the imagery in these movies actually exists. Such as the closet being representative of the womb and therefore Jamie Lee Curtis is going to be safe in the closet in Halloween. Now you can take it with a grain of salt or not but I wanted to shed some light on the horror genre and say that it has its own rules and conventions and archetypes. Horror filmmakers have lofty ideals and aspirations for their films. Great horror films, going back to Frankenstein, have social commentary about totalitarianism and creature features are social commentary of nervous trepidation over radioactivity and nuclear fallout. These latest torture porn horror films might be representative of our feeling of hopelessness in this post-9/11 age of suicide bombers. Theres so much more to them than just teenagers getting off on people slashing other peoples throats.
DRE: How did you decide on the look of Leslies mask?
SG: I worked with a really talented makeup, visual effects man named E. Larry Day. He lives up in Portland, Oregon where we shot the film and he had just come off doing the makeup on The Ring 2. Since he was there locally, I did my best to convince him to drop his fee and work with us on this small indie film. He listened to me as I explained what my vision was for creating an iconic mask to adhere to the conventions of slasher filmdom. A lot of the exposition of Leslie Vernons character is sitting on the cutting room floor but Leslie is the boy returned. Just like Jason or Michael Myers, something happened to him as a small child. But in this case he actually died and he has come back to reign terror on this unsuspecting town. Since he was the boy returned we wanted to do something that evoked an undeveloped face. E. Larrys twisted mind led him to this book of fetus and undeveloped baby faces. So if you look at the mask it is really an undeveloped fetal face.
DRE: What made you pick the hand scythe as Leslies weapon?
SG: We were fortunate enough to get Zelda Rubinstein from Poltergeist, who basically plays our harbinger of doom. She has a wonderful scary voice. When we got her, we wrote her a ridiculous amount of expository dialogue, which in itself is self-aware. She tells this story of the legend of Leslie Vernon where he was forced to till the fields using only a hand scythe. So Leslie Vernon comes back and kills people with his hand scythe. In one of the previous versions of the script, before we knew that we were actually making a serious movie here with legal ramifications and copyright issues, we had Leatherface in the script over at Leslies barbecues playing poker. There Leatherface gives Leslie Vernon a start gift, in the same way an agent would give an actor a start gift at the beginning of a movie for good luck. But we had to take that out.
DRE: Was it in the script that Leslie is as likeable as he is or was that the result of the actor or a change that you wanted?
SG: My only rule for finding an actor was that I wanted the acting to be as truthful and on the page as possible. David Stieves inspiration for writing this was him being on the cusp of his writing career. Who else feels that way but a serial killer starting out. So I wanted my dramatic actor to transfer that same emotion and act as though he was aspiring to do anything in life. What Nathan Baesel brought was this extraordinarily charming and very likeable guy. Nathan came into the room, auditioned and earned it right away. Another reason why we wanted to play it so truthfully was because so much of the movie lies in this juxtaposition between the docu-style and the actual horror film that we resolve things in, that nostalgic John Carpenter look. In the horror film everything changes, all of the sudden we have melodramatic musical score and we have god-like camera angles and we shoot on film as opposed to DV. Everythings different and that includes the writing, which becomes stilted which makes the acting become very melodramatic. To create that juxtaposition you need the acting in the documentary to be very truthful so that the acting in the horror can stand out as being very melodramatic. Nathan understood what we were going for and what separated him the most in the audition was that he can change on a dime.
DRE: Obviously you name check Michael Myers and Freddie and Jason, but are there references in the movie that arent so clear?
SG: This movie is chockfull of Easter eggs. There are some very subtle references that I am surprised anyones gotten. But Ive had a few people during film festivals walk up after the movie and point several things out that I just couldnt believe they caught, small little cameos or a set piece or a sign. Eugenes wife is Jamie for Jamie Lee Curtis. The names of the turtles Church and Zo are references. Everything is trying to be a reference because I wanted this movie to live as a nostalgic celebration of everything we love about the last 30 years of horror, specifically slasher horror. Color choices and even certain camera angles I lifted from Carpenter, [Friday the 13th creator Sean] Cunningham and [Stanley] Kubrick as templates for certain things. As a first time filmmaker, I think the more detailed I was and the more lofty ambitions that I had, regardless of whether or not all of these things that I tried to do succeeded or failed I think that the end product succeeded.
DRE: Obviously the role that Scott Wilson plays was probably a great role on paper but Ive been a fan of his for so long that I can really see how much he brings to it. Whats it like having him play that part?
SG: It is incredible. Scott Wilson and Robert Englund were our Vince Lombardi and Knute Rockne respectively. To have those guys come up to our little shoot in Portland did so many great things for our psyche. It said that what we were doing was legitimate and worthy. They set amazing examples and wowed us with incredible anecdotes and they were consummate professionals when they were shooting. Scott, in particular, gave us the indie street cred that we were desperate for. Roger Ebert apparently will see any film just because Scott Wilsons in it. The film lives and dies with the horror crowd but at the same time I am convinced that this film will appeal to a much broader demographic than straight horror does. So getting a guy like Scott Wilson who can draw the arthouse independent audiences and the Roger Eberts of the world was a real coup.
DRE: I used to work on the kind of shows that make documentaries like this. You did a really good job of portraying that world, did you ever work on those kinds of things?
SG: No, I havent. Ive got to give that credit to my DP, Jaron Presant. Weve come a long way from the jostly look of Blair Witch. When that film came out it introduced a great new way of shooting suspense but if you look at it now its very raw and nauseating to some. Shooting that way now you can evoke the same handheld look but barely float the camera enough to give you that feeling. Again, this goes back to the thing where 90 percent of the things that I wanted to do werent necessarily executed to perfection. I had this lofty ideal where I would have Todd, who is one of the cameramen, shoot very locked off, very straightforward, center everything in the frame type stuff because Todd was the jock archetype of the film. Doug, who is the other cameraman, was the stoner archetype and he got all the interesting angles and really cared about his composition and his look. Between those two points of view we would somehow get to learn who our characters were behind the camera by seeing what they shot. That obviously didnt work [laughs] because once we started cutting the film we broke those rules. But just to have these rules to start with and having a very defined, very detailed vision made me able to articulate it regardless of whether or not it executed in the particular way I wanted it to.
DRE: Anchor Bays meat is not theatrical so what kind of commercial expectations are there for this film?
SG: It is interesting that you say that because Anchor Bay is changing. Anchor Bay has recently become a subsidiary of Starz which is a media behemoth. It is my hope that Anchor Bays endeavor is to become the next Dimension Films. To become the theatrical genre label for a greater entity, the same way Dimension was Miramaxs genre label. Now that Anchor Bay has the financial wherewithal to release theatrically, they will hopefully go from a recycler of great DVD product and horror film products to a distributor and hopefully one day a producer of theatrical film products. I feel extremely excited about being the first theatrical release under their new partnership with Starz. I know how passionate they are but even more importantly about making their first theatrical film work. Theyve created more capital and more manpower for this theatrical release than Weinstein Company or IFC or any of the other more substantial theatrical companies that offered to act as distribution. Theyve really put their money where their mouth is. In some respects it might be a bigger risk on my part than a more established company but now we have true passionate people behind this movie as we always have.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon opens on March 16th
Daniel Robert Epstein: Did you have the idea of doing a horror movie or did you want to do a post modern type thing and this fit in the horror genre?
Scott Glosserman: I would have to preface that by saying I was steeped in the curriculum of deconstructing horror films because I had written the equivalent of my thesis in college in a Conventions of Horror film class. I did this whole explication of The Shining. Seven years later when I was reading scripts and looking for something to develop and direct, my manager at the time gave me a screenplay by a guy named David Stieve which was the first derivation of this movie. It was something upon which I felt I could infuse my academic knowledge of the true conventions and architects of horror into but at the same time it already stood as a very funny, very self-aware movie about this guy on the cusp of psycho-slasher stardom. So it was both things I guess.
DRE: Its tough to use a word like post modern without sounding like a pretentious twit. But that is exactly what this movie is. One of the coolest parts was when Leslie is outside talking about how he only wants to cut only certain branches on the trees so that someone can escape from the house onto a tree but then eventually hit a certain branch and fall. It is so post-modern your stomach aches. Its really wild.
SG: We had a really fun time. Those things make it a Damn, why didnt I think of that movie. A lot of the things are very tongue in cheek and very fun. I tried to actually shoot the walk run sequence a couple times. Leslie Vernon is working out and says Ive got to work my ass off to make it look like Im walking while everyone else is running. But trying to shoot that scene and stay true to the two camera documentary feel of [documentary cameramen] Todd and Dougs mockumentary cameras was tough but we had a great time trying to do that without making it be supernatural. What really pleased me, beyond that superficial deconstruction, was that we really delve into the cerebral and academic response that some of the themes and the imagery in these movies actually exists. Such as the closet being representative of the womb and therefore Jamie Lee Curtis is going to be safe in the closet in Halloween. Now you can take it with a grain of salt or not but I wanted to shed some light on the horror genre and say that it has its own rules and conventions and archetypes. Horror filmmakers have lofty ideals and aspirations for their films. Great horror films, going back to Frankenstein, have social commentary about totalitarianism and creature features are social commentary of nervous trepidation over radioactivity and nuclear fallout. These latest torture porn horror films might be representative of our feeling of hopelessness in this post-9/11 age of suicide bombers. Theres so much more to them than just teenagers getting off on people slashing other peoples throats.
DRE: How did you decide on the look of Leslies mask?
SG: I worked with a really talented makeup, visual effects man named E. Larry Day. He lives up in Portland, Oregon where we shot the film and he had just come off doing the makeup on The Ring 2. Since he was there locally, I did my best to convince him to drop his fee and work with us on this small indie film. He listened to me as I explained what my vision was for creating an iconic mask to adhere to the conventions of slasher filmdom. A lot of the exposition of Leslie Vernons character is sitting on the cutting room floor but Leslie is the boy returned. Just like Jason or Michael Myers, something happened to him as a small child. But in this case he actually died and he has come back to reign terror on this unsuspecting town. Since he was the boy returned we wanted to do something that evoked an undeveloped face. E. Larrys twisted mind led him to this book of fetus and undeveloped baby faces. So if you look at the mask it is really an undeveloped fetal face.
DRE: What made you pick the hand scythe as Leslies weapon?
SG: We were fortunate enough to get Zelda Rubinstein from Poltergeist, who basically plays our harbinger of doom. She has a wonderful scary voice. When we got her, we wrote her a ridiculous amount of expository dialogue, which in itself is self-aware. She tells this story of the legend of Leslie Vernon where he was forced to till the fields using only a hand scythe. So Leslie Vernon comes back and kills people with his hand scythe. In one of the previous versions of the script, before we knew that we were actually making a serious movie here with legal ramifications and copyright issues, we had Leatherface in the script over at Leslies barbecues playing poker. There Leatherface gives Leslie Vernon a start gift, in the same way an agent would give an actor a start gift at the beginning of a movie for good luck. But we had to take that out.
DRE: Was it in the script that Leslie is as likeable as he is or was that the result of the actor or a change that you wanted?
SG: My only rule for finding an actor was that I wanted the acting to be as truthful and on the page as possible. David Stieves inspiration for writing this was him being on the cusp of his writing career. Who else feels that way but a serial killer starting out. So I wanted my dramatic actor to transfer that same emotion and act as though he was aspiring to do anything in life. What Nathan Baesel brought was this extraordinarily charming and very likeable guy. Nathan came into the room, auditioned and earned it right away. Another reason why we wanted to play it so truthfully was because so much of the movie lies in this juxtaposition between the docu-style and the actual horror film that we resolve things in, that nostalgic John Carpenter look. In the horror film everything changes, all of the sudden we have melodramatic musical score and we have god-like camera angles and we shoot on film as opposed to DV. Everythings different and that includes the writing, which becomes stilted which makes the acting become very melodramatic. To create that juxtaposition you need the acting in the documentary to be very truthful so that the acting in the horror can stand out as being very melodramatic. Nathan understood what we were going for and what separated him the most in the audition was that he can change on a dime.
DRE: Obviously you name check Michael Myers and Freddie and Jason, but are there references in the movie that arent so clear?
SG: This movie is chockfull of Easter eggs. There are some very subtle references that I am surprised anyones gotten. But Ive had a few people during film festivals walk up after the movie and point several things out that I just couldnt believe they caught, small little cameos or a set piece or a sign. Eugenes wife is Jamie for Jamie Lee Curtis. The names of the turtles Church and Zo are references. Everything is trying to be a reference because I wanted this movie to live as a nostalgic celebration of everything we love about the last 30 years of horror, specifically slasher horror. Color choices and even certain camera angles I lifted from Carpenter, [Friday the 13th creator Sean] Cunningham and [Stanley] Kubrick as templates for certain things. As a first time filmmaker, I think the more detailed I was and the more lofty ambitions that I had, regardless of whether or not all of these things that I tried to do succeeded or failed I think that the end product succeeded.
DRE: Obviously the role that Scott Wilson plays was probably a great role on paper but Ive been a fan of his for so long that I can really see how much he brings to it. Whats it like having him play that part?
SG: It is incredible. Scott Wilson and Robert Englund were our Vince Lombardi and Knute Rockne respectively. To have those guys come up to our little shoot in Portland did so many great things for our psyche. It said that what we were doing was legitimate and worthy. They set amazing examples and wowed us with incredible anecdotes and they were consummate professionals when they were shooting. Scott, in particular, gave us the indie street cred that we were desperate for. Roger Ebert apparently will see any film just because Scott Wilsons in it. The film lives and dies with the horror crowd but at the same time I am convinced that this film will appeal to a much broader demographic than straight horror does. So getting a guy like Scott Wilson who can draw the arthouse independent audiences and the Roger Eberts of the world was a real coup.
DRE: I used to work on the kind of shows that make documentaries like this. You did a really good job of portraying that world, did you ever work on those kinds of things?
SG: No, I havent. Ive got to give that credit to my DP, Jaron Presant. Weve come a long way from the jostly look of Blair Witch. When that film came out it introduced a great new way of shooting suspense but if you look at it now its very raw and nauseating to some. Shooting that way now you can evoke the same handheld look but barely float the camera enough to give you that feeling. Again, this goes back to the thing where 90 percent of the things that I wanted to do werent necessarily executed to perfection. I had this lofty ideal where I would have Todd, who is one of the cameramen, shoot very locked off, very straightforward, center everything in the frame type stuff because Todd was the jock archetype of the film. Doug, who is the other cameraman, was the stoner archetype and he got all the interesting angles and really cared about his composition and his look. Between those two points of view we would somehow get to learn who our characters were behind the camera by seeing what they shot. That obviously didnt work [laughs] because once we started cutting the film we broke those rules. But just to have these rules to start with and having a very defined, very detailed vision made me able to articulate it regardless of whether or not it executed in the particular way I wanted it to.
DRE: Anchor Bays meat is not theatrical so what kind of commercial expectations are there for this film?
SG: It is interesting that you say that because Anchor Bay is changing. Anchor Bay has recently become a subsidiary of Starz which is a media behemoth. It is my hope that Anchor Bays endeavor is to become the next Dimension Films. To become the theatrical genre label for a greater entity, the same way Dimension was Miramaxs genre label. Now that Anchor Bay has the financial wherewithal to release theatrically, they will hopefully go from a recycler of great DVD product and horror film products to a distributor and hopefully one day a producer of theatrical film products. I feel extremely excited about being the first theatrical release under their new partnership with Starz. I know how passionate they are but even more importantly about making their first theatrical film work. Theyve created more capital and more manpower for this theatrical release than Weinstein Company or IFC or any of the other more substantial theatrical companies that offered to act as distribution. Theyve really put their money where their mouth is. In some respects it might be a bigger risk on my part than a more established company but now we have true passionate people behind this movie as we always have.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
It was pretty...horrible.