There are several reasons why I started up this site; finding a way to justify to my girlfriend my need to watch so many weird and random films, helping smaller independent filmmakers get even just a little bit more publicity for their films they work so hard on, even getting the occasional screener or two for films I would otherwise never get to see was a goal as well. But the main reason was simply trying to find new films to love that I wouldn’t have normally taken a chance on, and then hopefully convincing even one more person to watch that movie. Sure the discovery is fun, but it is sharing it with others that is what is truly worthwhile. This past weekend I found a film that firmly fit into this last category, and it is my extreme pleasure to present it to those of you who read this site.

Now as I mentioned in my previous review of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, I had a bit of a hectic week. And since I typically have to work at the theater on holidays, it ended up spilling into this weekend as well. When this happens Anna typically heads north to her family’s, content in knowing that I’ll be busy working and maybe watching the occasional terrible movie that she has no interest in seeing. This weekend was no different, and I had planned to watch a German horror film, but due to my not paying proper attention to our Netflix queue, a little known horror film called Intruder was shipped to us instead.

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It’s almost Halloween. While this is wonderful news to someone like me, it’s terrible news for my wife who is once again subjected to a plethora of horror movies in my attempt to show her all of the movies she had been missing out on before she met me. It doesn’t help matters much that I can clearly remembering watching movies like Halloween and The Fog before she was born. Anyway, in order to be a little different, this year’s movie queue has been littered with a lot of new unseen movies, such as The Objective (I’m convinced there was an amazing idea somewhere in that mess), The Strangers (who knew being attacked by three creepy people in masks could be so…dull?) and many others not worth mentioning. It’s been pretty bleak. Just when I was giving up hope, along came a movie that made up for all of the disappointments.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is an excellent example of horror deconstruction in the 21^st century, up there with other recent cinematic examples like All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, and literary examples like Joe Hill’s “Best New Horror”. When I find myself talking about the film with others, inevitably the Scream trilogy is mentioned by others for comparison. And while it’s easy to lump Wes Craven’s franchise with Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, I’d argue that the former spent more of its energy desperately trying to convince a new generation that horror is, like, cool, whereas the latter simply reminds the rest of us why we loved horror in the first place. (more…)