So, 5 days late, I've decided to celebrate Halloween in my own, non-Renaissance Fair way. My original intent was to marathon all of the Halloween movies back-to-back (up to and including Rob Zombie's remake), but I just did that a few months back and Jenn wanted nothing to do with watching them all over again. Besides, I'll save another marathon for when Zombie's Halloween 2 comes out on DVD.

Instead, I chose to watch one of my favorite films about the horror genre, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. I say "about the horror genre" because the film in of itself isn't really a horror film. It's a mockumentary about an aspiring serial killer's rise to infamy. Set in a world where Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and even Chucky are actual, real-life serial killers, you get a behind the scenes look at how they do what they do as a film crew follows Leslie while he takes them through the process, from preparation to execution (Yay, puns!).

So what you get is essentially a horror-comedy. The film pokes fun at all the cliches of the slasher film genre. The movie Scream did this from the survivors point of view. It was all about the cliches of surviving a horror movie, followed by the cliches of convoluted sequels. This film is from the killer's perspective: finding the right "target group" and "survivor girl," setting up red herrings and preparing the murder location for the night of the killing spree.

There are countless allusion to other horror franchises in the film. Robert Englund is in the film as Leslie's "Ahab" (basically the Dr. Loomis, stop-the-killer-at-all-costs, character). Kane Hodder makes a brief cameo, Zelda Rubinstein (from Poltergeist) makes an appearance, as well as many more subtle references (including a bottle of "Stay Awake" on Leslie's mantle).

The film had such a small theatrical release, I would've missed it entirely, but when it came out on DVD a few years ago, I noticed some ads online for it, watched a trailer and knew I had to have it. If you're a horror fan, like me, then you'll love this film. Rent it, buy it, come over to my place and watch it: seriously. It's a fantastic movie and one of the best original "horror" films of the past decade.