Horror Theory: Just Men Behind The Masks
So I just rewatched Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon. A 2006 deconstructionist horror film. And I have a thought for the rest of the horror community to chew on:
A lot of people mention idly that this is a "Shared universe" film. That this is a universe where Chucky, Michael, Freddy, and Jason (All of whom are name dropped) exist. Which heavily implies the rest do, to. I have a different idea.
This is a universe where those STORIES exist. Fred Kruger may have been a real person. Jason Voorhees drowned at camp that fateful summer. Charles Lee Ray was gunned down in a toy store. Maybe even Michael Myers went to the asylum and got out.
Here's the kicker tho: If you pay attention, at least, it's implied that the characters as we know them are fake. The only one I'd be willing to say exists properly from the first movie is Michael.
Spoilers ahead but the guy up top is the titular Leslie Vernon... Except no. He isn't.
The Dr. Loomis to Leslie's Michael (The in universe term is "Ahab.") is Doc Halloran. Halloran reveals and Leslie later admits he is not Leslie Vernon. His real name is Leslie Mancuso.
(Incidentally, yes. That is Robert Englund as Halloran. A+ casting.)
At the end of the movie, after carving a bloody swathe through a bunch of people, Leslie is "killed" by the survivor girl, Taylor. When asked if Leslie is dead, she says "I don't know what he is." Halloran reflects on the idea that Leslie was "Just a man."
We spent the entire movie up to this point getting into Leslie's head, learning how he does things. Seeing all the preparation not only he, but the other slashers put into the things the do. Why is Jason's Machete indestructible but all the other tools around break with one swing? Sabotage. Why are windows usually stuck? Nails. Why do tree limbs break right away and cars not start? Also sabotage. Stuff like that.
We also find out that Leslie Vernon was very likely a real person but has been dead for twenty years. At the very least Leslie Vernon is a popular folk tale around the town, Mr. Mancuso is just piggybacking off it to do some murder in the interest of making his survivor girl stronger and doing good for the world through evil.
(Pictured: Leslie Mancuso as Leslie Vernon during his killing spree)
The story of Mr. Vernon, the dead man, is that supposedly a bastard kid was born to a married couple (possibly through rape.) They worked him like a slave, forcing him to till fields with nothing but a hand scythe until he murdered both of them. The town found out and a mob of people drowned the boy after the murders and his body was never found as the water was too cold, so he never came back up. Turtles picked his bones clean.
Twenty years later, Mancuso took on the name and started plotting to murder people at that farm house. The rest of the movie is the set up and execution of that murder plan.
So what does that say about people like Michael, Jason, Freddy, and especially Chucky?
We'll start with the man who started it all. One tragic night in 1963, a young Michael Myers murdered his older sister with a kitchen knife. No one knew why. No one understood his motive. But the fact remains he did it. A little before Halloween night 1978, Michael escaped the mental institution he was in and went on a killing spree for reasons not everyone will know but was injured and eventually stopped by Dr. Loomis and a local baby sitter, Lori Strode.
I see this as being the thing that inspires that most horrible of things in-universe: Copycat Killers.
They mention directly that Michael has done his attacks on Haddonfield at least 4 separate times. I don't know much about Halloween as a series so I don't know what movies that number specifically is referencing but I'm willing to suggest the first two movies are billed together as one attack because it was basically one protracted occurrence. At the end of which he was blinded and then set on fire, burning to death.
Later movies retcon that death but logically, the real Michael is dead in this universe. Later instances where HE supposedly attacks are the works of more calculating, crazy people like Mancuso. His whole deal is "We set things up like this, we figure out how to do that and yadda yadda."
You could easily apply most of what he says and does to people who can act out just like he does. Bullet proof vests, gel applied in spots to stop bleeding. Breaking into people's houses and cutting the power and telephones, etc. I think the other supposed three attacks in the BTM universe are people who took on Mikey's coveralls and a replica mask, were in some way stopped or got away, and then were either replaced by new fakers or maybe continued being Mike a time or two before being stopped. This could also theoretically riff on the idea of Michael using body doubles to fake his death in some of the movies.
Alternatively, The real Mike could still be at the Smith's Grove Sanitarium in this universe. He never got out but his legend made a perfect starting point for people to latch on to and start "being him." Or he may be a local legend with no real basis in reality.
The problem is we don't have any further context for the four attacks that happened. So... Yeah, this is nine tenths me BSing.
How about Jason? The Crystal Lake killer and my personal favorite?
I think the most likely case of what happened with Jason in the universe of BTM is that Jason Voorhees did actually exist. He did drown that one summer. Some years later his mother would go on to slaughter a bunch of camp counselors before the camp could reopen. Note the thing about how slashers need a story like that which would naturally draw somebody.
So I think it's worth considering that the "dozens" of people "Jason' supposedly has killed over the years we're actually the works of either one faker or multiple fakers who've taken up residence at camp Crystal Lake over the years. This is because while we don't have any real evidence that Jason is 100% real we do have evidence that sometimes people will take up these mantles just to take them up if it's the convenient one to work with and use for your own ends.
If you go to Jersey and you want to start offing people, why not try and find a way to pin it on the Jersey devil?
So you have this local legend of a kid who drowned in a lake and his mom goes on a murderous rampage. So what are you, an up and coming slasher going to do? Well you start acting how you think Jason would act. You put on this facade and start doing damage to people. Given a lot of the stuff Mancuso does that actually makes him look undead, a talented enough makeup artist could actually theoretically make themselves look like a super deformed crazy guy like Jason or even like Freddy... Speaking of.
I think the most likely course of Freddy's history here is that he did still kill around 20 kids at some point in the past. And then the people got together and they burned him to death in the boiler room.
However I think maybe there's a chance he survived and went on to not so much invade people's dreams as he did perhaps start drugging people and then torturing them. Alternatively his "Slasher" copycat started doing that.
We know that in the actual nightmare on elm Street movies Freddy likes to get in your dreams, play with your fears and even use some of your greatest strengths against you, because he just can. Now imagine someone with the face of a burn victim breaking into your house at night, drugging you or gassing you up in a way that makes the whole world feel very dream-like, and unreal, and then butchering you.
I think it would especially be very easy to reframe a lot of the ways in which these people turn up dead as Freddy simply doing things that he knows because it's established in the BTM universe that a lot of these killers will stalk their victims from months at a time.
That one scene in dream Warriors where he turns his hand into drug needles and injects a girl with them? Well that could be suggestive of the idea that instead what Freddie actually did was drug her and then make her OD in her sleep.
A lot of the kills all of these guys do could be someone embellished like that one time that girl was force fed things until she choked to death in her dream, in real life her windpipe just kind of collapsed if memory serves. As if something had been weighing down on it.
Then again, maybe most of the kills from all the movies we know didn't really happen. Michael being strong enough to pin a guy to a wall using a kitchen knife is otherworldly in its own way. Like. Maybe that didn't happen that way. It's just the rumor mill circling around.
Now. The last one. My personal least favorite. Chucky. AKA Charles Lee Ray, the Lakeshore Strangler.
Charles Lee Ray killed a good handful of people as a normal adult but in a crime gone wrong, he got gunned down in a toy store somewhere in Chicago. In the universe of the Child's Play movies, he uses a voodoo spell to put his soul in a "Good Guy" doll. He then uses a normal little boy, Andy, to go kill his partner in crime, Eddie and then spends the rest of the series hunting for Andy so he can be human again by putting his soul inside of Andy. Or just trying to kill him in three and I think Curse's after-credits.
In universe, I think what really might have happened was Charles swore bloody vengeance on Eddie and the cop who killed him, expecting to escape. He was then killed in the store either trying to get the drop on the cop or just get out. The hideout Charles and Eddie, who escaped custody, used to use, exploded in a random gas leak incident.
But urban legends have circulated over and over. That it was Charles' ghost possessing a Good Guy Doll. That a little kid was seen on the train carrying one such doll heading toward Cabrini-Green. Etc.
Now, I'm not 100% sure how later appearances by "Chucky" would go. Like. How do you fake a killer doll? Tiny Animatronics? A REALLY short guy? Leaving them as calling cards? I dunno. But it is just another guy piggybacking.
The only cue that anything vaguely supernatural is happening in this world is at the end, Leslie is alive after having his head crushed and being burned, but, to his credit, he was established to be a pretty tough bastard up to that point and the press was only turned enough to lock him in place and hear one squelch. It probably did damage but it also probably didn't do enough to put him on ice. So it's fairly ambiguous and still probably means killer dolls aren't a factor.
In summary: Behind The Mask is not a universe where all of our favorite killers exist. It's a universe where their legends exist and people who want to do evil become those legends. For a time at least.
Happy Halloween, everyone.
