Horror Daily Double: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

You can binge on slasher flicks whenever you want, so maybe October should be reserved for something particularly clever from the sub-genre. Case in point: Scott Glosserman’s consistently inventive Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, which is not only a sly satire of slasher flick tropes, cliches, and conventions, it also becomes kinda creepy in its own right! Nathan Baesal is great as the seemingly affable psycho, as is Angela Goethals as a filmmaker intent on documenting all of the killer’s murderous tricks. Really fun stuff, doubly so if you know your slasher flick history.

Available on Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play

Horror master Wes Craven was struggling a little in the early ’90s. The People Under the Stairs has gone on to become a cult favorite, but it didn’t exactly blow the box office doors down at the time. So he logically turned to reliable old Freddy Krueger for some support. But instead of banging out another traditional sequel like Dream Warriors, he chose to get super-meta: This time around Freddy is targeting the actual filmmakers! It’s all very subversive and self-aware, sometimes to a fault, but the astute horror fan will of course note that there’s quite a bit of Scream DNA to be found in New Nightmare — which Mr. Craven would direct right after surviving the debacle known as Vampire in Brooklyn.

Available on Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu, FandangoNOW