scott glosserman's BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON (2006)

though there's certainly a rich, worthy canon, horror is almost certainly the easiest genre to really pin down; both its penchant for shameless trendiness and straightforward goals in regards to its audience make focused deconstruction fairly easy work, and somewhat beside the point. it was with some bit of surprise, then, that i enjoyed and even respected the canny meta-horror at work in Behind The Mask, which follows the crossed paths of an aspiring documentary crew and an aspiring serial murderer as an archetypal spree of slasher-flick terror is painstakingly plotted and realized. Glosserman and co-author David Stieve obviously know their stuff when it comes to the minutiae of convention, but it'd be to little avail without the admirable wit to back it up, and though the first bit of the film exudes a seeming Too-Cleverness, it manages to ride it all the way through into the third act before its inevitable collapse, at which point i was forced to concede that it was Just Clever Enough.