13 Nights of Hallowe'en: Night #11 Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

It’s hard to say where to start with the movie for tonight,
“Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon”. Getting into who the actors are and the director and writers is so much fun, but let’s try to be quick about that. There are small parts played by Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger) and Zelda Rubinstein (from Poltergeist). Great things need to be said about horror newcomers Nathan Baesel and Angela Goethals. They absolutely make the film--they’re in most of the scenes. Writer/director Scott Glosserman has no other credits for those two job titles previous to this film, which makes him immediately awe inspiring. The other writer, David J. Stieve, is in the same boat. This movie really makes it true that some films are better and better every time you see it.

“Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon” is a full-on horror mockumentary. It has an amazing balance of comedy and horror. It’s the good kind of comedy too, all deadpan satirisation in a smart and funny way without resorting to being lame or stupid. This movie is serious fun. At one point some will wonder if it is going to become the movie it was presented as, then it reaches a tipping point, where just like a roller coaster some good drops are past, and then around the corner is the monster rise and fall for which everyone was waiting. Keep an eye on everything in this movie. There are a number of references that are less obvious than others. There are also several horror in-jokes, one of which is incredibly cool and funny. Sit back and enjoy the birth of a new legend.

Mood: extravagant.
Music: Halloween in Heaven by Type O Negative off of Dead Again.

Dating Stories

It seems like now is a poor time to be writing. It's perhaps harder than ever to write a story set in the present without including something that will quickly leave the story feeling dated. Technology of different stripes can be ignored certainly but more of them are becoming ubiquitous and should be involved. A good example is the cell phone. Cell phones can vastly change the playing field of a story. It's something of a downer to see every story involve there being no cell phone coverage. It's a cheap cop out to trying to craft a story where being able to immediately reach someone, even help, can still leave the characters with their conundrums.

The first of the Poltergeist movies was such a story that defies being changed if the time setting of the story were to be updated. The Freeling family was surrounded by neighbours, able to call upon the best people to try and help, and still the horror would not relent and the mood could not be dampened. The writers didn't need secluded woods, downed phone lines, or any kind of physical isolation. Yet isolation engulfed the movie's family just as fully as the haunting frightened them.

Phone calls aside there are other ways that the ever changing and evolving technological landscape will affect modern, current, fiction. Does the character have a CD player or an MP3 player, or is it in his phone? Is the character watching a DVD or a HD DVD or a Blu-Ray disc when the terrible event happens? Is the secret knowledge hidden in a book, or on a website, or stashed on a USB drive? Encoded on a blog? Did the stalker find his victim on MySpace or Facebook? Did he stick a GPS tracker to her car? Keystroke logger? Does the cell phone bearing crowd witnessing an accident have camera stills of it or streaming video? The options are there, and changing too fast or not they should be put to best use.

Mood: down.
Music: Vicious Circle by Quiet Riot and Poison Apples by Motley Crue.

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Feeding Off Of and Sustaining Each Other

For a number of years I have been thinking about doing a haunted house novel. I have done a couple stories with ghosts in them, a couple of haunted items, and in a similar but disconnected vein, a possessed house. What I find to be a real challenge is on deciding what kind of ghosts to use, what traditional haunting phenomena, and other related things. There is more than one approach to writing ghosts. There are different kinds of ghosts around the world, each with their own particular beliefs and superstitions floating around them. Then there are other divergent explanations to work with as well.

One can certainly delineate the meaning of hauntings into two categories, the supernatural, and the scientific. The supernatural explanations run from noisy, mostly mindless spirits, to apparitions seeking to complete some earth task or unmask their killers, to ghost who don’t know they actually died. The scientific explanations run from the overspill of mental energies to cause physical phenomena, to echoes of the past somehow imprinted on locations, to factors impacting on the human brain to cause false impressions and hallucinations.

Even without looking at the why’s and how’s science can still help out tremendously in explaining the phenomena involved in a haunting. There is the ever-popular cold spot theory that associates ghosts, even ones unseen, with a sudden drop in temperature in the area they “physically” occupy. There are the Electro-Magnetic readings which can either be evidence of the ghost, or evidence that it is the mind of the witness being effected, depending on what kind of readings are gathered and where. There is also audio-visual evidence, though much of it remains controversial, and the most compelling of this sort of evidence is elusive and hard to collect.

This is a mere brushing of the topic, but it gives a good impression of the breadth of factors to consider in just a couple of lines of thought on the matter. This is without taking a look at the story factors that will determine what phenomena, explanations and other details of the haunting will best fit the given story being worked on. Looking at things from the writing perspective, the rest of the story outside of the haunting itself should affect the haunting details the writer will use, and the details used in turn will affect the rest of the story, making for a relationship best described as symbiotic.

Mood: level.
Music: Good Mourning/Black Friday by Megadeth and These Colours Don't Run by Iron Maiden.

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