It’s been 15 years since we first met a new slasher icon in Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. Directed by Scott Glosserman, the innovative film took a meta approach to the sub-genre, deconstructing the whole damn thing by taking us behind the scenes and showing what it’s like to be a slasher villain. The planning. The preparation. The execution.
Various attempts to get Before the Mask: The Return of Leslie Vernon, a sequel/prequel/remake, off the ground have only led to a limited comic series at this time, but that doesn’t mean we’ll never again see Leslie up on the screen. Chatting with We Watched a Movie, Behind the Mask star Nathan Baesel offers up the latest on that potential.
“No [there’s been no movement on the project], but not for lack of interest,” Baesel explains to We Watched a Movie. “Just as a creative exercise, and maybe that’s all it ever is, during COVID I wanted to get some writing done and I wrote some material for… whatever iteration of Behind the Mask that we could get going on a kind of serial basis, but one that’s just a lot less labor intensive than doing a full production, ya know? And that interested me as a way to go because… finding something that you can run ‘n gun and just do it on a really lean… with lean resources… ya know, people are proving all the time that you can get a lot of really good stuff done with very little and there’s no reason why we couldn’t [do that].”
“If it develops any further, maybe we’ll have some news down the road,” Baesel adds during the conversation. “In the meantime, the interest is there and that’s always flattering.”
You can listen to We Watched a Movie’s full chat with Nathan Baesel below.