Sunday, April 5, 2015

Crossover of the Week



2005
BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON
            Aspiring slasher Leslie Vernon seeks to follow in the footsteps of the great slashers that came before him. Footage is shown of Camp Crystal Lake, the town of Springwood, Ohio, and Haddonfield, Illinois as places that have suffered slasher attacks. Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Chucky are mentioned by name as existing. A Lament Configuration can be seen in the house of Leslie’s friends Eugene and Jamie. Leslie has a bottle of Stay Awake medicine on his mantlepiece.
            2006 horror film. The references connect Vernon to most of the important slasher series: Friday the 13th (Jason Voorhees and Crystal Lake), A Nightmare on Elm Street (Freddy Krueger, Springwood, and Stay Awake), Halloween (Michael Myers and Haddonfield), and Child’s Play (Chucky.) The Lament Configuration is from the Hellraiser movies, based on Clive Barker’s story “The Hellbound Heart.” Of interest, one deleted scene has Leslie mentioning that he spent some time in Texas, helping a fellow slasher who was trying to “reinvent his thing,” a reference to Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, and a nod to both the originals and the 2003 remake. Some references in the film do seem to imply that slashers lack supernatural powers, but this can be seen as Leslie simply using showmanship and stage magic to make up for abilities he lacks; this is backed up by a reference to Leslie Vernon in the ghost-slasher film Hatchet II.

8 comments:

  1. In Hack/Slash, Cassie and Vlad would occasionally encounter mundane serial killers (the kind that exist in the real world) along with the supernatural slashers. Vernon is probably one of these who was inspired by Slashers.

    What's Stay Awake medicine from?

    If you don't mind me asking, how's the print version of this going?

    ReplyDelete
  2. If you'll look again, I actually noted that Stay Awake was from A Nightmare on Elm Street.

    The books appear to be entering the home stretch. We're shooting for 300,000 words, and currently I have 281,554. We still need to select a cover artist, and the pictures for the book's interiors. I've got a file folder on my computer for the cover art I've been posting here, so I'll probably be using a few of those.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yeah, I see it now.

    That's good to hear.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great news! Is there a tentative projection for publication date at this point?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Can't wait. :-) At least that means there will be time to include the just announced Star Trek/Green Lantern series coming later this year. :-P

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sean, do you have a time limit or a something about accepting crossovers? Because, theoretically, you could spend the rest of your life evaluating crossovers and never publish the book. :)

    You could of course continue this blog after publication, though I don't know if you want to.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Once I get to 300,000 words, we're going to probably go ahead and prepare both volumes for publication. Win mentioned a few books in his introduction to Volume 1 that he wasn't able to read in time to include in the books, and a few announced crossovers that didn't come out in time to be included, so I can probably do something like that in my own introduction for Volume 3.

    I may keep the blog going even after the books are published.

    ReplyDelete