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botslayer · 16 days ago

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For no other reason than this initial post being a lot of fun, I'm going in on some more classic horror characters and how I think "Leslifying" them into this theory might play out. I also want to address some of the Easter Eggs in the movie and the fact that Eugene, Leslie Mancuso's mentor, is, and I swear this is true, the director and a few others swear by it, meant to be Billy from the original Black Christmas (1974) and also the guy from The Toolbox Murders (1978) who dun went and did the murderings in that. And also his wife is implied to be one of his survivor girls.

With that out of the way: Let it be said that I'm just doing ones I personally like and know enough about to jam into this. I can't promise I'll get everything, but I'm throwing in what feels natural to this theory. I'm keeping some of the crazier ones at arm's length because NGL: I can't figure out what The Leprechaun would be like in this universe. He's just too out there as a concept. Same with the Killer Klowns from Outer Space. These are one-off killers, slashers, dynamic, singular antagonists or less bizarre groupings. Okay? Okay. 1. The Cenobites

Now I know what I just said about bizarre groupings and things, but A. There is a Lament Configuration in Eugene's house in the movie. They're using it like a damn paperweight. B. I can actually think of a pretty logical way for them to fit. What is it? They don't exist. Consider that you could theoretically buy a supposed "Necronomicon" online these days, and even plausibly back in 2006. Be that the one from Evil Dead for replicas' sake or the one supposedly written about in the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. I think the Hellraiser movies, or at least the novel the first one or two were based on, "The Hellbound Heart" written by Clive Barker exist in the universe of BTM. The Lament Configuration in Eugene's house is not a functional magical object. It's just a piece of merchandise related to those films/that book. It's the same as having a Freddy glove or a Morpher from Power Rangers. However, this selection makes sense when you remember Cenobites are all about torture and pain in unbelievable quantities. Seems like an on-brand thing for a brutal serial killer to have in his house. 2. Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Can... we stop this bit?

For those unfamiliar with the story of Daniel Robitaille, Basically, his family were slaves, but he was born free and in fact, was quite wealthy due to his father's inventiveness. Thus he was free to pursue art and layers of higher education in the comforts of the upper crust despite his racial background to the point where he became a well-known artist and was thereafter commissioned to paint a portrait of a rich guy's WHITE daughter. They fell in love. And The Daughter fell pregnant. This, being a relatively recent post-civil war era US, even in Chicago, wouldn't let that slide. So the father had hooligans cut his hand off, they jammed a meathook into the stump and bolted it in there, chained him to a rock, bashed open a few beehives, and covered him in the stolen honeycomb until the bees effectively stung and kinda ate him to death. After that, he began to haunt Cabrini-Green, where his ashes were scattered hither and thither before it became what it was by the time of the first Candyman movie, his new name, "Candyman" being his calling card. If you say it five times in the mirror, he appears and then murders you. The movie itself picks up with a college student, Helen, trying to write a paper on urban legends and getting pulled deep into the specifics of Candyman as a story because not only is the story fascinating and kind of depressing, but it seems to have left an impression all over Cabrini Green... To the point where we actually could have the best link to BTM: A normal guy running a gang, calling himself Candyman, and murdering people with a hook. That sounds just like Mancuso with more accomplices.

Now, in the movie, the faker and his men beat Helen senseless and leave her for dead. He didn't quite finish the job, though as of the very next scene, Helen picks him out of a line and tells the cops he's the one who led her physical assault. Now the question of why a supposed slasher wouldn't just MANGLE her to death is an interesting one. And my honest answer is complacency. He got comfortable doing that stuff for a few YEARS if the movie's timeline is to be believed, then got sloppy with Helen and it turned out to be the one that bit him in the ass and finally got him arrested. Albeit he was also apparently running a few different criminal organizations personally. Ignoring that for a second: What about Helen herself? 3. Helen Lyle

Helen appeared at the end of Candyman after some really fucked up shit happened to her. See, her assault less than halfway into the movie was less than half of her overall suffering. She was publically blamed for the killing of a sort-of friend's dog, the kidnapping of that friend's baby, got committed to a mental asylum for a whole month, and ultimately burned to death in a pyre fire the people of Cabrini-Green started after saving the aforementioned baby from Candyman's threats upon its life. After her funeral, her (Now-ex) Husband said her name five times in the mirror, accidentally summoned her, and then she murdered him with Candyman's own hook. Which was put in her grave by a procession of people from Cabrini-Green.

What I think might have happened here is that Helen was a real person. Her brain was damaged after her run-in with the "Real" Candyman. She starts suffering from a series of paranoid delusions. That the thing in her paper is coming after her. And the movie does kind of imply that's what it LOOKS LIKE to any outside observer. She, as far as everyone knows, killed the dog, killed her friend (Bernadette), kidnapped a baby, got committed, killed her own doctor, randomly decided to climb into a pile of junk for shelter in the winter night and crawled out with the baby.

I think some of that could logically be embellishments to the story. She has her run-in with the gang leader, she has her traumatic brain injury and the trauma of the near-death experience, then gets institutionalized under mysterious circumstances. Several of which are over-blown by the imaginative minds of the people of Chicago. Hell, she may have escaped the institution at some point. The death of her husband, Trevor, might have been the result before she was locked up again. Also worth noting: The place of her death and the cause could be traced back to something else from the first post. Chucky. Think about it, big fire, partial explosion, the same general area of the same city, and the first movies are only FOUR YEARS apart. 1988 to 1992. That's really not that long. stories about all sorts of weird shit could have cropped up between the two and given circumstances, these are just different perspectives on one crazy overlap of coincidences. These coincidences are tied together over and over and mutate, becoming two or three distinct figures in the minds of people all over. 4. Pennywise/It/Robert Gray

Yeah, if you didn't know, Pennywise, despite being an Eldrich horror beyond our mortal minds, actually addresses itself as Robert Gray in a limited capacity. My hand to god. Now, in-universe, Pennywise exists as this eldrich horror from "The Macroverse" that feeds on fear and human meat. He tends to go after children specifically because they're easier to scare than adults and fear to him is "salt" for the meat. It goes into long hibernation cycles, awakens, spreading all sorts of evil, and then usually caps these cycles off with one big shebang of awful before retreating back into the darkness from whence It emerged. A local group of kids, "The Losers club" Were behind a series of events that injured it one cycle, then killed it the next, possibly under the auspices of It's creator, "The Other," or It's rival/brother, "The Turtle." This is somewhat unclear but that's the sense It makes of the situation. Now, in the BTM world, what I feel is most logical is that the original Pennywise, an actual person, probably killed some people. Do remember that a partial basis for why Steven King wrote the original book was John Wayne Gacy, an IRL Serial Killer who worked parties and charitable events as a clown named Pogo. He then raped, tortured and murdered 33 young men. And then died via execution in jail.

So what happened in BTM's world? Pennywise's performer, possibly one Robert Gray, ends up discovered for some huge tragedy, likely involving children ala Freddy, and is then executed. Whether this was extrajudicial or completely legally sanctioned is up to interpretation. However, much the way of a story like Gacy or Michael Myers, he's likely the local boogeyman of Derry, Maine. You tell small children not to go out at night, or else Pennywise The Dancing Clown will get you. And he'll eat you up and leave whatever's left for sewer workers to find. Local tragedies are periodically blamed on this imagined common entity to keep kids in line, perhaps. And again, you could have, intermittently, psychos putting the makeup on and going berserk, slowly easing their way into the town and actually causing a bunch of deaths and disappearances, all while dressed as clowns and scaring people. Like the 2016 clown sightings (Remember those?) but with more fatal consequences. The Pennywise character over the years has also probably built a reputation as being an alien who looks like a clown, a monster with a clown-ish appearance, and god knows what else because that's just how these sorts of stories work. 5. Art The Clown from Terrifyer

We're doing another clown because "Screw it." Art himself is a being of, at the time of writing, ambiguous origin, he's got some crazy demonic vibes and does all sorts of really sadistic, evil shit to people because he can, though. Like in Terrifier 2, he literally ripped a girls arm off and after cutting her all up, poured a lot of bleach and salt on hr just to inflict more pain. He's as savage as Josan and twice as sadistic as Freddy. It's nutty.

In the BTM universe, I feel like Art, "The Miles County Clown" only had one significant appearance. The options here are worth thinking about. Either the first Terrifyer, where, again, his kill count might be a bit inflated because stories tend to do that, or the 2013 anthology flick, "All Hallow's Eve" where he passes a kid a VHS tape of some horror films for Halloween, then murders that kid and his sister. These could be blended events. Art could have killed those two kids, and in the same Halloween, murdered a few other people given the crowds wandering this way and that among other things being plausible distractions for those evenings. There is a slight uptick in murders on Halloween, didn't you know? (Albeit, that's all crime, INCLUDING Murders) So Art has one night where he has a big blowout murder fest, scars a woman's face heavily, and then commits suicide in front of the police. They get him to the morgue. Now, it's canon in the Terrifier movies that Art's body vanished from the morgue and no one found it. A year later, he attacked again. I feel like that might be the embellishment. Art, the real one, was buried. He is dead. But again, these stories mutate, common beliefs about them spread despite the truth because it makes the story interesting. Art's copycat or copycats exist though. and it explains why he, like Pennywise, returns periodically. 6. The Odets from Wrong Turn, The Sawyers from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, And The Mutants/Hill People from The Hills Have Eyes

I'm clustering all three of these together because they're all excessively similar. Buncha inbred/mutant Cannibals out in "God's Armpit, Wherever, USA." Going back to the real-world influences of these characters and what happened to them, The Sawyers are based on the real-life killer and taxidermist of human parts, Ed Gein, albeit the family is considerably larger, the Odets clearly have a Texas Chainsaw influence, and the Hill People follow similar in-group trends to their counterparts albeit their origins are somewhat different. Like in the Hills Have Eyes reboot where they were mutated by nuclear bomb testing. What I think happened here is similar to "Crybaby Bridge." A real urban legend with a few variants. But the basics tend to be a woman pulled over on a bridge with her baby and the baby went over because either she threw it or it just got out of her sight long enough to go over. In some versions the woman threw herself over. Either way, at night, you can sometimes hear the baby's spirit crying out for its mom, the mom crying out for the baby, or the baby crying while its mom screams in fine terror. The thing is there are like six or seven of them all across the USA. I think, then, the similarities between these guys and the Sawney clan from Scottland (Again, another real-life legend) might have something to do with it. It's a lot of cross-pollination and overlap with Ed Gein, and there may have been local goings on at some point in the history of these places like Donner parties or the like.

It's just a coincidence that a lot of them have these similarities because similar phenomenon happened at all of them, prompting small groupings of Slashers to spring up like deranged cults. Speaking of Cults It's just a coincidence that a lot of them have these similarities because similar phenomenon happened at all of them, prompting small groupings of Slashers to spring up like deranged cults. Speaking of Cults 7. The Killers from Haunt

The guys from Haunt are doing stuff right out of a decent playbook for someone like Leslie when you think about it. They're setting up an attraction for Halloween night to lure people in and have them offer themselves up on a silver platter for their deranged games. Killing, scaring, physically torturing these poor people. All in attempts to "Earn their faces" (Taking the "Vampire" killer at his word) as in "They surgically modify their faces to fit their costume personas." They take people's phones at the start of The Haunt and MICROWAVE them to render them untraceable and unusable. Then they boobytrap the place up and down to lure victims into new spots and find whacky ways to torment them further and get some pretty gnarly kills in. Remember that Mancuso sets up a lot of the stuff he does with DIY sabotage, home dis-improvement techniques, and stage magic. These guys are basically doing the same exact thing. They're also capable of adjusting their plans if the people going through The Haunt derail them. Like Mancuso. Really, save for the body modding, this movie could probably play out perfectly as is and still function in a context like Behind The Mask. It's nutty. Also, you should see it, it's great.

8. Sam from Trick 'R' Treat.

Continuing the hard Halloween theme for our last stop on this guided tour of this theory and my mad ramblings, Sam is a half-pumpkin child who embodies Halloween. He has set rules that if you break, you will die. Because HE will kill you. With his razor chocolate bar (A nod to his rule about checking candy) and sharply bitten lollipop, he has two edged weapons and a supernatural kind of strength, not to mention a decent healing factor. I think it's also important to note Sam, short for Samhain, is always dressed like that. Orange pajamas, a burlap mask with button eyes and a stitched smile, fingerless gloves, and he usually has a burlap sack to carry his sweets around in as he Trick-Or-Treats and wanders the streets.

Again... This kid just seems like a local legend. The kind of things parents tell their kids about. "Be safe on Halloween, follow the rules or Sam will get you! We even have rules for ourselves!" Kinda like Pennywise but more firmly rooted to Halloween as a day like Art or Michael. I think if someone wanted to piggyback off of Sam's Legend, they could do all sorts of BS like the stuff Sam does in the movie during his encounter with Mr. Kreeg. Painting the whole "Trick or treat, smell my feet..." thing on the wall, lighting Jack-O-Lanterns and littering their front yard with them, leaving pumpkin guts and bladed candy here and there, etc. You just gotta get a kid or two to wander the streets in a costume that looks like the local figure (Relatively easy) and carry out the murders yourself, planting the calling cards that point to Sam.

Anyway, that's all I got. I hope you enjoyed this follow-up/expansion. If you have any other suggestions for horror movies I can try and wedge into this bloated connected universe of madness I have going on, feel free to suggest them, because season be damned, I enjoy horror and I wouldn't mind following this up again later. And Considering what tomorrow is, I say it with more power and feeling than before: Happy Halloween. All of You.

Horror Theory: Just Men Behind The Masks

So I just rewatched Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon. A 2006 deconstructionist horror film. And I have a thought for the rest of the horror community to chew on:

A lot of people mention idly that this is a "Shared universe" film. That this is a universe where Chucky, Michael, Freddy, and Jason (All of whom are name dropped) exist. Which heavily implies the rest do, to. I have a different idea.

This is a universe where those STORIES exist. Fred Kruger may have been a real person. Jason Voorhees drowned at camp that fateful summer. Charles Lee Ray was gunned down in a toy store. Maybe even Michael Myers went to the asylum and got out.

Here's the kicker tho: If you pay attention, at least, it's implied that the characters as we know them are fake. The only one I'd be willing to say exists properly from the first movie is Michael.

Spoilers ahead but the guy up top is the titular Leslie Vernon... Except no. He isn't.

The Dr. Loomis to Leslie's Michael (The in universe term is "Ahab.") is Doc Halloran. Halloran reveals and Leslie later admits he is not Leslie Vernon. His real name is Leslie Mancuso.

(Incidentally, yes. That is Robert Englund as Halloran. A+ casting.)

At the end of the movie, after carving a bloody swathe through a bunch of people, Leslie is "killed" by the survivor girl, Taylor. When asked if Leslie is dead, she says "I don't know what he is." Halloran reflects on the idea that Leslie was "Just a man."

We spent the entire movie up to this point getting into Leslie's head, learning how he does things. Seeing all the preparation not only he, but the other slashers put into the things the do. Why is Jason's Machete indestructible but all the other tools around break with one swing? Sabotage. Why are windows usually stuck? Nails. Why do tree limbs break right away and cars not start? Also sabotage. Stuff like that.

We also find out that Leslie Vernon was very likely a real person but has been dead for twenty years. At the very least Leslie Vernon is a popular folk tale around the town, Mr. Mancuso is just piggybacking off it to do some murder in the interest of making his survivor girl stronger and doing good for the world through evil.

(Pictured: Leslie Mancuso as Leslie Vernon during his killing spree)

The story of Mr. Vernon, the dead man, is that supposedly a bastard kid was born to a married couple (possibly through rape.) They worked him like a slave, forcing him to till fields with nothing but a hand scythe until he murdered both of them. The town found out and a mob of people drowned the boy after the murders and his body was never found as the water was too cold, so he never came back up. Turtles picked his bones clean.

Twenty years later, Mancuso took on the name and started plotting to murder people at that farm house. The rest of the movie is the set up and execution of that murder plan.

So what does that say about people like Michael, Jason, Freddy, and especially Chucky?

We'll start with the man who started it all. One tragic night in 1963, a young Michael Myers murdered his older sister with a kitchen knife. No one knew why. No one understood his motive. But the fact remains he did it. A little before Halloween night 1978, Michael escaped the mental institution he was in and went on a killing spree for reasons not everyone will know but was injured and eventually stopped by Dr. Loomis and a local baby sitter, Lori Strode.

I see this as being the thing that inspires that most horrible of things in-universe: Copycat Killers.

They mention directly that Michael has done his attacks on Haddonfield at least 4 separate times. I don't know much about Halloween as a series so I don't know what movies that number specifically is referencing but I'm willing to suggest the first two movies are billed together as one attack because it was basically one protracted occurrence. At the end of which he was blinded and then set on fire, burning to death.

Later movies retcon that death but logically, the real Michael is dead in this universe. Later instances where HE supposedly attacks are the works of more calculating, crazy people like Mancuso. His whole deal is "We set things up like this, we figure out how to do that and yadda yadda."

You could easily apply most of what he says and does to people who can act out just like he does. Bullet proof vests, gel applied in spots to stop bleeding. Breaking into people's houses and cutting the power and telephones, etc. I think the other supposed three attacks in the BTM universe are people who took on Mikey's coveralls and a replica mask, were in some way stopped or got away, and then were either replaced by new fakers or maybe continued being Mike a time or two before being stopped. This could also theoretically riff on the idea of Michael using body doubles to fake his death in some of the movies.

Alternatively, The real Mike could still be at the Smith's Grove Sanitarium in this universe. He never got out but his legend made a perfect starting point for people to latch on to and start "being him." Or he may be a local legend with no real basis in reality.

The problem is we don't have any further context for the four attacks that happened. So... Yeah, this is nine tenths me BSing.

How about Jason? The Crystal Lake killer and my personal favorite?

I think the most likely case of what happened with Jason in the universe of BTM is that Jason Voorhees did actually exist. He did drown that one summer. Some years later his mother would go on to slaughter a bunch of camp counselors before the camp could reopen. Note the thing about how slashers need a story like that which would naturally draw somebody.

So I think it's worth considering that the "dozens" of people "Jason' supposedly has killed over the years we're actually the works of either one faker or multiple fakers who've taken up residence at camp Crystal Lake over the years. This is because while we don't have any real evidence that Jason is 100% real we do have evidence that sometimes people will take up these mantles just to take them up if it's the convenient one to work with and use for your own ends.

If you go to Jersey and you want to start offing people, why not try and find a way to pin it on the Jersey devil?

So you have this local legend of a kid who drowned in a lake and his mom goes on a murderous rampage. So what are you, an up and coming slasher going to do? Well you start acting how you think Jason would act. You put on this facade and start doing damage to people. Given a lot of the stuff Mancuso does that actually makes him look undead, a talented enough makeup artist could actually theoretically make themselves look like a super deformed crazy guy like Jason or even like Freddy... Speaking of.

I think the most likely course of Freddy's history here is that he did still kill around 20 kids at some point in the past. And then the people got together and they burned him to death in the boiler room.

However I think maybe there's a chance he survived and went on to not so much invade people's dreams as he did perhaps start drugging people and then torturing them. Alternatively his "Slasher" copycat started doing that.

We know that in the actual nightmare on elm Street movies Freddy likes to get in your dreams, play with your fears and even use some of your greatest strengths against you, because he just can. Now imagine someone with the face of a burn victim breaking into your house at night, drugging you or gassing you up in a way that makes the whole world feel very dream-like, and unreal, and then butchering you.

I think it would especially be very easy to reframe a lot of the ways in which these people turn up dead as Freddy simply doing things that he knows because it's established in the BTM universe that a lot of these killers will stalk their victims from months at a time.

That one scene in dream Warriors where he turns his hand into drug needles and injects a girl with them? Well that could be suggestive of the idea that instead what Freddie actually did was drug her and then make her OD in her sleep.

A lot of the kills all of these guys do could be someone embellished like that one time that girl was force fed things until she choked to death in her dream, in real life her windpipe just kind of collapsed if memory serves. As if something had been weighing down on it.

Then again, maybe most of the kills from all the movies we know didn't really happen. Michael being strong enough to pin a guy to a wall using a kitchen knife is otherworldly in its own way. Like. Maybe that didn't happen that way. It's just the rumor mill circling around.

Now. The last one. My personal least favorite. Chucky. AKA Charles Lee Ray, the Lakeshore Strangler.

Charles Lee Ray killed a good handful of people as a normal adult but in a crime gone wrong, he got gunned down in a toy store somewhere in Chicago. In the universe of the Child's Play movies, he uses a voodoo spell to put his soul in a "Good Guy" doll. He then uses a normal little boy, Andy, to go kill his partner in crime, Eddie and then spends the rest of the series hunting for Andy so he can be human again by putting his soul inside of Andy. Or just trying to kill him in three and I think Curse's after-credits.

In universe, I think what really might have happened was Charles swore bloody vengeance on Eddie and the cop who killed him, expecting to escape. He was then killed in the store either trying to get the drop on the cop or just get out. The hideout Charles and Eddie, who escaped custody, used to use, exploded in a random gas leak incident.

But urban legends have circulated over and over. That it was Charles' ghost possessing a Good Guy Doll. That a little kid was seen on the train carrying one such doll heading toward Cabrini-Green. Etc.

Now, I'm not 100% sure how later appearances by "Chucky" would go. Like. How do you fake a killer doll? Tiny Animatronics? A REALLY short guy? Leaving them as calling cards? I dunno. But it is just another guy piggybacking.

The only cue that anything vaguely supernatural is happening in this world is at the end, Leslie is alive after having his head crushed and being burned, but, to his credit, he was established to be a pretty tough bastard up to that point and the press was only turned enough to lock him in place and hear one squelch. It probably did damage but it also probably didn't do enough to put him on ice. So it's fairly ambiguous and still probably means killer dolls aren't a factor.

In summary: Behind The Mask is not a universe where all of our favorite killers exist. It's a universe where their legends exist and people who want to do evil become those legends. For a time at least.

Happy Halloween, everyone.

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